WASHINGTON — The Associated Press declared that Republican Sen. Ted Cruz successfully defended his seat against Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, based on the incumbent’s competitive performance in the state’s large population centers, bolstered by his overwhelming lead in more conservative rural areas across the state.
Cruz’s victory, which the AP declared at 11:39 p.m. ET, blocked a possible path in which Democrats could have retained control of the Senate by offsetting possible losses of vulnerable Democratic incumbents in other parts of the country.
The AP only declares a winner when it can determine that a trailing candidate cannot close the gap and overtake the poll leader.
CANDIDATES: Cruz (R) vs. Allred (D) vs. Ted Brown (libertarian)
WINNER: Cruz (R)
Poll CLOSING TIME: 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM ET, depending on the state
ABOUT THE RACE:
Facing their toughest Senate map in years, Democrats saw the Cruz-Allred matchup as one of their only chances to possibly defeat a Republican incumbent and offset an expected loss in West Virginia and highly vulnerable seats in Montana, Ohio and elsewhere. Cruz first won this seat by a 16-point margin in 2012, when he ran to replace 20-year Republican incumbent Kay Bailey Hutchison. He faced much tougher competition in 2018, when then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke gained national attention for coming within 3 percentage points of defeating Cruz.
Allred, a former NFL linebacker and civil rights attorney, represents the Dallas area’s 32nd Congressional District. He defeated 11-term Republican United States Representative Pete Sessions in 2018. Sessions returned to Congress in 2021.
Allred has outspent Cruz for the bike, with each spending about $77 million on the race as of mid-October. Cruz entered the final stretch of the campaign with a cash advantage of $9.6 million to $2.5 million.
Texas was once a heavily Democratic state, but Republicans have dominated statewide politics since the 1990s. A Democrat has not held a US Senate seat in more than 30 years. In recent elections, Democratic candidates tend to perform best in the population centers of Dallas, Harris (Houston), Travis (Austin), Bexar (San Antonio), and El Paso counties, as well as along the southernmost border with Mexico. Republicans won by large margins across most of the state, as well as the more competitive counties surrounding Dallas and Houston.
WHY DID AP CALL THE LIP:
When the AP called the race, Cruz led Allred in the statewide poll by more than 10 points with about 76% of the vote counted from nearly every county. The incumbent gave big leads in traditionally Republican areas in the east and in the plains regions that make up much of the state. But he also remained competitive with Allred in both the Democratic population centers of the Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston areas.
Cruz surpassed Trump’s share of the 2020 vote in those areas, narrowing Democrats’ traditional advantage there. He trailed Allred by about 4 percentage points in the area, while Trump trailed Democrat Joe Biden in those areas by between 8 and 9 percentage points in 2020.
Allred also underperformed in nearly all of the state’s most populous counties compared to O’Rourke in his 2018 run against Cruz. He slightly trailed O’Rourke’s performance in Harris (Houston’s home), Dallas, Travis (Austin’s home), and Bexar (San Antonio’s home) counties but trailed far behind in O’Rourke’s home county of El Paso by 15 percentage points.
Allred ran competitively in Fort Worth-based Tarrant County, which is one of the most competitive of the state’s large counties. Trump won Tarrant comfortably over Hillary Clinton in 2016, but both O’Rourke and Biden narrowly took it in 2018 and 2020. When the AP called the race, Allred was trailing Cruz in Tarrant but by 2 a.m. ET he was ahead by a razor-thin margin.
To overtake Cruz’s statewide lead, Allred would have needed to win the remaining ballots by more than 30 percentage points over Cruz, but he performed nowhere near that level in the precincts where the most prominent votes remained.
