What Democrats Have Learned Since Betomania

Six years and several political lifetimes ago, Democrats across the country were under the spell of Betomania.

A young congressman from El Paso, Beto O'Rourke, had seized the attention of young people, donors, and glossy magazine editors with his vigorous, gonzo challenge to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a prized archvillain to liberals (and plenty of D.C. Republicans). O'Rourke smashed fundraising records and made such a star turn that, even after losing the race to a widely disliked senator, he was compelled the following year to run for president. Alas, the energies fueling Betomania proved to be finite.

Now, with another Senate term and a couple more defining moments of ignominy under his belt, Cruz is up for reelection again. He's facing a strong Democratic recruit in Colin Allred, a former Baylor football star–turned–center-left congressman. The polling averages of the race show Allred, if anything, performing a hair better against Cruz than O'Rourke was at this time in 2018, trailing Cruz by about 4 points. The Cook Political Report recently moved the race from "Likely Republican" to "Lean Republican," and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee recently announced an investment in the race. Were Allred to find a way to flip the seat, it would provide an insurance policy on Democratic control of the Senate should Montana Sen. Jon Tester go down—a fate that's looking harder and harder for Tester to avoid.

And yet, Allredmania has not swept the nation off its feet. Some of that is because this is a presidential cycle, not a midterm cycle, and attention will naturally gravitate to the top of the ticket. And Allred—for better or worse—is a more controlled, managed candidate than the eternally skateboarding O'Rourke.

But liberals' reticence to invest their hopes and dreams in Allred's bid is mostly out of a sense that they've seen this movie before. A Democrat hasn't won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, and Democratic gains in the state over the past decade are stalling out. President Joe Biden came within 5.5 percentage points of Donald Trump in the state in 2020, the closest a Democratic presidential candidate has come this century; Kamala Harris is en route to a similar finish. Allred has done well to get within 4 points of Cruz. But each point after that gets exponentially harder.

"For Allred, I wouldn't want to say he's out of it, because clearly the margin is narrow," Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University and part of the team behind the University of Houston's polling of the race, told me.

"But the million-dollar question is," he continued, "is there anything Colin Allred can do to close that gap between now and Nov. 5, when our polling shows that 96 percent of Cruz voters and 97 percent of Allred voters are locked in?" The Cruz team and its outside allies, Jones said, "have been very successful in increasingly tying Colin Allred to Kamala Harris, so the proportion of voters who are casting a ballot for Donald Trump and then for Colin Allred has shrunk," while Allred's negatives have risen.

The two issues the Cruz campaign and its allies have been pummeling Allred on are border security and transgender issues.

It's worth devoting more words to the latter, given that Republicans across the country—including on the Trump campaign, which has made anti-trans messaging something of a closing message—are spending a lot of money on the subject down the stretch. The Cruz campaign released an ad last month about how Allred "opposed protecting women's sports" and—with a superimposed still of Allred looking slightly menacing—"voted to allow boys in girls' bathrooms." A more creative one from an outside PAC shows a likeness of Allred in full linebacker gear tackling a girl in what appears to be a powderpuff football game.

If you're forced to release a direct-to-camera response ad in which you say "I don't want boys playing girls' sports," as Allred recently has, then the attacks are likely having an effect.

As for how Allred has been going after Cruz, though, consider the B-roll shown in the second half of this response ad. It shows the unforgettable footage of Cruz, wearing his Texas flag face mask, strolling through an empty airport security line with his carry-on roller bag in tow. Such was the walk of shame Cruz had to make when he was found in 2021 vacationing in Cancun while Texas was suffering from a deep freeze. Allred mentions the Cancun jaunt often as illustrative of Cruz's time as a senator: that "Ted Cruz only cares about Ted Cruz," as he concludes in one ad.

And on policy, of course, Allred's strongest card is abortion, which is almost entirely banned in Texas.

Cruz has said some sharp things about abortion rights in the past—he's against them —and it was against that backdrop that he had his most evasive moment of the night in Tuesday's debate, the first and last debate of the race.

Several times, he refused to answer directly a question about whether he supported or opposed exceptions to an abortion ban in the cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother, chuckling at the moderator's persistence and arguing that those were questions for the state Legislature. It was the same near silence on the issue that he's carried throughout his campaign.

Saying he supported the standard abortion ban exceptions wouldn't be the end of the world in a pink-state reelection race. It would, in fact, help. But Cruz thinks in long time horizons. He may have calculated that this is the position that allows him to beat Allred without injuring his position among Iowa evangelicals in 2028.

Allred was fine in the debate. Yet aside from an unfortunately timed chuckle here or there, Cruz was otherwise characteristically unflappable, rarely suggesting that he was caught unprepared, because he rarely is, and never coming close to providing Allred the sort of late-race collapse he could use to make up those last few precious percentage points.

The debate was Allred's "last best chance to do something to change the dynamics of the race, and while he had a very strong debate, so did Sen. Cruz," Jones told me. "Before the debate last night, Cruz was up by 4 points. After the debate last night, he's still up by 4 points."

If you were to invent a race with a natural 4-point equilibrium, it might be this one. Trump will win Texas by 5 to 7 points. Cruz, being an acquired taste, runs a couple of points behind the Republican presidential ticket in his Senate race against a strong, but risk-averse, Democratic recruit. It's healthy for everyone involved that there's no global Allredmania this time around. It would be irrational.