ICYMI: “How Ted Cruz pulled off a decisive win”

HOUSTON — Today, the Texas Tribune published an article recounting Sen. Ted Cruz’s overwhelming victory in his re-election bid for the U.S. Senate. The article specifically focuses on the inroads the campaign made with the Latino vote and the campaign’s efforts to highlight Allred’s radical record on transgender policies. 

The article states the following. 

“In the weeks leading up to Election Day, a series of polls found that U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was in a familiar position: fighting for political survival in a state where other Republicans were routinely dominant.

“But Cruz’s team felt confident. They were better positioned this election cycle overall and they’d identified what they saw as their ace in the hole: Democratic challenger Colin Allred’s record on transgender rights — specifically, the issue of transgender children playing in youth sports. The year before, Allred, a Dallas congressman, had voted against GOP legislation that proposed cutting off federal funds for school athletic programs that allowed ‘a person whose sex is male’ to participate in women’s sports. 

“Cruz and his allied political groups blitzed the airwaves with ads highlighting that vote and Allred’s other stances in favor of transgender rights. The ads, often featuring imagery of boys competing against girls in sports, reflected what Cruz’s team had found from focus groups and polling: Among the few million voters they’d identified who were truly on the fence, the transgender sports topic was most effective in driving support to Cruz, said Sam Cooper, a strategist for Cruz’s campaign.

“’We felt like it was a double whammy for us, that it was an issue that, one, we had Allred dead to rights on, and two, it cut across all of our persuasion universes,’ Cooper said. ‘It helped us with college-educated whites, which we needed, and also helped us with Hispanics,’ for whom it was ‘the No. 1 persuadable issue.’…

“In the end, Cruz walloped Allred by nearly 9 percentage points, winning a majority of the statewide Latino vote and proving the polls dead wrong.

“For Cruz, the decisive win was especially sweet coming off a 2018 cycle that had made him seem vulnerable.

“This time, Cruz mounted a more aggressive fundraising operation heading into the campaign, restocking his war chest to help him compete with the flood of Democratic cash that came pouring in like clockwork. He and his allies hit Allred early, tying the Dallas Democrat to party standard-bearers Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who are unpopular in Texas.

“They also sensed that there was a political shift underway among Latino voters and felt that Cruz had a chance to win an outsized share of the bloc that had reliably favored Democratic candidates for decades…

“‘It wasn’t just the cultural issues, it wasn’t just the economic issues,’ Cooper said. ‘It was the fact that he showed up. It wasn’t an accident that our fourth-to-last rally — Sunday night before the election, typically your biggest rally — was in McAllen.’

“Upwards of 700 people packed into a burger restaurant in downtown McAllen to hear Cruz on the stump — reflecting the massive GOP surge that would be borne out days later in the Latino-dominated Rio Grande Valley and across much of Texas’ broader border region. The shift was particularly striking in the valley, the four-county region at the southern tip of Texas where Trump won a majority of the vote, eight years after drawing only 29% there.”