This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Ted Cruz has had quite a week. On Tuesday, the Texas senator ensured the Republican spending bill slashed funding for weather forecasting, only to then go on vacation to Greece while his state was hit by deadly flooding, a disaster critics say was worsened by cuts to forecasting. Cruz, who infamously fled Texas for Cancun when a crippling winter storm ravaged his state in 2021, was seen visiting the Parthenon in Athens with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday, a day after a flash flood along the Guadalupe River in central Texas killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children and counselors at a camp. > “Texans are dead and grieving, and Cruz is protecting Big Oil instead of the > people he’s supposed to represent. It’s disgraceful.” The Greece trip, first reported by the Daily Beast, ended in time for Cruz to appear at the site of the disaster on Monday morning to decry the tragedy and promise a response from lawmakers. “There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say, ‘Okay, what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.” The National Weather Service (NWS) has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and around $20 billion in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials. But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis. Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, prior to its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150 million fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting. A further $50 million in NOAA grants to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems, and coastal ecosystems was also removed. Cruz was contacted by the Guardian with questions about these cuts and his trip to Greece. Environmental groups said the slashed funding is just the latest blow to federal agencies tasked with predicting and responding to disasters such as the Texas flood. More than 600 employees have exited the NWS amid a Trump administration push to shrink the government workforce, leaving many offices short-staffed of meteorologists and other support workers. Around a fifth of all full-time workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), meanwhile, are also set to depart. “Ted Cruz has spent years doing Big Oil’s bidding, gutting climate research, defunding NOAA, and weakening the very systems meant to warn and protect the public,’ said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Fossil Free Media. “That’s made disasters like this weekend’s flood in Texas even more deadly. Now he’s doubling down, pushing through even more cuts in the so-called big beautiful bill. Texans are dead and grieving, and Cruz is protecting Big Oil instead of the people he’s supposed to represent. It’s disgraceful.” > “That was an act of God; it’s not the administration’s fault the floods hit > when it did.” Cruz, who has previously cast doubt over the scientific reality of the climate crisis, said that complaints about cuts to the National Weather Service are “partisan finger pointing,” although he conceded that people should’ve been evacuated earlier. “Some are eager to point at the National Weather Service and saying that cuts there led to to a lack of warning,” the Republican senator told reporters on Monday. “I think that’s contradicting by the facts and if you look in the facts in particular number one and these warnings went out hours before the flood became a true emergency.” The Trump administration, too, has rejected claims that the service was short-staffed, pointing out that extra forecasters were assigned to the San Antonio and San Angelo field offices. The service’s employees union has said the offices were staffed adequately but were missing some key positions, such as a meteorologist role designed to coordinate with local emergency managers. “People were sleeping in the middle of the night when the flood came,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. “That was an act of God; it’s not the administration’s fault the floods hit when it did.” Leavitt said any blame placed upon Trump for flood forecasting is a “depraved lie.” Resources for weather forecasting, as well as broader work to understand the unfolding climate crisis, could be set for further cutbacks, however. The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal seeks to dismantle all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs, along with its entire research division. This would halt research and development of new weather forecasting technologies and methods. This planned budget, which would need to be passed by the Republican-held Congress to become law, comes as the threats from extreme weather events continue to mount due to rising global temperatures. “We have added a lot of carbon to the atmosphere, and that extra carbon traps energy in the climate system,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “Because of this extra energy, every weather event we see now carries some influence from climate change. The only question is how big that influence is. “Measuring the exact size takes careful attribution studies, but basic physics already tells us the direction,” Dessler added. “Climate change very likely made this event stronger.”

