The political center is having a moment in the U.S. Senate race in Texas, but it's not likely to last

In both the Presidential and U.S. Senate races, efforts by the candidates to portray their opponents as extremists while presenting themselves as comparatively moderate and bipartisan has had mixed effects. Overall, this messaging is resonating more with candidates’ partisans in the state than with their opponents’ base voters, making these tactics likely to be more successful at mobilizing partisans than at persuading the opposition's voters that their own candidate is too radical. Nor do the ostensible efforts to scare independents with claims of ideological extremism seem to be having the effects the campaigns desire. 

A closer look at the University of Texas / Texas Politics illuminates how the efforts at contrasting moderation with extremism have fared – but also suggests that the surprising attraction of the middle in Texas politics is likely to be fleeting once the U.S. Senate race is settled and behind us.

On the Democratic side, UT/TxPP polling suggests that Republican efforts to paint Kamala Harris as a radical in the eyes of their voters have been more successful than efforts to convince them of the same about Colin Allred. 

While the Cruz campaign seemed to have had an opportunity to define Allred, who was largely unknown at the outset of his candidacy, the Democrat’s clear effort to project a moderate image seems to be effectively countering Republican messaging aimed at painting him as radical. This is particularly evident when comparing how Texas voters assess the ideological position of Allred and Harris on an ideological scale ranging from “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative.” 

At the top of the ticket, Harris carries political baggage that has aided the efforts of former president Trump and his allies to brand her as a radical. From her political roots in California to the record of positions she expressed during the 2020 Democratic primary when she attempted to channel the energy of the surging progressive wing of her party, the Trump campaign has more to work with than Allred’s opponents. Whatever the relative influence of Harris’ public record and the Trump campaign’s efforts, 80% of likely Republican voters in the October UT/Texas Politics Project Poll identified her as “extremely liberal.”

Many fewer Democrats hold such a slanted view of Harris: only 13% place her on the extreme end of the spectrum, and more than half place her either right in the middle (29%) or just to the left of center (21%). Independents are more likely than Democrats, but much less likely than Republicans, to view her as “extremely liberal” (26%).

The Cruz campaign’s efforts to portray Allred as similarly radical by looking at his (relatively scant) record in Congress and, more simply, to paint him as ideologically indistinguishable from Harris, has not resulted in a similar read of Allred by Texas voters – not even by Cruz’s own partisans. Only 45% of Republican voters view Allred as “extremely liberal” (35 points less than say the same about Harris), with 37% of Republicans placing the Dallas Congressman in the middle, or in one of the less ideologically extreme, though still liberal leaning categories. While there are a lot of factors at play in comparing Harris and Allred’s respective attempts to overcome the baseline Republican advantage, the differences in perceptions of their ideological positions might wind up being part of the explanation should Allred run better against Cruz than Harris does versus Trump in Texas.

Among Democrats, only 6% view Allred as “extremely liberal”, with the plurality (37%) placing him “in the middle.” Whether these results reflect Allred’s own efforts to triangulate his position in the mind of the electorate (e.g. his early distancing from Biden on the border), or Cruz’s strategic determination not to spend too much of his campaign cash too soon talking about the other candidate is unknowable. But Allred has clearly avoided being perceived as a radical by a Texas Democratic party still populated by a non-trivial share of moderates.

At the same time, while Cruz’s efforts to present himself as a champion of bipartisanship have been quite evident in media coverage during the year and half approaching this election, and a regular theme of his campaign, Cruz’s image in the public eye is well-established, and at odds with this calculated rebranding. The incumbent’s time in office prior to 2023, and likely his very public profile as one of the leaders of the conservative movement in the U.S. Senate, means that most voters already view the state’s junior senator as pretty conservative. Overall, 44% of voters say that Senator Cruz is “extremely conservative”, including 56% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans. Taken together, 70% of Republican voters placed Cruz in either the most conservative or next most conservative category on the scale — along with 69% of Democrats and 57% of independents.

The degree to which Trump’s right-wing populism is at odds with the GOP’s pre-Trump conservative orthodoxy is evident in the degree to which a smaller group of Democrats (50%) place him at the extreme end of the ideological spectrum compared to Republicans’ views of Harris. Only a modest share of Republican likely voters, 27%, whose party has long worn the mantle of the country’s unambiguously conservative choice, place Trump at the far right end of the scale.

When it comes to moderate and independent voters, Cruz and Trump have been less successful in their efforts to persuade these key groups that the Democrats leading the ticket in Texas are ideologically extreme than vice versa. These groups are particularly important in the still evolving U.S. Senate race, and they tend to perceive Cruz as solidly conservative, and Allred as (merely?) left of center.

These groups’ views of Harris and Trump convey a fair amount of imprecision on the part of voters without strong partisan or ideological moorings to pinpoint either’s ideology, other than to place Trump somewhere to the right of the middle, and Harris somewhere to the left. For comparison, while 80% of Republicans place Harris at the far left end of the ideological spectrum, only 26% of independents locate her in the same ideological space.

The four candidates’ efforts to define themselves and each other in the estimation of the Texas electorate reflect the convergence of the long term history of party politics in the state with the strange particulars of the 2024 election.

