Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has won re-election over his opponent, Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, CNN and NBC News have reported.
The two-term GOP senator was expected to win a third, although polling had tightened in the days leading up to the election—suggesting that Allred, a former NFL linebacker, had a chance to flip the seat in the ordinarily red Lone Star State.
But despite Allred’s impressive fundraising efforts, Cruz kept his margin tight among women voters—winning 47 percent to Allred’s 51, exit polls showed.
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Those polls also showed that Cruz made gains among Latinos; 52 percent said they voted for the Republican, as opposed to just 35 percent in 2018.
A Democrat has not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994.
Cruz suffered a scare in 2018 when Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke—another fundraising magnet—lost by fewer than three points.
As in that race, the Democratic party’s national groups, who have seen Texas as a future battleground, poured millions into Allred’s campaign as he slammed Cruz over his support for Texas’ six-week abortion ban.
Allred also tried to flip the script when it came to immigration, pointing to Cruz’s failure to support a bipartisan border deal.
“No one is more self-serving, more disconnected from Texans than Ted Cruz,” Allred said at the state’s Democratic Convention in June. “Ted Cruz is the ultimate me guy.”
Cruz, for his part, attempted to link Allred to the Biden-Harris campaign on issues like immigration and transgender athletes in women’s sports.
The Republican, though he was favored, didn’t take a win for granted ahead of the election.
“Texas is a battlefield,” he told Texas Republicans in July. “It’s easy to be complacent. One of the real mistakes people make in politics is they have a recency bias. They say well, whatever things have been recently, that’s what it’s going to be forever.”
But when the dust settled, Cruz declared his win over Allred on Tuesday night.
“This decisive victory should shake the Democrat establishment to its core,” he told his supporters at a rally in Houston, The Texas Tribune reported.
Cruz made a name for himself early in his Senate career as a highly conservative and outspoken rabble-rouser, known for his strongly-worded speeches.
Although he was a vocal critic of Donald Trump as the two competed for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Cruz has since aligned himself with the now-GOP nominee.