At the end of every event on Ted Cruz’s 53-stop campaign swing through Texas, the state’s junior senator invites supporters to line up and sign his bus. People scrawl their names and their hometowns. Someone wrote “End Human Trafficking” behind the driver’s side mirror. A lot of people write Bible verses; Psalm 91—“No weapon forged against me shall prosper”—is a popular one. People have plugged a plumbing company, a YouTube channel, and even Cruz’s own podcast. A “Free Palestine” message has been crossed out. A “Zodiac 2024” message has not. The campaign’s slogan, emblazoned in big letters on the front, is “Keep Texas, Texas.” But as Cruz attempts to fend off Democratic Rep. Colin Allred in one of the year’s tightest US Senate races, one simple message written in gold marker on the door captured the essence of his path to victory: “CA Refugee 4 Ted!!” This is the great irony of the embattled Republican’s reelection bid: For a party that complains about Democrats “importing” voters from across the border, it is Texas Republicans who are relying on migration to remain in power. The people he is seeking to protect Texas from, according to the data, are Texas-born residents (who backed his 2018 opponent, Beto O’Rourke). The people he is hoping will save him are, in no small part, transplants. The result is that the politics that Cruz pitches on the campaign trail is less about addressing the lived reality of Texas—a high-tax and low-services state with poor public health outcomes and a fragile power grid—than about preserving the image it projects to the world. It is a contest, in a sense, between Texas and Texas. In the backyard of a brewery in the Hill Country town of Boerne on Saturday night, this sense of an imperiled legacy was palpable. It was not just the de rigueur “Don’t California My Texas” T-shirts—I kept running into voters who had moved to the state in recent years, attracted by the particular brand of freedom that people like Cruz espouse. Cheryl Grosso moved from Washington state three years ago during the pandemic. “My biggest thing is child sex trafficking,” she said. I met a former Democrat who had supported Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 presidential primary before fleeing California and its Covid-19 restrictions. “The left went crazy,” she said, “thinking men can be women” and “shutting down businesses.” I asked her if she’d consider voting for a Democrat again. “I left that behind,” she said. “I shed it like an old skin.” Cruz’s remarks were a constant reminder of this Texas that was under attack. “How many of you all drove a truck here tonight?” he asked. A mass of hands went up. “This is Texas,” he said. But Democrats’ electric-vehicle mandates would threaten that frontier way of life. “Who the hell is Kamala Harris and Colin Allred to tell you what kind of car or truck you buy for your family?”  “If there were a vacancy on the city council in San Francisco Colin Allred would be one heck of a candidate—he’d be tough to beat,” Cruz said, “But thank God this is Texas!” A supporter shouted that Allred should be given a one-way ticket to California. “How about we just put him on a jackass, head it north and slap its ass?” Cruz said.  Who was this man, and why did he sound like he was in Blazing Saddles? “This is a battle between sane and crazy. These people are nuts. Tim Walz waves like this,” Cruz said at another point, opening and closing his hand somewhat like a bird, in what I took to suggest an effeminate manner. “What the hell is that? You do that in Texas, you’ll get your ass kicked.” I don’t think it’s true that Texans will kick your ass if you wave at them like that, although I’m pretty sure I know who I’d call nuts if they did. But that we don’t do that kind of thing around here is Cruz’s message in a nutshell. Much of his rhetoric onstage—like the message on the accompanying campaign literature, and the message in tens of millions of dollars in campaign ads—was that Allred holds outsider values that make him a threat to their idea of Texas. In particular, he is a threat to Texas women and girls. “He has voted repeatedly in favor of boys competing in girls’ sports,” Cruz said, “in favor of men competing in women’s sports…Colin Allred has voted not only in favor of boys’ and girls’ sports, but he’s voted in favor of boys in girls’ bathrooms, boys in girls’ locker rooms, boys in girls’ changing rooms.” Allred and Kamala Harris “are both open border radicals who are both desperately trying to cover up their record and lie to the voters,” he said a little while later. What was the difference? “Well, you might say he’s a man, she’s a woman. But do we know how he identifies?” It is hard to overstate just how much of Cruz’s attempt to win a Senate race in the world’s eighth-largest economy is about the prospect of transgender students competing in high school sports. He talked about it a ton. Appended to the anti-trans panic was a countervailing vision of masculinity, Texas style.  “Did anyone happen to see Trump’s speech at the Al Smith dinner?” Cruz asked. “I have to say my favorite line of it was he said, ‘Have you guys seen this White Dudes for Kamala?’ And he said, ‘You know, I’m not really worried, because all their wives and all their wives’ lovers, are voting for me.’” “Bring back alpha males!” a woman behind me shouted.  This riff on cuckolded men was a sort of strange reference coming from Cruz, a guy who has devoted his recent life to the man who smeared his own wife. And amid all this bravado were obvious signs of weakness. The premise of “Keep Texas, Texas,” after all is that it’s possible you might not. Historically, this sort of existential crisis seems to correlate most strongly with Cruz appearing on the ballot. He won reelection by less than 3 points in 2018, the same year Gov. Greg Abbott was reelected by 13. While some recent polls have shown Cruz and Allred within the margin of error, no one expects Donald Trump’s final margin to be so close. Cruz is still a good bet to win—perhaps especially because Trump is a good bet to win by a wider margin—but he has become a high-floor, low-ceiling kind of guy; there is only so much juice you can really have as the guy who saved bathrooms. The surest sign that Cruz still has real work in the final weeks of the race to do was the fact that he spent a fair bit of time talking about the work he actually does. Cruz, who has sought to depict himself during the campaign as a bipartisan leader in Washington, spoke at length about his efforts to deliver a nonstop flight between Washington, DC, and San Antonio. He’d worked hand in hand with leaders from heavily Democratic Bexar County. He’d even worked with Pete Buttigieg! It was the sort of deal that the bacon-delivering legislators of Texas’ past—your LBJs, your Jims Wright—used to wrangle before breakfast. Cruz spoke of it like he’d just acquired Louisiana. If the direct flights don’t save him, the unceasing attack on Allred’s stance on trans rights still might. The spots have hit hard enough that Allred recently responded with a direct-to-camera ad stating that he did not support “boys in girls sports.” It was one of the first things people would bring up when I asked about Allred. And it elicited some of the harshest reactions from the crowd during Cruz’s remarks. As I waited for the event to begin, I met a voter named Erica Herbert, who was holding a “Women for Cruz” sign. She acknowledged that she had reservations about the Republican candidate. Herbert supported abortion rights and was worried about the state’s hard-right drift—fitting the profile of the kind of person Democrats are banking on to flip the seat. But after watching Cruz’s recent debate with Allred, Herbert considered Cruz “the lesser of two evils.” She wasn’t sure exactly what exactly to believe, but the high school sports issue settled the matter; she wasn’t going to vote for a candidate who could do such a thing. Cruz can be a difficult politician to love, but he is never more adept than when he’s telling voters what they have to lose.

The suburbs of North Dallas were once the headquarters of a very particular pre-MAGA version of the Republican party: genteel, gun-toting, and church-going. The men wore beaver-fur cowboy hats, and the women were hairsprayed to the high heavens. As we reported in 2011, the 75205 zip code—some of which falls into the 32nd congressional district of Texas—was the “most enthusiastically Republican enclave in the country.” But then, changing racial demographics made the district ripe for Democratic picking. In 2018, a 35-year-old Black civil rights lawyer named Colin Allred ousted Pete Sessions, an eleven-term Republican congressman. Allred, a stocky former NFL linebacker, has been re-elected to the seat twice since, campaigning on his moderate sensibilities and willingness to reach across the aisle.  Now, Allred is running that same play against Sen. Ted Cruz, the hard-line Republican, in an ever-tightening race. At the Texas Tribune Festival in September, Allred seemed to be nostalgic for that fading Republican archetype who once populated the district he now represents. He described growing up with the “real conservatives,” whom Cruz, he said emphatically, is not. Allred paints Cruz as a divisive extremist and has been courting Republicans who “don’t see themselves reflected in this version of the Republican party.”  