The Allred campaign strategy reflects a clear choice in the decades-long debate in the Democratic party about whether statewide candidates should run more to the center or more to the left. His campaign has succeeded in establishing a more centrist image, even as the Democratic presidential candidate at the top of the ticket – with whom Allred’s fate is crucially intertwined – has been successfully branded by the Trump campaign and associated Republicans as a radical, at least among Republican voters both Cruz and Trump must mobilize to maintain their position in an ever-more competitive Texas.

Considering the divergence in their images, Allred’s joint appearance with Harris in Houston in the final weeks was a calculated risk. There was upside in using the visibility of the event (and Beyonce, of course) to reach the final group of Democratic voters that polling shows remain aloof amidst Allred’s well-funded mobilization efforts (and, of course, to drum up turnout for Allred in all-important Harris County). But there was also risk in the images of Allred side-by-side with a candidate so clearly negatively defined, at least in ideological terms, among a large swath of persuadable voters. This is a familiar dilemma for Democratic candidates going back at least as far as the earliest signs of the breakup of the post-Reconstruction Democratic party in the 1950’s. The context is now vastly different, yet somehow the trade-offs ring familiar.

Meanwhile, the effort by Ted Cruz to rebrand himself as an avatar of bipartisan policy making, albeit one who still remembers his roots in the Tea Party tumult the 2010’s, calls attention to a much more immediate set of dilemmas rooted in the gradually increasing competitiveness of the Texas political system and, of course, the massive impact of Donald Trump on the Republican Party.

There’s no small irony in the fact that Donald Trump’s takeover of the national Republican party was fueled in part by his ability to tap into the same anti-elite and nativist sentiments that fueled Cruz’s electoral success in 2012. Yet Trump’s lack of moorings in any clearly articulated conservative philosophy remains evident in views of him among Republicans, who don’t view him as overwhelmingly or even clearly conservative. This leaves GOP ideologues rooted in a more conventional, ideologically defined conservatism, like Cruz, at the mercy of Trump’s ideologically mercurial populist impulses. The Republicans who have bent the knee to Trump have learned to either outwait or just talk around Trump policy pronouncements at odds with modern conservativism as practiced in the GOP (like tariffs), even as they ride along with more familiar, reactionary, cultural politics on issues like immigration and civil rights.

Cruz will likely persevere in hanging onto his Senate seat despite the whims of the former president who extracted Cruz’s obeisance after brutally defeating him in the 2016 GOP presidential primary. But win or lose, it has required effort to play the margins in a tight election by distancing himself from a public image he spent a decade in public office constructing, but which he clearly decided (rightly or wrongly) has created risk. The comparatively modest share of Texans who now see Cruz as ideologically extreme – 44% overall, 36% of Republicans, 56% of Democrats – suggest he found some success in that strategy, even if the campaign has been notably less successful in portraying Allred, rather than himself, as the extremist in the race. Cruz’s image hasn’t been reversed by any means, but it has been softened some, presumably as the Cruz campaign seeks to win some of the persuadable votes that contributed to Beto O’Rourke’s totals in 2018.

The outcome and margin of the Senate race will provide some leading indicators for the same kinds of choices about positioning that candidates in both parties will have to make in the run up to 2026 Texas elections, albeit in a very different mid-term election context. 

There will be an active primary season in both parties, where the “center” vs. “left/right wing” fights are likely to play out yet again in both parties. The center has not been the place to be in Texas for most of the current century, particularly in lower-turnout, mid-term elections in which statewide offices are on the ballot – a by-product of the cementing of Republican ownership of both politics and governance that coincided with the GOP’s sharp shift to the far right of the political spectrum. Republican candidates have had little or no incentive to situate themselves in the center of the ideological spectrum, through either issue selection or policy choices. Thus the surprise in the evident gravity of the middle in the U.S. Senate race, however much sense it makes given the dynamics of Cruz’s last contest.

The outcome of the 2024 election, both here and nationally, will provide some clues about whether the center will hold in the next governing and election cycle in Texas. The countervailing forces working against such a shift will be significant once the 2024 election is behind us and attention turns to the legislative session convening in January and the 2026 election that it will set up. The results of the 2024 GOP legislative primaries moved the center of gravity in the next Texas House further to the right, and the political mass on the far-right of the state Republican Party is likely to reassert its force as GOP candidates position themselves for the 2026 primaries. 

One might speculate that an Allred victory (however unlikely) or even a Cruz margin in the range of 2018 would have a moderating impact on Republican elected officials in 2025. But while the close margins for some statewide candidates in 2018 had a somewhat moderating effect on legislative politics, that lasted exactly one session. And coming after a presidential election, none of the statewide elected officials that saw their margins shrink in that midterm will feel the direct pressure in 2025 that some of them responded to in 2019. 

Closer margins at the top of the ballot may get some Republicans’ attention, but it seems unlikely that even an Allred win would unleash a spirit of moderation in the Legislature or the governor’s mansion – or, by extension, in the overall political climate in the state. Should Harris win the national election, Texas Republicans are likely to return to a familiar playbook, using the Democrat in the White House as a foil for conservative (if not reactionary) retrenchment politics in the state. Should Trump return to the White House, his ideological and stylistic influence on Texas Republicans are unlikely to slow the rightward movement among state leaders, let alone turn them back toward the center. Either way, the forces that incentivized the tentative turn toward the middle in the 2024 race are unlikely to carry through in the next cycle of governance and election politics in the state.

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