Colin Allred and the Legend of Blue Texas

Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX)

While the biggest news yesterday was the retirements of Ben Cardin and Jay Inslee, they may not end up being the most important news of the 2024 cycle.  That could well have come from the Lone Star State, where it appears that Rep. Colin Allred (D) will run for the US Senate in the State of Texas against Sen. Ted Cruz.

Allred is about as good of a recruit as Democrats could hope for in Texas.  A three-term congressman from Dallas who flipped a seat in 2018, he's an imposing 6'1", and a former linebacker for the Tennessee Titans (and more pertinently for his political future, Baylor University).  Allred is hoping to follow in the footsteps of figures like Jon Tester, Mark Kelly, & John Fetterman, all men who came from stereotypically "masculine" backgrounds (Tester a farmer, Kelly an astronaut, Fetterman, like Allred, a former college football player), who were able to transcend their states purple/pink political hue to win elections.

Allred is also running in what might be the only real opportunity for the Democrats to flip a seat in the Senate this cycle.  With only a one-seat majority, the Democrats (if they want any hope of holding the Senate), need to take at least two states that Donald Trump won in 2020, given that Tester (MT), Sherrod Brown (OH), and Joe Manchin (WV) are all up for reelection next year.  A win by Allred would be incalculably huge in that math.

Allred, of course, faces an uphill battle.  No Democrat has won statewide in Texas since 1994, an almost 30 year gap, and it has become synonymous with the Republican Party.  If Democrats are most associated with New York, California, or Massachusetts, if you think of one state that embodies the Republican ethos, it's Texas, the sprawling fossil fuel-rich state bursting with huge swaths of red voters (and a mountain of electoral college votes).

But Texas continues to change.  Despite a tough year, Beto O'Rourke actually got closer in Texas in 2022 to ousting a sitting governor than Charlie Crist did in Florida, despite the latter being a typical swing state that Joe Biden only lost by 3-points.  Under-discussed from 2020 is the fact that Biden only lost Texas that year by 5.6-points, making it the third closest state that Trump won.  This is three points closer than what Hillary Clinton got in 2016 (a 9-point victory), and that was a vast improvement over Barack Obama's 16-point gap in 2012 (and remember, Obama won that election's popular vote by roughly the same margin as Biden did in 2020).  Texas is very quickly becoming, if not a purple state, the most promising pink state on the map.

Blue Texas has been a myth for so long now that for some, it's hard to grasp how it will happen, and to some degree (even from me), I'm not entirely sure what a Blue Texas would look like, and who the best candidate is to make it happen.  But while demographics aren't a promise (ten years ago, betting the farm that the suburbs and not Latino voters, for example, would be the reason the Democrats won their next election would've been a foolish bet), almost every fundamental in Texas points toward a bluer state.  The Democrats will almost certainly win a statewide election there by 2030...it's a just question of which, and with whom.

This is why Allred, just turning 40 a couple of weeks ago, is running.  A promising career is worth the risk of becoming a supernova.  We saw this with Beto O'Rourke in 2018.  He came within inches of winning the state, and even that made him a serious presidential contender (for a time).  The first person to win Texas, unless they are already a presidential nominee, will become a presidential contender.  Texas is the Holy Grail of electoral college prizes.  Look at it this way-if Biden wins Texas in 2024, he could lose Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia, & Wisconsin...and he'd still be reelected.  The person who finds the winning formula to take Texas would become impossibly important in the Democratic Party.  If Allred has presidential aspirations, this is about as good of a way to make a down payment on them.

They'd also deal what would be one of the more fatalistic blows to the Republican Party in a while.  It is oftentimes talked about how certain Biden states (like Nevada and Wisconsin) could slip away from the Democrats in the next decade like Ohio & Iowa have during the Trump years.  But so far, those states have held pretty solid, swing states for certain, but nowhere near Ohio & Iowa, and in 2022-23, they both gave Democrats some of their plummest wins.  Texas becoming an issue for Republicans while those states stay purple would give Democrats a brief chance to regain some ground in the Senate.  The Senate remains, to be sure, very Republican-leaning (solid red states like Wyoming, Idaho, & the Dakotas are wastelands don't even have a fourth of the population of Texas), but Texas becoming in-play would make the electoral college a bigger challenge for the GOP than it has been since the 1960's.  Blue Texas, and Allred's run, are so important because it basically changes the game of presidential politics...and is worth whatever amount of "Charlie Brown & the football" analogies that come with attempting to get the victory.