In the 2024 Texas U.S. Senate race, Democrat Colin Allred mounted an ambitious bid against incumbent Republican Ted Cruz, but ultimately fell short.
Cruz won with about 53% of the vote to Allred’s nearly 45%.
Allred’s campaign was among the most expensive in Texas history, with combined fundraising by both candidates exceeding $160 million.
Allred attracted attention for breaking fundraising records within his party and emphasized outreach in urban and suburban areas, as well as the Rio Grande Valley.
Despite those strengths, he was unable to close the gap in many rural and conservative parts of the state.
Notably, Allred outperformed the top of the Democratic ticket in Texas. He received about 5.5 percentage points more support in Texas than Kamala Harris, the Democrat’s presidential nominee.
Allred is making another run for a senate seat. He’s in the Democratic primary and he’s facing competition there, including State Representative James Talarico, who is showing strong fundraising.
I asked Colin Allred why he’s running again.
(The following is a portion of the interview you can listen to on "Texas Matters.")
Allred: I am proud of some of what we did in the last campaign that we were able to outrun our presidential ticket pretty significantly.
I'm a football player, by training, and so I kind of feel like when you have a loss and sometimes you have to learn, you can learn more from those [situations] than you can in any other case.
And I felt really strongly that there were a lot of promises made to working people in the last election about lowering their costs, making it easier for them to get by.
They were told that inflation was going to go away on day one, that the economy that they remembered pre-COVID was going to come back on day one. And I think they were lied to. And I take that personally because that's my story as well. [I] was raised by a single mom who's a public school teacher.
We lived paycheck-to-paycheck. I know folks are out there hoping that their elected officials are seeing them and thinking about them and knowing what they're going through, which is that right now they're working harder for less.
And I think everything's upside down.
If you're willing to cut corners, be a bit corrupt, then you can get ahead. But if you're working hard and playing by the rules, I think it's really hard for you. And so I want to address that.”
Guest: Colin Allred
Colin Allred is running for U.S. Senate.
You can find out more at his website.
