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Early voting begins Monday across Texas for the 2024 general election. The biggest contest on the ballot, after the presidency, is the U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred. Most polls show Cruz with a single-digit lead over Allred.
While Cruz is known for being a staunch conservative, he’s been making an effort over the current election cycle to try to portray himself as more palatable to undecided voters, stressing his ability to work across the aisle to deliver practical benefits for Texans and downplaying some of his more extreme positions.
Abortion
Cruz has opposed legalized abortion throughout his political life. So, it’s significant that he’s tried to deflect questions about where he stands on Texas’ abortion ban.
During Cruz’s sole debate with Allred last week, the moderators asked Cruz no fewer than three times whether he supported or opposed the state’s position of not allowing any exceptions to its abortion ban in the cases of rape or incest. Each time, Cruz deflected, either attacking Allred’s support for abortion rights as too extreme or speaking in generalities.
“As for what the law should be in Texas, that’s a decision that will be made by the state legislature,” Cruz said. “Congressman Allred is running all sorts of ads saying that I made this decision. I don’t serve in the state legislature. I’m not the governor. The folks that make the laws here, the state legislature, the governor — he knows that, but he’s trying to deceive the voters.”
Cruz’s reluctance to speak on abortion may stem from a desire to win over undecided Texans. Most polling shows him with a narrow but distinct lead over Allred among likely voters, and abortion is a hot-button issue this cycle in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Immigration and border security
Cruz is not known for pulling his punches. Take his stance in February on the Senate border bill.
Among other measures, the bill would have made it easier for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to summarily remove or bar entry of some non-U.S. nationals if the average of non-U.S. nationals crossing the Mexico border hit a threshold of 4,000 within a seven-day period. The bill would also have boosted base pay for asylum officers and made it easier for DHS to hire more personnel.
The bill won endorsements from the main union representing Border Patrol officers and from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Then, former President Donald Trump came out against it. The bill was meant to be bipartisan, but Trump’s opposition triggered a Republican stampede that ultimately killed its chances of passage.
“My views on this bill have not been ambiguous. At the last press conference we had here, I described it as ‘a steaming pile of crap,'” Cruz said, admitting that was even before he’d read the bill. Once he had read it, he said, “It turned out my assessment was far too kind.”
Cruz has long argued for tougher border controls, but he condemned the border bill as bad politics and bad policy.
“We have the worst rate of illegal immigration in our nation’s history,” Cruz said – accurately, at the time, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which shows encounters had just peaked two months earlier. “People are dying. Children are being brutalized. Women are being sexually assaulted. Over 100,000 people died of overdoses last year. This bill doesn’t fix it.”
Despite Cruz’s rhetoric, FBI data show violent crime is down, and research funded by the National Institute of Justice shows illegal immigrants in Texas are arrested at less than half the rate compared with native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes.
Cruz as lawmaker
“He’s a bomb thrower,” said Steven Smith, a political scientist at Washington University in Saint Louis.
Smith has studied the liberal/conservative voting records of members of Congress.
“In the case of Senator Ted Cruz, it uniformly places him, since he entered the Senate in January 2013, among the seven or eight most conservative senators, which puts him to the right side, far-right side of the Republican Party in the Senate.”
That sometimes puts him crosswise with his own party’s leadership, especially when it comes to voting on funding bills known as “continuing resolutions,” needed to avoid a government shutdown.
“In 2023, Senator Cruz was one of nine Republicans who opposed the continuing resolution,” Smith said. “And it put him out there on the far right.”
Which isn’t to say Cruz can’t be constructive. Vanderbilt University’s Alan Wiseman, who co-directs the Center for Effective Lawmaking, put Cruz in the middle of the pack when it comes to his ability to get legislation passed.
“It’s also the case that in general, he seems to be more high performing compared to other Republicans when he’s in the minority party, which is somewhat unusual, actually,” Wiseman said.
“Jobs, jobs, jobs”
A case in point is when he worked with Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration, a critical vote to keep the agency functioning and to provide critical support for the nation’s airports. Cantwell chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, on which Cruz is the ranking minority member.
Cruz touted the measure’s practical accomplishments on a visit to Venus Aerospace in Houston shortly after President Joe Biden signed the measure into law.
“It invests over $4 billion in airports all across the country, including major investments here in Houston, in Dallas, in Austin, in San Antonio, in Corpus Christi, in Midland, in airports all throughout the state of Texas,” Cruz said. “My number one priority in the Senate is jobs. It’s jobs, jobs, jobs, and aviation is critical to jobs in the state of Texas.”
Cruz also worked with South Texas Democrats to build or widen bridges linking Texas and Mexico, which Congress ultimately approved as a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act late last year. Cruz spoke at the World Trade Bridge in Laredo, one of the bridges to be widened, in advance of the measure’s passage.
“By expanding this bridge, by creating more lanes for commerce, the trucks can move more quickly,” Cruz said. “The goods can get to the customers faster, which lowers prices for consumers, and they pollute a whole lot less when they don’t sit in a parking lot for hours waiting on the traffic jam.”
But these examples are notable because it’s so rare to see him in a cooperative mood.
“For most of the bills for which he received more than 10 cosponsors, so a sizable number of cosponsors, they tend to only have Republicans as cosponsors,” Vanderbilt’s Wiseman said. “He’s not clearly reaching out to Democrats.”
As for why Cruz has been more open to working with Democrats over the last year, Smith from Washington University said, “That of course, may have something to do with the fact that he was facing a potentially difficult reelection bid.”