HOUSTON — One key race Texas voters will decide on Nov. 5 is the one for the U.S. Senate. Republican incumbent Ted Cruz takes on challenger Democratic U.S. Rep Colin Allred.
Polls have shown the race to be very close and the two have gone head-to-head in a debate hosted by our sister station, WFAA, which aired on KHOU 11.
Cruz, who lives in Houston, has been in the U.S. Senate since 2013. He first won a Senate seat in 2012, when he beat Democrat Paul Sadler. In 2018, Cruz narrowly defeated Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. Cruz also ran for president in 2016, but dropped out in the primary. It was a presidential election won by Donald Trump.
Allred, who is from Dallas, has been in the U.S. House since 2019, first beating incumbent Pete Sessions in the 2018 election. He beat Republican challengers Genevieve Collins in 2020 and Antonio Swand in 2022. Allred is a former football player for the Tennessee Titans and Baylor Bears.
KHOU 11’s Len Cannon sat down with both Cruz and Allred to talk about their policies, their politics, the campaign and each other.
You can also watch the full conversations with Len Cannon below.
Below is more background on Cruz and Allred, from our sister station, WFAA.
About Colin Allred
Allred, 41, was born and raised in Dallas by a single mom, who was a public school teacher. He attended Hillcrest High School in North Dallas, where he was elected class president. After high school, Allred attended Baylor University in Waco on a football scholarship, where he graduated with a degree in history.
He deferred his law school acceptance to play in the NFL. He was a linebacker for the Tennessee Titans for five seasons before sustaining a career-ending injury.
Allred attended law school at University of California Berkeley School of Law and worked as a civil rights attorney. He served in the Obama Administration in the General Counsel’s Office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development before he ran for Congress in Texas 32nd District, encompassing parts of Dallas, Collin and Denton counties. Allred defeated 22-year Republican incumbent Pete Sessions to win that race in 2018, one of the most competitive races in Texas at the time and a major blow to Republicans’ failed attempt to keep control of the house that year. He won re-election in 2020 and a third term in 2022. He bested a field of nine candidates in a Democratic primary to challenge Cruz for his Senate seat.
About Ted Cruz
Cruz, 53, was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father before he moved with them to Houston as a young child. After graduating from a private high school in 1988 as valedictorian, Cruz attended Princeton University, where he studied public policy. He then graduated from law school at Harvard University.
After graduation, Cruz clerked for several judges, including former Chief Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, who was a staunch conservative and federalist, and well known for dissenting in Roe v. Wade and voting to end the recount in Florida during the 2000 Presidential Election.
Cruz joined George W. Bush's presidential campaign as a domestic policy advisor in 1999, and once Bush was elected, served as an associate deputy attorney general in the Justice Department, as well as the Federal Trade Commission's director of policy planning.
In 2003, Cruz was appointed to his first office representing Texas as the state's attorney general. The office was created in 1999 by then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, also a future Texas senator, and Greg Abbott, who was Texas' attorney general in 2003, appointed Cruz into the role. The solicitor general handles appeals involving the state government.
Cruz first gained nationwide attention in this role arguing several high-profile cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including defending the Ten Commandments monument outside the Texas State Capitol, and defending the constitutionality of requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
After returning to private practice for a few years in 2008, Cruz began his first Senate campaign in the 2012 Republican primary to replace the retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, running as a Tea Party candidate, winning in what the Washington Post called "the biggest upset of 2012." He has held his senate seat since first winning it in the 2012 election.
