5 takeaways from the Texas Senate debate

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and Rep. Colin Allred (D) squared off Tuesday in their only debate before Election Day, sparring about the border and abortion amid signs of a surprisingly competitive race that could help decide control of the Senate this fall.  

Allred, a three-term congressman and former NFL player, has been building momentum in the red state, giving Democrats a glimmer of hope for a pickup opportunity as they brace for the possible loss of vulnerable incumbents elsewhere.  

Cruz, seeking his third term in the upper chamber with former President Trump’s endorsement, is still the favorite to win. But he is leading by just 2.8 percentage points, according to an average of Texas polls from The Hill/Decision Desk HQ.  

The debate showdown comes just after The Cook Political Report shifted the contest into toss-up territory and as Democrats grow increasingly bullish about it.

Debate gets feisty 

Sparks flew repeatedly during the hourlong debate as the rivals poked at each other’s records and clashed over key issues such as abortion.  

Allred swung several times at Cruz’s 2021 trip to Cancún as Texas faced power outages and freezing temperatures, an ill-timed Mexico excursion that has dogged his reelection bid and bolstered Allred’s larger message that he is unreliable. Cruz repeatedly directed viewers to a website critiquing his competitor’s “All-Radical Record.”  

At one point during a discussion over the southern border, Allred used his time to direct a question to Cruz, grilling the incumbent on why he didn’t support a border security bill earlier this year.  

“It’s a great question,” Cruz said, before asking Allred to cede his time so he could answer it, an offer Allred declined. When it was his turn to have the mic, Cruz accused Allred of having “memorized his lines well.” He later said the congressman had “snarled at me” after one particularly tense exchange about Cruz’s “hiding in a supply closet” during the Jan. 6, 2021, riots, which Allred argued the senator had helped provoke. 

“The far left,” Cruz said. “They’re so angry right now. There’s so much hatred.” 

Candidates paint each other as extreme 

With as much as 11 percent of the electorate still undecided according to a poll last week, both candidates sought to play to the center, casting themselves as reasonable men with bipartisan instincts and their opponent as a dangerous radical. 

“Congressman Allred wants to destroy what we’ve got in Texas, because he shares Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris’s values — and I will fight to keep Texas Texas,” Cruz said in his closing statement.  

Throughout, Cruz sought to cast Allred, without evidence, as an ally of Islamic terror, an opponent of the Texas oil and gas industry and a supporter of illegal immigration and of the forced sterilization of children. 

And he emphasized his own bipartisan bona fides — specifically highway bills with Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.). 

Allred, in turn, called Cruz a “threat to democracy.” 

“We’re all Americans; we’re all Texans. We need a leader who will bring us together around our shared values. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my six years. That’s the exact opposite of what Sen. Cruz has done — whatever he says tonight,” Allred said in his closing remarks. 

In part, this was a dig at Cruz’s starring role in Trump’s challenge to his decisive 2020 election loss to President Biden. Cruz on Tuesday declined to address whether he believed that election had been stolen.

But it was also part of a more pervasive Allred critique that was also highlighted by the repeated “Cancún” references. Whether you agree with Cruz’s policies or not, Allred argued — and the Democrat claimed common ground with him on topics from liquefied natural gas exports to whether he supports “boys playing girls sports” — the incumbent is a showboater out only for himself. 

“If you don’t like how things are going in Washington right now, well, you know what? He is singularly responsible for it,” Allred said in his closing.

Cruz dances around the abortion question 

Republicans’ weakest issue in Texas is abortion. About 80 percent of voters think it should be allowed in some form, but in 2021, the Republican-dominated state Legislature passed a bill banning all abortions after six weeks — a period when most women do not know they are pregnant and that ends long before many serious or life-threatening medical conditions emerge. 

That bill took effect in 2022, after Trump-nominated Supreme Court justices provided the key votes to overturn federal abortion protections, plunging Texas doctors into a legal no-man’s-land where they faced fines of up to $100,000 and life in prison for making the wrong call on whether an abortion had been medically necessary. 

Asked about his policy on abortion, Cruz dodged with an answer focused on states’ rights. 