And that strategy seems to be working—last week, the Cook Political Report shifted the race to “lean Republican.” Most polls show Allred within single digits of Cruz, and one has Allred leading by one point. With Democrats defending incumbents in Ohio and Montana, flipping Texas could make the difference in maintaining their governing majority in the Senate. After some Democrats pushed the party to invest more in Allred’s campaign, both the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee announced investments in Texas.   But Texas Democrats have not won a statewide election since 1994. The closest they have come was former El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s freewheeling 2018 campaign against Cruz. O’Rourke famously campaigned in all 254 counties, criss-crossing the state in his maroon Dodge Caravan. He live-streamed his every move on Facebook: chatting away while getting a haircut, skateboarding in a Whataburger parking lot, and going on pre-dawn jogs with supporters. O’Rourke ultimately lost by fewer than three points—which some Democrats count as a victory—and won a place as a mythic figure in the state party. He is the ghost haunting Allred’s campaign. Every dollar raised, poll conducted, and door knocked inspires comparisons to 2018’s high-water mark. By most measures, Allred is a strong candidate and has assembled quite a war chest, having outraised Cruz this year. And the junior senator from Texas certainly appears concerned about the race—Cruz’s campaign has called the election the “fight of our lives.” And, in a surprising twist, the hyper-partisan Cruz, who built his career as a culture warrior, has attempted to gain an advantage by arguing that he has a bipartisan record.  Allred, who can come off as stiff and overly scripted, hasn’t inspired the kind of Democratic fervor that O’Rourke enjoyed. But he has been appealing to moderate Republicans and independents who may be alienated by Cruz’s MAGA approach, talking openly about Democratic failures to address the border crisis. The central question: Is running a middle-of-the-road campaign the strategy for winning a race that O’Rourke so narrowly lost?  Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, speaks on the final night of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP Campaigning for statewide office in Texas, which is slightly larger than France and has a population of 30 million, is comparable to running for the president of some countries. Hispanics are now the largest population group in the state, and the number of Black and Asian residents is also growing. Texas contains four of the most populous cities in the US and some of the most expensive media markets. Allred’s robust campaign coffers have made it possible for him to blanket urban centers with television ads. But a more difficult challenge is what veteran journalist and editor of the website Quorum Report Scott Braddock called the “imagination gap:” Texans under the age of 30 have never seen a Democrat win a statewide election.  The last Democrat to do so was Bob Bullock, who was re-elected as lieutenant governor in 1994, the same year that former president George W. Bush first became governor. Since then, there have been a series of high-profile losses. From the “Dream Team” of statewide candidates in 2002 to popular Houston mayor Bill White’s gubernatorial campaign in 2010, Democrats have routinely raised their hopes only to be crushed by Republicans. In 2014, they thought they had a real shot for the governor’s mansion with Wendy Davis, the state senator who rose to national prominence when her marathon filibuster delayed a restrictive abortion bill. Bolstered by Battleground Texas, a new PAC launched by two Obama campaign alums, Davis ran on a compelling biography as a single mother who wound up at Harvard Law School. But her campaign struggled to stay on message and was out-raised and out-spent by Greg Abbott in his first gubernatorial campaign. She lost by 20 points.  In 2018, Texas Democrats found a new standard bearer in O’Rourke, the lanky, indefatigable 46-year-old US congressman from El Paso. He made a point of throwing out the Democratic playbook, initially pledging to go without pollsters and consultants and to refuse donations from corporations and super PACs. O’Rourke was a kind of political Rorschach test. Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said, “O’Rourke was successfully able to be everything to everyone.” He had progressive bona fides, supporting universal healthcare, abortion rights, and an assault rifle ban. He capitalized on Democratic outrage around former president Donald Trump’s family separation policies, leading a Father’s Day protest outside a detention facility for immigrant children. But he could also be, as Jones put it, a “post-partisan pragmatist.” He had a centrist voting record in Congress and a long-standing friendship with Republican Congressman Will Hurd—the two live-streamed their road trip from San Antonio to Washington, DC, in 2017. Ignored by Cruz for the first several months of the campaign, O’Rourke’s shifting and sometimes contradictory narratives went largely unchallenged.  > “O’Rourke was successfully able to be everything to everyone.” With an army of volunteers and record-breaking fundraising from both inside and outside the state, O’Rourke came tantalizingly close to defeating Cruz, losing by 2.6 points. As Gus Bova writes in the Texas Observer, O’Rourke “broke the mold” in 2018, defying political gravity and reinvigorating Texas Democrats. But after disappointing showings in the 2019 Democratic presidential primary and the 2022 gubernatorial race, some have wondered if O’Rourke’s political career is over. O’Rourke now heads a voter registration PAC and recently joined second gentleman Doug Emhoff on a fundraising turn through Texas—including a stop at his beloved Whataburger.  When it comes to the prospect of a blue Texas, one can’t blame Democrats for feeling like Charlie Brown winding up to kick the football again, despite knowing that Lucy is going to yank it away every time. And it might be hard to rustle up enthusiasm for a candidate who is decidedly less compelling than O’Rourke.  Beto O’Rourke, the 2018 Democratic candidate for Senate, gives the thumbs up as he took the stage to speak at the Pan American Neighborhood Park in Austin, Texas. Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman/AP For the last eight years, Democrats have harbored hopes that, eventually, Trump and his allies will become so extreme they will alienate their own base. And, for many, Cruz could be the perfect example of a Republican who should have been jettisoned by the GOP long ago. When he arrived in the Senate in 2013, fueled by the insurgent tea party, he made a name for himself as a far-right obstructionist with a penchant for showmanship. In 2013, his long-shot attempt to undercut the Affordable Care Act—involving a 21-hour Senate speech and a reading of “Green Eggs and Ham”—led to a two-week government shutdown and was harshly criticized by other Republicans. Then there was his ill-fated and embarrassing presidential primary bid in 2016, which culminated in a surprising speech at the Republican National Convention during which he urged delegates to vote their consciences and declined to endorse Trump. But Cruz walked back his condemnation of Trump when it became apparent that it would irreparably harm his political career. And, of course, there is Democrats’ favorite Cruz gaff of them all: jetting off to Cancún during a deadly winter storm in 2021. (He apologized upon his return.) These days, Cruz also makes time to record his thrice-weekly podcast. Nonetheless, polling finds that Cruz remains very popular among Texas Republicans, and he may be bolstered by Trump’s appearance on the ticket. But a June poll found that only 25 percent of self-identified Independents, a key voting group, approved of him. His recent attempts to rebrand as an effective legislator and unsung bipartisan hero may speak to that concern.    Early in the race, Allred’s campaign was so lackluster that it inspired a great deal of grumbling from within the Texas Democratic party. “Where is Colin Allred?” asked a prominent West Texas lawyer and Democrat on X in August. Allred had done few public events and made even fewer media appearances before the final night of the Democratic National Convention when he gave a speech shortly before Vice President Kamala Harris. For most people outside of Texas (and even some people within it), this was likely the first time they heard that Cruz was facing a challenger. In the weeks since then, Allred’s campaign has picked up its pace. But he has mostly opted for smaller meetings over large rallies and town halls, and his campaign has organized mostly identity-focused coalition groups—including women, Asian Americans, and Black Texans. Last week, his campaign announced “Republicans for Allred,” chaired by former US congressman Adam Kinzinger, a prominent anti-Trump Republican who also endorsed Harris. The Allred campaign declined to make the candidate available for an interview and instead suggested I speak to Olivia Julianna, a social media activist who is advising the campaign on youth voter turnout. When asked why larger rallies haven’t been a focus of his campaign, she replied, “This is a more strategic, targeted way of reaching people and bringing them in on these very issue-focused events that are about [what] they care about the most.”  