Last Friday night, more than 20,000 attendees packed a stadium in downtown Houston for a Kamala Harris campaign rally that featured perhaps the Bayou City’s most famous emissary, Beyoncé, who delivered a statement of support (though not an appearance) for the vice president. Not since Bill Clinton in 1992 had there been such a presidential hopeful in the Lone Star State. The event was intended to give a national stage to the specter of Donald Trump-fueled abortion bans such as the one in Texas.

It also provided Colin Allred with perhaps the most talked-about moment of his campaign. The Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, who has made government encroachment on reproductive rights a centerpiece of his campaign, won a major speaking engagement for his advocacy to oust two-term Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. to an excited crowd of voters in a city that holds the key to its electoral prospects.

“Everything is bigger in Texas, but Ted Cruz is too small for Texas,” Allred said in his speech, which came about an hour before Beyoncé and then Harris.

Allred went after Cruz for enabling the failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, recalling how he stood bravely at the entrance to the House of Representatives, ready to fend off the riotous crowd as Cruz ‘hiding in a broom cupboard’. (More precisely, Cruz has called the room in which he claimed to have been hanging out with fellow Stop-the-Steal Republicans to play out their next moves “a supply closet with stacked chairs.” When Allred confronted Cruz at this point about his their only debate, Cruz chuckled uncomfortably.)

Allred, a Dallas congressman, former NFL linebacker and civil rights attorney, attacked Cruz for fleeing to a Cancun resort during the deadly 2021 winter storm while his fellow Texans struggled without heat. (In his defense, Cruz did claimed (It was his daughters’ idea to go into hiding.) And Allred excoriated the senator for spending his time in Washington on divisive stunts, extremist ideology and me-first politics, as exemplified by his frequent podcasting.

It’s the last week before Election Day, early voting is in full swing and everyone is watching for signs of what’s to come. And as with the biennial ritual, many in the state and nationally are wondering: Will Texas turn blue (whatever that means)? Or, more specifically, can Allred become the first Democrat to win an election in Texas in 30 years?

In recent weeks, public polls among likely voters show a race ranging from dead-even to seven points in Cruz’s favor. Averages calculated by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight equate to a win of about 4 points for Cruz. The same sites put Trump’s lead in the state at about seven percent.

Through relentless digital solicitation, Allred successfully surpassed then-Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s record fundraising total in 2018 with $80 million raised. Allred has put much of that into blowing up the state’s major media markets with TV ads touting himself as tough on border security and featuring stories of women who have suffered under Texas’ abortion law.

Beto O’Rourke’s out-of-nowhere upset against Cruz six years ago, which the El Paso Democrat lost by just 2.6 points, reinvigorated liberal voters in Texas in the Trump era. O’Rourke also set the benchmark for statewide candidates running in the cycles that followed.

O’Rourke’s key strengths in 2018 — his out-of-the-box freewheeling style, his aversion to traditional campaign strategy and his idealistic embrace of post-partisan politics — put the stale packaging of moribund statewide campaigns in Texas upside down. But some Dem campaigners, including old hands who worked in politics when the party could still win statewide races, believed those same traits helped spoil a winnable race. (Hindsight is 20/20, but less so when the last example of success is in the rearview mirror decades ago.)

O’Rourke, his detractors said, lacked the necessary discipline, saying and doing things that may have sounded good at the time but came back to bite him. His stubborn refusal to go on the offensive against his prime opponent, Cruz, had cost him a lot of money. And his decision not to use any meaningful portion of his massive fundraising for TV ads, essentially handing the airwaves to Cruz, was a major blunder.

With the right adjustments and the rapidly changing political terrain in Texas, Democrats could steadily improve O’Rourke’s performance. But since then, that number has looked more like a ceiling, a one-time advantage benefiting from the favorable tailwinds of the early Trump era and a uniquely vulnerable incumbent president who continues to suffer a humiliating presidential defeat. In 2020, Democrat MJ Hegar lost to longtime Republican Senator John Cornyn by about 10 points; and in 2022, O’Rourke’s doomed encore against Governor Greg Abbott fell short by an equally dismal margin.

In a presidential election cycle that has been analyzed in terms of “vibes,” the 2024 Texas Senate showdown was remarkably subtle in its vibrations.

In his bid to oust Cruz, Allred has copied little of O’Rourke’s approach. He has chosen a more subdued, cautious course. He is extremely disciplined and often comes across as dry, static and a bit too tight. But he has also been more aggressive in the offensive against Cruz, portraying the latter as a podcasting-obsessed, self-interested coward who was one of the country’s most virulently anti-abortion conservatives before becoming more evasive in light of the backlash took positions. until the fall of Roe vs. Wade.

