As the 2024 election season approaches its final weeks, Democrats face an uphill battle to maintain their majority in the U.S. Senate. The party is defending its seats in close races across the country, leaving little margin for error.
The slender hope for the senators, who are the gatekeepers of substantive legislation and are responsible for confirming Supreme Court justices and senior presidential administration appointees, rests on their hopes of unseating Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Maybe.
Texas is certainly a difficult place for Democrats to place their trust. Democrats have not won this election in 30 years. The Lone Star State appears to be forever out of reach for Democrats, and their hopes continue to rise, only to be dealt a major blow on Election Day.
The Texas government has steadily advanced right-wing policies on immigration, abortion, education, and other hot-button cultural issues. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win there was Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Cruz is in his second term and has a nationwide support network since winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He won the Iowa caucuses that year with support from evangelical voters and finished second to Donald Trump.
A former corporate lawyer and Supreme Court clerk, he has developed a reputation as a conservative firebrand in the Senate, pushing for government shutdowns and serving on committees to advance his political priorities. They often have heated exchanges at public hearings and media appearances.
Despite the situation, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in Houston on Friday, holding a rally with her party’s Senate candidate, Representative Colin Allred.
And for the first time in the campaign, she appears alongside pop star Beyoncé, who will perform at the city’s Major League Soccer Stadium.
This is a remarkable investment of precious time and resources just over a week from Election Day. But polls show a close race between Allred and Cruz, some within the margin of error, making it significantly closer than the race between Harris and Donald Trump in the state. There is.
Allred, a three-term Dallas-area congressman, is a former NFL player and college football standout at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He served in the Obama administration before running for public office and is currently running as a political moderate.
Meanwhile, despite his political strengths, Mr. Cruz is not widely liked, even in conservative Texas. When he ran for re-election in 2018, he defeated Democrat Beto O’Rourke by less than 3 percentage points.
And in 2021, he was criticized for traveling to Cancun, Mexico, during a record winter storm that caused power outages across large swathes of Texas.
This matchup is enough to once again raise hopes for the Democratic Party.
On Thursday afternoon, Texans gathered at the Cactus Jack Cagle Community Center in Spring, Texas, to vote early for the November 5 election. Many said they supported Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz primarily because of their views on the economy and restricting illegal immigration. But Harris’ supporters in this northern Houston suburb were cautiously optimistic.
“Cruise is wishful thinking,” Leona Fuller said. “He called Trump all kinds of names[during the 2016 presidential campaign]and now he’s suddenly become pro-Trump. He can’t do that and expect people to lead and provide effective leadership. You can’t.
Floyd Gidley III, who voted in his first election after turning 18, wrote a high school paper on Allred’s policy proposals and said he was particularly drawn to his calls for criminal justice reform.
“It’s time for change,” said Floyd’s father, who accompanied him to the vote. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”
However, many political experts have doubts.
Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabbat’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, calls the race “likely to be Republican.”
“Texas is going to be a tough state someday,” he said, citing demographic changes as the state becomes younger and more diverse. “But I don’t see that happening for Democrats this year.”
But even if Democrats want to maintain their Senate majority, they have little chance of doing so.
They currently hold 51 seats in the 100-seat parliament. If they win the presidency, which is a big condition, they only have one seat to lose. If Trump wins, the party’s net loss would give Republicans the floor, with Vice President J.D. Vance providing the tie-breaking vote.
The outlook for the Democratic Party this year is bleak.
This year, 34 of the 100 senators (who serve six-year terms) are running for election. The Democratic Party holds 23 seats, but this is also a result of the party’s overperformance in 2018 and 2012.
Three of those states, Ohio, Montana and West Virginia, were won by Trump comfortably in 2016 and 2020.
The West Virginia seat being vacated by centrist former Democrat Joe Manchin is the de facto key to flipping it to Republicans. In Montana, three-term incumbent Jon Tester has been trailing in the polls for months.
The other five Democratic-controlled seats are in states considered to be close to this year’s presidential election: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. In three of those states, Democratic incumbents are seeking re-election. In the remaining two cases, new candidates are seeking to replace outgoing senators.
Meanwhile, most of the seats held by Republicans are in deeply conservative states like Mississippi, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The only states where Democrats are close are Florida and Mr. Cruz’s Texas.
In another state, reliably conservative Nebraska, independent candidate Dan Osborne is running a close race against incumbent Republican Deb Fischer. But it is unclear whether Osborne would vote to give Democrats a real majority if he wins.
“Sometimes in safe states you get incumbents who get lazy,” Coleman said. “Deb Fischer hasn’t had a tough campaign since she was first elected.”
Of greater concern to Democrats is the fact that in the past two years of presidential elections, only once, in Maine in 2020, has a state elected a president from one party and a senator from the other.
Coleman said there is little hope for Democrats if the trend away from ticket installments continues. This may explain why the party is putting more resources into incumbents in battleground states, rather than supporting challengers in Republican-friendly states like Texas and Florida.
The Democratic Senate majority leader’s political action committee spent more than $15 million (£11.5 million) on campaign advertising in Ohio and Pennsylvania this week alone. In Texas, he spent $60,000.
“If you look at how Democratic groups spend their money, they’re more concerned with maximizing the seats they can hold after the election than they are with maximizing their potential goals,” Coleman said.
He noted that the money the party has put into Texas thus far is “a drop in the bucket” in such a large state.
So what are Harris and Beyoncé doing in Texas? Coleman says this gives Democrats an opportunity to focus nationally on the state’s strict anti-abortion laws, and polls show they’re doing the same. The party has been shown to have a decisive advantage over Republicans.
And even if Allred doesn’t win, a strong showing against Cruz could help the state’s Democratic Party build the infrastructure to be more competitive in the future.
That may not be what Texas Democrats hoping to win this year and members of their party hoping to retain the Senate want to hear.
But that may be the cold, harsh reality facing the party as election day approaches.
North American correspondent Anthony Zurcher covers the race for the White House in his twice-weekly U.S. Elections Unspin newsletter. UK readers can sign up here. People outside the UK can sign up here.