Beto O’Rourke came the closest any Democrat has come to winning a Senate race in Texas in 30 years by campaigning in places Democrats rarely go. Rep. Colin Allred is going after the same opponent with the hope of getting the job done by doing the opposite.
Texas Democrats are in the hunt for the winning formula, and they’re A/B testing; the Allred campaign could either amount to a massive upset or a colossal waste of money in an election cycle where Democrats need all the resources they can get.
He’s running a very different campaign than O’Rourke did, based on the idea that Allred can galvanize presidential election year turnout to secure the Democratic base and run a middle-of-the-road campaign to win over independents — and even Republicans.
“It’s easier than people think to rally 40% in Texas. What’s hard is finding the other 10.1% you need to win,” said Matt Angle, who runs the Democratic group Lone Star Project. “The pattern to win competitive races at the county and the district level in Texas is to build a coalition from the middle out.”
There’s a ton of energy and money going toward Allred this cycle: He has more than 350,000 unique donors, according to a July release from his campaign, and was making significant ad buys as early as May. His strategy has also meant not going into Republican, rural Texas like O’Rourke did. He is focusing on the major cities and purple suburbs.
Not everyone involved in Democratic politics has bought into Allred’s campaign strategy. Sara Spector, a former Democratic state delegate and a lawyer from the Republican and rural West Texas town of Midland, said she’s worried she hasn’t seen Allred’s campaign in her part of the state.
“I talk to friends across the state. They’ve never heard of Colin. They didn’t know anyone was running against Ted Cruz,” she said. Spector posted on X: “Where is Colin Allred?”
“I just think that giving money to that man right now is just like throwing money down the toilet,” Spector said. She will vote for Allred, though. “I don’t think he’s earned it honestly, but, you know, we can’t have a Republican.”
Democrats have lost badly in the statewide elections since O’Rourke came within 3 points of Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018; he lost by nearly 11 points in 2022 against Gov. Greg Abbott, and Sen. John Cornyn beat his challenger in 2020 by nearly 10.
O’Rourke invested heavily in his ground game. His team got out early and aggressively and, in 2018, visited all of Texas’ 254 counties.
“He wanted to bring a new electorate to the polls,” Texas political consultant Glenn Smith said. “And he succeeded.”
Allred isn’t doing that. Instead, his team has gotten out early and aggressively with advertising.
“The great thing about Beto doing what he did was it sent a message that he’ll go anywhere, and he’ll talk to anyone. Every single Texan is important, and that was morally good, but also strategically useful,” said Katherine Fischer, who worked on O’Rourke’s campaign in 2018 and was his deputy campaign manager in 2022, and now works for Texas Majority PAC. “But the reality is that the vast majority of Democratic voters live in like, 12 counties.”
Consultants NOTUS spoke to said that Allred is operating in a completely different environment than O’Rourke did in 2018.
Fischer said O’Rourke’s more grassroots, activist-oriented campaign made sense midway through Donald Trump’s first term.
“The vibe was all like, resist, resist, try to win,” she said.
Allred faces some major obstacles, even if the “vibes” sway in his favor. It takes a lot to build name recognition in such a big and populous state. Texas has expensive media markets. To run a viable campaign, especially against a well-resourced incumbent like Cruz, takes tens of millions of dollars. Allred has been outraising Cruz, with more than $38 million collected so far. But, if he wants to stay active in the airwaves and online, it’s going to take even more. Time spent fundraising is time away from other types of campaigning.
“The reality of the state is so big and everything is so expensive that if you don’t start from a certain position financially, it doesn’t really matter what else you do,” Fischer said. “That takes a lot of time.”
Ultimately, campaigning in Texas as a Democrat is about trade-offs, Fischer said. More time for fundraising means less time for building familiarity with voters.
“People don’t necessarily understand the scale of the state,” she said. “In order for people to feel like Colin is around, he would probably have to be doing the thing that Beto was doing, which was again, incredibly taxing.”
“The hardest thing for Colin and for anybody, any Democrat running, is to get known enough,” Angle said.
Operatives say a lot of Allred’s strategy depends on the presidential cycle.
“I think [Allred] can rely on the presidential race to turn out voters, and in Beto’s 2018 case, he didn’t have that, and he had to spend a disproportionate share of money on field and get out the vote activities throughout the campaign,” Smith said.
He’s also spearheaded an effort to coordinate campaigns all over the state, which will allow campaigns to loosely team up and get more out of their money spent on the ground.
There are some signs that Cruz is aware that Allred could be a formidable challenger. Cruz has made efforts this cycle to boost his bipartisan accomplishments and launched efforts for the first time that aim for the middle, like Democrats for Cruz. The Cruz campaign has also spent a lot of time pushing back on Allred’s assertion that he’s a moderate. That said, Republicans are still projecting total confidence. Allred remains behind in most polls.
“It’s hard to win over moderates when you are not one,” a spokesperson for the Cruz campaign said in a statement. “Colin Allred can try to paint himself in a moderate light, but his record is clear.”
“Texas is our nation’s conservative stronghold. Democrats have been trying to win a statewide seat in Texas for over 20 years and have failed time and again,” they added. “This time will be no different.”
NOTUS spoke to seven Allred donors. They all felt his moderate campaign was a plus, but that doesn’t mean they believe he’s going to win.
“What do I know? I thought Beto would win,” Linda Quick, a Houston resident, who, along with her husband, has donated more than $10,000 to Allred’s campaign and committee.
“A lot of times I feel, especially in Texas, that if you’re throwing blue money at someone, you’re kind of throwing it away,” Tom Schwenk, a Realtor who considers himself an independent and gave about $2,500 to Allred’s campaign, said. “But I decided to give him a nice chunk of change because I think he can definitely make a difference for the better.”
Allred is yet another test. Democrats in Texas have been throwing spaghetti at the wall for years, with little to show for it, and millions spent.
“I realize that we’re going to win one of these. It’s going to be unexpected when we do win it. We just don’t know which one it’s going to be, but it’s going to happen, and so it may as well be this one,” Smith said. “I have the luxury of not gambling on these things.”
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.