The Texas Newsroom is taking an in-depth look at the candidates in Texas’ U.S. Senate race. Read a profile of U.S. Rep. Colin Allred here.
From Houston Public Media:
Early voting begins Monday across Texas for the 2024 general election. The biggest contest on the ballot, after the presidency, is the U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred. Most polls show Cruz with a single-digit lead over Allred.
While Cruz is known for being a staunch conservative, he’s been making an effort over the current election cycle to try to portray himself as more palatable to undecided voters, stressing his ability to work across the aisle to deliver practical benefits for Texans and downplaying some of his more extreme positions.
Abortion
Cruz has opposed legalized abortion throughout his political life. So, it’s significant that he’s tried to deflect questions about where he stands on Texas’ abortion ban.
During Cruz’s sole debate with Allred last week, the moderators asked Cruz no fewer than three times whether he supported or opposed the state’s position of not allowing any exceptions to its abortion ban in the cases of rape or incest. Each time, Cruz deflected, either attacking Allred’s support for abortion rights as too extreme or speaking in generalities.
“As for what the law should be in Texas, that’s a decision that will be made by the state legislature,” Cruz said. “Congressman Allred is running all sorts of ads saying that I made this decision. I don’t serve in the state legislature. I’m not the governor. The folks that make the laws here, the state legislature, the governor — he knows that, but he’s trying to deceive the voters.”
Cruz’s reluctance to speak on abortion may stem from a desire to win over undecided Texans. Most polling shows him with a narrow but distinct lead over Allred among likely voters, and abortion is a hot-button issue this cycle in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Immigration and border security
Cruz is not known for pulling his punches. Take his stance in February on the Senate border bill.
Among other measures, the bill would have made it easier for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to summarily remove or bar entry of some non-U.S. nationals if the average of non-U.S. nationals crossing the Mexico border hit a threshold of 4,000 within a seven-day period. The bill would also have boosted base pay for asylum officers and made it easier for DHS to hire more personnel.
The bill won endorsements from the main union representing Border Patrol officers and from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Then, former President Donald Trump came out against it. The bill was meant to be bipartisan, but Trump’s opposition triggered a Republican stampede that ultimately killed its chances of passage.
“My views on this bill have not been ambiguous. At the last press conference we had here, I described it as ‘a steaming pile of crap,'” Cruz said, admitting that was even before he’d read the bill. Once he had read it, he said, “It turned out my assessment was far too kind.”
Cruz has long argued for tougher border controls, but he condemned the border bill as bad politics and bad policy.
“We have the worst rate of illegal immigration in our nation’s history,” Cruz said – accurately, at the time, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which shows encounters had just peaked two months earlier. “People are dying. Children are being brutalized. Women are being sexually assaulted. Over 100,000 people died of overdoses last year. This bill doesn’t fix it.”
Despite Cruz’s rhetoric, FBI data show violent crime is down, and research funded by the National Institute of Justice shows illegal immigrants in Texas are arrested at less than half the rate compared with native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes.
Cruz as lawmaker
“He’s a bomb thrower,” said Steven Smith, a political scientist at Washington University in Saint Louis.
Smith has studied the liberal/conservative voting records of members of Congress.
“In the case of Senator Ted Cruz, it uniformly places him, since he entered the Senate in January 2013, among the seven or eight most conservative senators, which puts him to the right side, far-right side of the Republican Party in the Senate.”