“You wouldn’t expect Texas’s laws to be the same as California. You wouldn’t expect Alabama to be the same as New York,” he said.  

Allred spoke about watching his wife go through pregnancy: “You don’t know what they’re going to say, but I can’t imagine that the doctor comes in and says, ‘So there’s a problem with the baby — or a problem with Allie — but there’s nothing I can do, because Ted Cruz thinks he knows better.’” 

“I don’t serve in the state Legislature. I’m not the governor,” Cruz snapped. “He knows that, but he’s trying to deceive everybody.” 

“Every Texas family watching this has to understand that when Ted Cruz says he’s pro-life, he doesn’t mean yours,” Allred said.

Allred tacks right on border, trans rights 

Moderators asked Allred to respond to Cruz’s two principal lines of attack against him, the border and medical care for transgender youth. 

In the first topic, Cruz accused Allred of being part of a conspiracy by Democrats to open the borders, import millions of immigrants and give them citizenship — “that would turn Texas blue, and every statewide elected official in Texas would be defeated in the next election.” 

In the second, Cruz sought to cast the congressman as overly supportive of transgender youth athletes — or as he put it in a recent attack ad, of “boys using girls locker rooms.” 

“Congressman Allred was an NFL linebacker. It is not fair for a man to compete against women,” Cruz said.  

In both cases, Allred cast himself as something like a reasonable conservative on the model of mid-1990s George W. Bush: traditional, Christian but fundamentally compassionate.  

“I don’t support boys playing girls sports,” Allred said, a line that LGBTQ magazine The Advocate called “anti-trans” when the congressman unveiled it last week. But he added that “what I think is that folks should not be discriminated against,” before pivoting into abortion  — framed, carefully, around the image of the woman exercising her right not just to choose, but to not die of a preventable condition. 

“What he wants you thinking about is kids in bathrooms, so you’re not thinking about women in hospitals,” Allred said.  

That approach was evident too in his posture on the border. When moderators pressed the Democrat on why he previously opposed Trump’s border wall but supported Biden’s recent plans to expand it, Allred cautioned against taking “something out of context from seven years ago.” 

In contrast to his first-term remarks about the “racist” wall, Allred repeatedly hit Cruz on Tuesday for not being tough enough on immigration, and in particular for voting in February against a restrictive Senate border deal.

“Sen. Cruz treats our border communities like he’s going on some kind of a safari. He comes down, he puts on his outdoor clothes, he tries to look tough.” And then, Allred said, Cruz “goes back to Washington and does nothing to help.”  

In another Bush-era throwback, Allred also promised to fix “our broken legal immigration system.” 

Trump an asset, Harris a liability  

Cruz throughout the debate touted his ties to Trump, while Allred kept the top of his own party’s ticket at arm’s length and declined to attack the former president, whom Democrats elsewhere have used as a bogeyman. 

This in large part reflects Allred’s narrow path to victory in what remains a very red state: While the Senate race in Texas has grown tighter, Vice President Harris remains 5.5 percentage points behind Trump in the Lone Star State, according to the Decision Desk HQ averages. 

That is twice the current distance between Allred and Cruz, which means that for Allred to win, he must persuade hundreds of thousands of Trump voters to dump Cruz. While he has endorsed Harris and even hyped her up in a speech at the Democratic National Convention this summer, he’s been careful to keep Harris at a distance as Cruz hammers the comparisons. 

Cruz, in turn, has far less need to be conciliatory to Harris supporters. “Kamala Harris is Colin Allred. Their records are the same,” he said, adding that they are both “running on the same radical agenda.”

“When Donald Trump was president, I worked hand in hand with President Trump to secure the border, and we achieved incredible success,” Cruz said at one point. At another, he spotlighted his counsel to Trump on Israel, an issue that fired the senator up perhaps more than any other brought up during the debate. 

“When President Trump was president, I urged him to move our embassy to Jerusalem. He did. … When President Trump was president, I urged him to pull out of the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. He did,” Cruz said.  

Trump on Tuesday highlighted his “complete and total endorsement” of Cruz ahead of the debate.