At the Texas Tribune Festival, Allred was asked about a note from O’Rourke, who said in an interview that he’d like to see more of Allred, particularly in “unscripted” moments. It’s difficult to campaign in such a large state, Allred said, a bit defensively, and he pointed out that he had made 50 stops in 22 cities in the past month. Allred’s restraint is underscored by comparisons with O’Rourke, who was endlessly available to voters. Even Cruz, perhaps relieved to know that he will not have to face O’Rourke again, has spoken with some admiration about O’Rourke and noted that he and Allred are “very different candidates.” In August, Cruz told the Texas Tribune, “Beto O’Rourke was charismatic. He was tireless. He campaigned all over the state, and he became a phenom.” Matt Angle, a longtime Democratic political strategist in Texas, said Allred’s more traditional, buttoned-up campaign can still be successful since having high message discipline is usually considered to be a good thing in a candidate. “Some people like the excitement of someone who is spontaneous [and] there’s a lot to be said about leading a pep rally,” Angle told Mother Jones. “But I like candidates who are trying to figure out how to win.”  > “Democrats in Texas always face this a no-win situation: the more they appeal > to moderate voters, the greater the risk they run that the base doesn’t turn > out for them…The more they focus on the base, the more they alienate moderate > voters and push them over to the Republicans. ” Some Democrats have worried that Allred is taking the base for granted and focusing too much on moderates. Even though he endorsed Harris’s presidential bid, he’s largely kept her and other national Democrats at arm’s length. In fact, it sometimes seems as if Allred would rather voters not view him as a Democrat at all. In May, he told Texas Monthly that the race is “not about voting for Democrats. This race is about me versus Ted Cruz, specifically.”  Jones, the professor from Rice University, said that the best strategy, which Allred seems to be employing, is relying on Harris to mobilize progressives while he targets moderate Republicans and independents. “Democrats in Texas always face this a no-win situation: the more they appeal to moderate voters, the greater the risk they run that the base doesn’t turn out for them,” said Jones. “However, the more they focus on the base, the more they alienate moderate voters and push them over to the Republicans. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Allred’s policies are generally consistent with those of the Democratic party: he wants to expand Medicaid, codify Roe v. Wade, and reduce gun violence. But he has attempted to distance himself when it comes to immigration and border security, which have become the centerpieces of his campaign. A June poll found that 47 percent of Texans strongly disapproved of President Joe Biden’s approach to immigration and border security. Immigration has become a weak point for Democrats at large, as border crossings have risen to record levels and strained federal and local resources. To combat accusations of being weak on the border, Democrats have begun to support some immigration policies that they opposed under Trump, and, as many have pointed out, are sometimes indistinguishable from Republicans in their rhetoric of being “tough” on the border. Allred is not an exception, and he has been willing to go further than other members of his party. In January, he voted alongside two other Texas Democrats in support of a Republican-led congressional resolution that condemned Biden’s border policies. On the campaign trail, he often cites his family connection to the Rio Grande Valley—his maternal grandfather was a customs agent at the Gateway Bridge in Brownsville—and he’s said that current immigration policies have placed an undue “burden” on border communities. But Allred’s rhetoric on border security was not always so tough. In 2018, when he was running for the House of Representatives, he called Trump’s border wall “racist” and pledged to tear it down. Yet, last October, he commended President Joe Biden’s decision to continue border wall construction, describing it as a “necessary step.” In a recent TV spot reminiscent of a Ford F-150 ad, Allred emerges from a white pick-up truck to survey the border wall. The law enforcement officials accompanying him declare that Cruz has been “all hat, no cattle” on border security, while Allred has been “tough” and “[stood] up to extremists in both parties.”  