Democrats Target Ted Cruz to Stave Off Senate Disaster

With just over six months to go in the 2024 campaign, incumbent Republican Ted Cruz has a healthy seven-point lead over Democrat Congressman Colin Allred in Texas’s U.S. Senate race according to the latest RealClearPolitics average. But the liberal establishment and their media allies are gearing up to spend enormous sums of money to take down Cruz, who has long proven to be one of the most committed conservatives in Congress and a constant thorn in the side of President Joe Biden.

Democrats are facing a nightmare Senate map this year, with 23 seats up for re-election, compared to just 11 for Republicans. Of those 23 seats, Republicans have at least a fighting chance in nine of them – West Virginia, Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and now Maryland with the primary victory of former GOP Governor Larry Hogan.

If the liberal party has any hope of retaining their slim 51-49 majority, they will almost surely need to hold on to most of those toss-up seats and take at least one seat from the GOP. Democrats’ best chance of doing so is in Texas, where the left has sought to oust Cruz since his first election to the Senate back in 2012.

In recent years especially, Cruz has proven particularly effective at pushing back on Democrat extremism and revealing the corruption and ineptitude of the Biden administration.

Last June, for instance, Cruz lambasted Paul Abbate, Biden’s Deputy Director of the FBI, for allegedly covering up a $5 million payment from Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings to the Biden family as part of the Hunter Biden corruption scandal. “This is why you are damaging the institution,” Cruz told Abbate. “The American people have a right to know whether there is serious credible evidence the president of the United States took a $5 million bribe.”

Cruz has also issued scathing condemnations of Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland for the weaponization of the Department of Justice against conservatives, including Garland’s failure to adequately protect Supreme Court Justices following the backlash to the Dobbs decision and the targeting of Catholics and pro-life Americans.

In another particularly embarrassing moment for Biden and the left, Cruz exposed Justice Ketanji-Brown’s record of left-wing activism during her Senate confirmation hearing back in 2022, including her praise for the infamous “1619 Project” and record of giving lenient sentences to child pornographers.

Cruz’s ability to expose Democrats’ lies and abuses of power is both what makes him so valuable to American conservatives and a top Democrat target. While most politicians lose sight of why they came to Washington after 12 years in office, Cruz has continued to serve the interests of the American people and listen to the conservative base in Texas and throughout the country.

However, while Cruz appears to have a healthy lead and is running a strategically sound campaign, recently outlining plans for an aggressive ground game in the lead up to Election Day, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from pouring millions into their effort to unseat him.

Colin Allred, a former NFL player, civil rights attorney, and three-term congressman representing a suburban Dallas district, has built up a formidable war chest, hauling in more than $9.5 million in the first quarter of this year alone. President Biden also made a visit to the Lone Star State in March to urge donors to back Allred.

According to the Cruz campaign, Democrats could spend upward of $100 million on the race this year. While that may sound like an astronomical figure – and indeed, it would shatter every record – the left also spent a record amount backing Beto O’Rourke’s effort to oust Cruz six years ago.

In total during the 2018 cycle, O’Rourke raised $61 million to Cruz’s $40 million, coming within 200,000 votes of flipping the seat. Now, the left is betting big that even more money could boost Allred over the top this November. Allred’s haul thus far in the campaign is outpacing O’Rourke’s.

But while Allred, like O’Rourke, will surely be the beneficiary of an enormous media build-up, he has a radical voting record that may have doomed his campaign from the start.

Since entering Congress in 2019, Allred has voted in-line with the far-left wing of his party on virtually every issue of importance to voters – most notably his support for Biden’s trillion-dollar tax-and-spend bills that led to 40-year high inflation rates.

Following the BLM riots in 2020, Allred also voted for Democrats’ “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act,” a laundry list of “Defund the Police” policies. And he is already facing criticism for his prior support for sanctuary city policies, a “no” vote on a bill to deport illegal aliens who assault police officers, and a promise to “tear down” President Donald Trump’s “racist” border wall.

Allred also voted no on House Republicans’ Parental Bill of Rights, co-sponsored legislation to allow biological men in women’s locker rooms, supported abortion-on-demand up until the moment of birth, voted against expanding domestic oil and gas production (the backbone of Texas’s economy), opposed funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, and said it would be “better” if the Second Amendment “had not been written.”

While Allred is now trying to rebrand himself as a moderate, his support for radical left-wing groups is already undermining that image. As Fox News has reported, Allred played a pivotal role in 2022 in securing $1 million in taxpayer funds for a left-wing education group that teaches children the United States is a “white supremacist system.” He secured another $1 million for a group that puts on “kid-friendly drag shows.”

Allred has also accepted thousands in campaign cash from anti-Israel activists. Even his staff members have a record of anti-Israel and anti-police extremism.

Democrats have indeed closed the gap with Republicans in Texas in recent years, but all indications point to Allred simply being too extreme to win outside of his comfortably blue House district.

The Cruz campaign should nonetheless take nothing for granted, and still has a lot of work to do – and money to raise – to give themselves the best chance of victory on Election Day. There will surely be more coordinated smear campaigns against Cruz, with the corporate media dutifully repeating the lies. Texas Republicans must also be wary of schemes to unfairly influence the outcome of the contest, including the very real threat of non-citizens illegally casting ballots.

But if current polling is correct, it seems Democrat hopes of winning the Lone Star State are, at least for this year, still just a fantasy.

In any case, many in the conservative movement are hoping so.

“Nothing less than existential” is the characterization of the race by Anthony R. Dolan, who has held senior posts on nine presidential races, including Cruz’s 2016 race, and before that served as chief speechwriter for Ronald Reagan for eight years.

“It’s hard to think of any more important senator,” Dolan said. “We should be grateful to Texas for giving America somebody smarter and better-spoken than any of the smarmy lawyer-leftists here in D.C. At Senate hearing after Senate hearing, he holds corrupt and mendacious officials accountable. The bad guys hate him, but even more to the point they fear him.”

“When I was a reporter,” added Dolan, who was the youngest reporter to receive the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, “the media was liberal but also had a conscience and ethics. So, for example, they would report on Carter administration corruption or expose Joe Biden’s lies, with devastating coverage of his 1988 presidential campaign. Today major outlets openly collude with corrupt politicians and government officials to protect them from exposure and accountability and justice. That’s why Cruz is so important – he is doing the job the media used to do. He is telling truth to power.”

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @ShaneHarris513.