Why Texas Senate Candidate Colin Allred Believes He Can Beat Ted Cruz
Texas Rep. Colin Allred faces an uphill climb in his bid to unseat longtime incumbent Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate. But he’s defeated the odds before.
In 2018, Allred, who had never held an elected office, beat incumbent Rep. Pete Sessions with a single-digit lead, ousting a lawmaker who’d represented Texas’s 32nd District in Congress since 1997, according to the Texas Tribune.
Now, Allred hopes to prevail in another tough race, where polls show he’s been trailing Cruz since he won the Democratic primary earlier this year, but has apparently gained enough traction to rattle the Republican incumbent, who Allred believes is more unpopular than people realize.
Allred was reelected in 2020 and again in 2022. One of his priorities in the Senate would be working to reform the filibuster so lawmakers can more easily pass legislation, he said, like the John Lewis and Freedom to Vote bills which aim to expand ballot box access and strengthen voting protections.
In Democracy Docket’s latest candidate Q&A for the 2024 cycle, Allred talks about his background as a voting rights lawyer, his support for strengthening the Voting Rights Act, and why the former linebacker misses the NFL.
Responses have been edited for style and clarity.
You’re up against a longtime incumbent, Sen. Ted Cruz. Why did you enter the race, and why do you believe that you can beat him in November?
Ted Cruz is very well known. He’s not very popular. To me, as somebody who was born and raised in Dallas by a single mom, who went to public schools, who was lucky to get a scholarship to go to Baylor [University] to play football — I played in the NFL, went to law school and became a voting rights lawyer and then served in Congress — I think I know who we are as Texans. And we’re not who Ted Cruz says we are, or my story wouldn’t have been possible.
I’m sure people see the stories coming out about women who are being forced to leave their home state to try and get treatment, whether they have a high-risk pregnancy or a pregnancy that has an issue, or of even more elaborate attempts to try and find ways to restrict the right to vote.
What’s fundamentally happening is there’s an attack on freedom in Texas, and as a fourth-generation Texan if there’s one thing I can tell you that I know about us, we believe in freedom. This is deeply un-Texan. Now they’re trying to control every single aspect of Texans’ lives, and we can reverse that by beating Ted Cruz.
Regarding voting restrictions in Texas, the state in 2021 passed a slate of voter suppression laws. How, as a senator, would you work to protect the voting rights of Texans? What have you done in the House to preserve that right?
My practice as a lawyer was working in voting rights, and I worked on the ground here in Texas, particularly in 2014 after the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act (in 2013), including the preclearance provisions, and made sure that Texas could move ahead with their voter ID law. I’ve been dealing with this for over a decade now, and what we’ve seen in Texas is that they’ve made it hard to vote in every single aspect that you can.
There’s a reason why we have always been in the bottom 10 states in terms of voter turnout, and I don’t think it’s because Texans are not civically engaged. It’s because we’ve been dealing with this.
The good news is we can address it at the federal level. We can overcome all of these state laws by passing legislation that overrides it, including banning partisan gerrymanders, which is one of my top concerns. That’s what we [tried] to do in the last Congress, when we had the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. We did have 50 votes in the Senate, even though after we passed it in the House, we didn’t have enough to get it past the filibuster.
Q: You brought up the John Lewis act. Do you think it would have a better chance of passing if you were in the Senate?
What we’re dealing with right now, with the filibuster, is something that’s not consistent with the history of the Senate. And it’s placed us in a position where every piece of legislation that doesn’t fall into a few narrow buckets is subject to the 60-vote threshold, which is historically not the case in the U.S. Senate. It’s really a recent invention, and it’s one that has made it almost impossible for us to do things like addressing voting rights or restoring a woman’s right to choose, both of which we passed out of the House, and had a majority in the Senate, but not enough to get past the supermajority requirement.
What we have to do is reform the filibuster. I think there will be a discussion around how that will work, but what I want to fundamentally see is the Senate get back to actually [getting] things done while maintaining its bipartisan nature. I think that we can do both. When I’m in the Senate I’ll bring that energy.
Q: If you win, you’d become Texas’s first Black senator. What would this achievement mean for you and the Lone Star State?
In [U.S.] history we’ve had 12 Black senators. I think there’s a very good chance we could add three more in this election cycle. And I think that would be tremendous in terms of changing the outlook of the Senate. But also I think it would be incredibly important for Texas, one of the states that was initially part of the Confederate states, to now move so far past that, that we’re able to think of what we really are, which is an incredibly diverse, pluralistic state where everyone is welcome, everyone has a voice. To me that’s what this would represent — not just for African Americans in Texas, but for all Texans, showing that anybody has a chance to serve.
Q: How have you worked to further democracy and support voting rights in Congress, and how does your record differ from Cruz’s?
I don’t know of any senator who’s been more hostile to the right to vote than Ted Cruz. You don’t have to go any further than the 2020 election.
He was the senator who objected to the results in Arizona. There’s often a member of the House who objects to several presidential elections. But we’ve never had a senator who does and, in this case, Cruz objected to the results in Arizona, a state that he doesn’t represent and had multiple court cases and recounts already showing the results are fair. And, of course, there’s things like not supporting what I think are common-sense voting rights laws.
Should Cruz and folks like him get his way, they will clamp down even further on the right to vote, and I’ll be the exact opposite in the Senate. I will expand and protect the right to vote, not to benefit Democrats, but to make sure that the will of the people is reflected in our elections, and that’s what this is fundamentally about.
Q: As a former NFL player, how does playing on the field compare to legislating in Congress?
We had a lot more accountability in the NFL. It’s very difficult to lie because it’s all on tape, and everybody sees the same tape. You can’t get away with anything. One of the things I miss about it is the level of accountability and the fact that, if you did something wrong, people own up to it and say, “I’m going to get it right next time.” We don’t see a lot of that, unfortunately, in Congress.
John Lewis, a mentor and a hero of mine, would tell us in the Congressional Black Caucus that we might have come here on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now. We’re all Americans, and we all work together, and I think we have to remember that. My background in sports has helped me develop that ability. Unfortunately, there are folks like Ted Cruz who I think never did.
Q: As we look ahead to 2024, what’s your message to voters who are nervous about November’s election, who are unsure if they even want to vote?
I always tell folks: if you’re not at the table, you’re going to be on the menu. That’s an Ann Richards quote [and] it’s very true.
Listen, there are incredibly important decisions that can be made by the folks who are elected in this election, and for every single one of us, we all have a stake in it. But I’m also really confident that we are fundamentally decent people, both as Texans, but also as a country.
Now we have to make sure that we show up on Election Day and make sure that we cast that ballot. So to me, this is one of the most important elections in American history, but it always is, and it is because of you and your life and the things that are happening and the things that you can have an influence [on].
President Obama used to tell us, democracy is not a spectator sport. You’re not watching two teams play it out and then just seeing who wins. You’re one of the players on the field. You are the cavalry. You’re the one that you’ve been waiting for. So get out there and be a part of it. If you don’t, you’ll be on the menu.