Allred’s campaign declined to respond to specific questions from Mother Jones on border security. His campaign website says that he supports “common-sense” immigration measures and pathways to citizenship for those who are “obeying the law, working hard, [and] paying taxes.” I asked Joaquin Castro, the Democratic congressman from San Antonio about Allred’s position on the border. He said that his congressional colleague is trying to strike a “reasonable balance,” disagreeing “with the dehumanization of people” while pushing for more funding for border security. Earlier this year, a bipartisan border security bill failed to pass because of pressure from former president Trump. Described by Biden as the “strongest border deal the country has ever seen,” the measure was the result of negotiations with some of the most conservative members of Congress, including Okalhoma Sen. James Lankford. It would have increased funding for enforcement, restricted asylum applications, and expanded the government’s authority to deport migrants. The bill’s failure presented a unique opportunity for Democrats to turn the border blame game back on Republicans. Allred has campaigned widely on Cruz’s opposition to the deal, saying that Cruz voted against it only because, like the former president, “he wanted to have the issue to run on in November.” A persistent Democratic mantra is that Texas is not so much a red state as a non-voting blue one. In 2020, Manny Garcia, who was then the state Democratic party’s executive director, told Reuters, “Texas is in play because there are more of us than there are of them.” But organizers emphasize that electoral transformation takes time and investment. Michelle Tremillo, the co-executive director of the Texas Organizing Project, said that her group focuses on engaging Black and Latino first-time voters and “building that cycle of participation is long term work.” Democrats already have made progress in county and district elections—such as Lina Hidalgo, a 27-year-old Colombian immigrant who defeated a popular Republican incumbent to lead Harris County in 2018. “With each election cycle, we are chipping away at a statewide gap,” Tremillo said.  Such voter mobilization efforts are relatively new in Texas, particularly on the statewide level. A decade or so ago, political infrastructure for Democrats in Texas was like “actual infrastructure in Afghanistan,” said Braddock, the journalist. There were Democrats concentrated in large urban counties, but there was “nothing to connect them,” he said. State-level campaigns were largely left to do everything on their own: fundraising, coordinating events, and organizing volunteers to phone-bank and door-knock. Angle, the political strategist, told Mother Jones that, back then, “the resources to expand and coordinate to win a statewide race weren’t available.”  The 2018 O’Rourke campaign showed Democrats that a state-wide grassroots effort was both possible and effective. There are now more progressive voter groups in Texas—some run by O’Rourke campaign alums. Katherine Fischer, who worked on O’Rourke’s senate campaign and now runs Texas Majority PAC, said, “There’s now a much stronger network performing organizing work, which lessens the campaign’s burden.” > “Success this year is not measured by who wins. It’s measured by watching how > much closer they get.” This past summer, Texas Democrats announced that Allred’s campaign would bundle its efforts with down-ballot Democratic candidates, coordinating volunteers and sharing data. Called the “Texas Offense,” the campaign described it as the “first statewide coordinated grassroots effort in 20 years.” A recent press release reported that the coalition had logged 600 events and 3,000 volunteer shifts.  Democrats like to call Texas a “game-over” state—if they secure its 40 electoral college votes, Republicans will find it very difficult to win the presidency. Though Jimmy Carter was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win in Texas in 1976, Democrats are quick to point out that the margins have progressively narrowed in the last decade. In 2012, Obama lost Texas by 15.8 points. Hillary Clinton lost by nine, and Biden lost by 5.6. This year, Democrats are simply hoping to move the needle closer in the presidential race. “Success this year is not measured by who wins. It’s measured by watching how much closer they get,” said Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a Democratic advocacy group.  However much Democrats may hope for an Allred victory, not many are expecting one. After 30 years of being proven wrong, Democrats are tempering their optimism—and their low expectations might prove to be a real liability for Allred. On a recent episode of the Bulwark Podcast, O’Rourke told journalist Tim Miller that politics is a “confidence game.”  “Can [Allred] generate enough excitement to convince people that he can win?” O’Rourke asked. “If people believe this is possible, then they’ll act like it’s possible.”