Colin Allred Wins Democratic Contest to Take On Senator Ted Cruz in Texas

Representative Colin Allred, a Dallas-area Democrat who defeated an incumbent Republican in 2018 to gain his congressional seat, won the Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, emerging on top of a crowded field seeking to challenge Senator Ted Cruz.

“I can’t tell you how much it means to me to be your nominee to be the next senator from the great state of Texas,” Mr. Allred, a civil rights lawyer and former N.F.L. linebacker, told his supporters Tuesday night.

State Senator Roland Gutierrez, who had been trailing by a wide margin in early returns, conceded the race mid-evening on Tuesday and thanked his supporters, many of whom were families of those killed in a mass shooting at a school in the small city of Uvalde in 2022.

Mr. Allred, 40, presented himself during the campaign as an across-the-aisle politician with a working-class upbringing who could appeal to a wide range of voters. But he faces steep odds in the general election: No Democrat has won a statewide office in Texas since the 1990s.

Democrats have believed for years that Mr. Cruz represented one of their best targets to finally break that streak. They nearly did so in 2018, when Mr. Cruz first ran for re-election and Beto O’Rourke, then a little-known representative from El Paso, came within about 2.5 percentage points of unseating him, an unusually narrow margin for a statewide race.

Mr. Allred gained his seat in the House that year, riding the same wave of Democratic enthusiasm that nearly ousted Mr. Cruz. Mr. Allred’s district has since been redrawn to be more favorable to Democrats.