The Texas Tribune By Jasper Scherer Nov. 14, 2024
Cruz won over Latino voters and targeted Colin Allred’s support of transgender rights to win a third term.n the weeks leading up to Election Day, a series of polls found that U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was in a familiar position: fighting for political survival in a state where other Republicans were routinely dominant.
But Cruz’s team felt confident. They were better positioned this election cycle overall and they’d identified what they saw as their ace in the hole: Democratic challenger Colin Allred’s record on transgender rights — specifically, the issue of transgender children playing in youth sports. The year before, Allred, a Dallas congressman, had voted against GOP legislation that proposed cutting off federal funds for school athletic programs that allowed “a person whose sex is male” to participate in women’s sports. The law defined sex as “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
Cruz and his allied political groups blitzed the airwaves with ads highlighting that vote and Allred’s other stances in favor of transgender rights. The ads, often featuring imagery of boys competing against girls in sports, reflected what Cruz’s team had found from focus groups and polling: Among the few million voters they’d identified who were truly on the fence, the transgender sports topic was most effective in driving support to Cruz, said Sam Cooper, a strategist for Cruz’s campaign.
“We felt like it was a double whammy for us, that it was an issue that, one, we had Allred dead to rights on, and two, it cut across all of our persuasion universes,” Cooper said. “It helped us with college-educated whites, which we needed, and also helped us with Hispanics,” for whom it was “the No. 1 persuadable issue.”
In the end, Cruz walloped Allred by nearly 9 percentage points, winning a majority of the statewide Latino vote and proving the polls dead wrong. Though the anti-trans ads may have contributed, Cruz also received a healthy boost from GOP nominee Donald Trump — who carried Texas by a whopping 14 points — and from voters’ sour outlook on the economy and immigration under Democratic management. About half of Texas voters cited one of those as the most important issue driving their vote, a bloc among which Cruz won more than 85%, according to exit polls.
Fresh off a 2018 reelection where he narrowly avoided becoming the first Texas Republican to lose statewide in decades, Cruz is emerging from last week’s win with his biggest jolt of political momentum in years, primed for an even bigger role on the national stage that could allow him to lay the groundwork for a future presidential run. He’s in line to head the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee under Trump's presidency. And he will retain a big megaphone with his nationally syndicated podcast and as a fixture in the conservative TV and talk radio ecosystem.
More:
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/14/ted-cruz-texas-senate-win-transgender-rights-political-future/