The informal measures of how much resonance a candidate finds — armies of grassroots volunteers, large crowds packed into small spaces in the furthest reaches of the state — have been missing for Allred throughout the campaign.

That’s apparently by design, at least in part, as Allred has tried to avoid too much noise. His strategy has been to move toward the middle in an effort to win over independent and moderate Republican voters — especially suburban women — while counting on the presidential election to help define the base.

In March, Allred handily defeated his Democratic primary opponents, including underdog state Senator Roland Gutierrez. For months afterward, the congressman kept his head down as he raised money and made TV news hits. It wasn’t until September that Allred really began expanding his campaign presence across the state, still primarily organizing smaller events on a curated set of topics. Allred has also heavily touted the support of former GOP Congresswoman Liz Cheney and other anti-Trump Republicans.

From the beginning, Allred set out to neutralize the most important issue for Republicans and many independents in Texas — an issue that is a little part real-world challenges and a big part racial resentment fueled by propaganda in Fox News style, which is usually labeled as “the border” – by trying to distance itself from the Biden administration and embroil itself in the orderly border security complex. In January, Allred was one of a handful of Democrats to join a Republican House resolution — nothing more than a partisan messaging stunt — to condemn Biden’s “open borders” policy. A few months earlier, he praised the administration’s decision to resume construction of the border wall in Texas, something Allred had previously labeled “racist.”

One of the key ads Allred released a few months ago was a classic “tough on the border” ad straight out of the GOP playbook, picturing himself at the border wall with pickup trucks and sheriff’s deputies, using he called Cruz “all hats and nos.” cattle” for the senator’s vote against a bipartisan border security bill. It’s the kind of reactive approach that many Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have taken in response to the Republican Party’s relentless drumbeat about migrant “invasions.”

Meanwhile, Cruz has made a half-hearted attempt to remake himself into a productive, bipartisan statesman focused on bringing jobs to Texas. But along the way he still uses the same script as in 2018.

He has tried to define Allred as yet another radical liberal bent on destroying the Lone Star State. His closing message was poetically simple: “Colin Allred is Kamala Harris.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, Cruz has stormed the vast rural swathes of Texas, where he needs Republican voters to go to the polls.

He touts a basic message: “Keep Texas Texas” (a more comprehensive upgrade from his 2018 “Texas Tough”). This means the Harvard-educated lawyer is once again leaning on Texas bravado about freedom and trucks, making jokes about sending Allred on a fool’s errand to California, and suggesting that veep candidate Tim Walz isn’t swinging in a sufficiently masculine manner.

On the air, Cruz and his allied super PACs (including one dubiously funded with revenue from his podcast) have spent tens of millions of dollars on nasty, misleading anti-trans ads claiming Allred wants boys to play in girls’ sports.

The attack on Cruz apparently caused enough damage that Allred felt compelled to put up his own ad earlier this month in response to the attacks. In a direct proclamation to the camera, Allred declared, “I am a father. I am also a Christian. My faith has taught me that all children are God’s children. So let me be clear. I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or all those ridiculous things Ted Cruz says.”

This defensive nonsequitur had the effect of upsetting some in the Democratic base, who saw it as a resort to anti-trans propaganda, and giving more oxygen to the Cruz camp, which pushes transgender kids in sports to the core of his offensive against Allred. .

The October University of Texas poll, which had Cruz ahead by seven points, also showed Allred, like O’Rourke before him, leading among independent voters and competing well in the suburbs. But Cruz, who pulled off a failed presidential bid in 2018 that dented his approval ratings at home, now appears to be on firmer ground.

To secure re-election, the Republican senator will certainly rely on the same red wall in rural areas that stopped O’Rourke six years ago, but he will also look to the high turnout of conservatives in the suburbs for reinforcement. If he can close the gap in his home state of Harris and outperform Hispanic voters, that’s the question.

The path to victory for Democrats remains the same as ever: Allred must widen margins as much as possible with huge turnout in the Democratic voting centers of Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, while building on O’Rourke and Biden’s 2018 gains in 2020 – but not O’Rourke in 2022 – in key suburban counties. Even with that, the Dallas congressman must also sway a sizable number of Republican voters, looking for the vote between Trump and Allred, like a politically confused needle in a haystack of 30 million Texans.