Just a few months ago, Sen. Ted Cruz was considered “bulletproof,” but one recent poll actually has challenger Rep. Colin Allred ahead of him for the first time.
Cruz barely won re-election the last time he ran, squeaking out the narrowest statewide margin of victory — 2.6 percentage points — for a Republican candidate since 1998.
Cruz once held a nearly 10-point advantage over Allred, but the race has tightened considerably in the last few weeks, with Allred polling about the same as Beto O’Rourke did in 2018.
“For the first time in this race, a new poll has us leading Ted Cruz by 1 point. I don’t know about y’all but I’m fired up and ready to WIN! We’ve got 47 days, let’s do this Texas,” Allred wrote in a post on X, referring to the most recent Morning Consult poll. However, it’s the only poll showing Allred ahead, with the others showing Cruz ahead albeit by a narrow margin, reported Newsweek.
Some, however, believe that the race is closer than it appears.
“The Texas Senate race is a tossup. It should have always been considered a tossup. That is not to say Cruz will lose, but the race should be looked at as anyone’s game,” Brett Loyd, president and CEO of Texas-based polling company The Bullfinch Group, told Newsweek.
Because of the tightening race, Cruz recently agreed to debate Allred on October 15 at WFAA’s studios in Downtown Dallas, a mere three weeks before election day.
Newsweek looks at how Allred is polling compared with how O’Rourke did six years ago. Here’s the start of the story:
A mid this year’s U.S. Senate race, Representative Colin Allred is polling about the same against Senator Ted Cruz as Cruz’s former opponent Beto O’Rourke polled in the 2018 election based on an analysis of past and current polls.
Allred, a former professional football player currently serving Texas’s 32nd district as a first-term Democrat representative, will go up in November against Cruz, a Republican who has held his Senate seat since 2013.
It will be an uphill battle for Allred to win Cruz’s Senate seat in the red state. Then-Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, got close during the 2018 election, but Cruz ultimately beat him.
In a Morning Consult poll conducted from September 9 to 18, Allred is leading Cruz for the first time, albeit by 1 point (45 to 44 percent). The poll surveyed 2,716 likely voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent.
Allred was trailing not too far behind Cruz in previous polls. In a Morning Consult poll conducted between August 30 and September 8, Cruz was ahead by 5 points (47 to 42 percent). A total of 2,940 likely voters were polled. The margin of error was not publicly available.