Senator Ted Cruz of Texas fended off an aggressive and well-funded Democratic challenger to win a third term and preserve decades of Republican Party dominance in the nation’s most populous red state, according to The Associated Press.
“Keep Texas, Texas,” had been the refrain of Mr. Cruz’s campaign. In keeping his seat, he dashed what had been rising hopes among some Democrats that years of demographic changes and urbanization, along with aggressive turnout efforts, could start to flip the state.
“Tonight the people of Texas have spoken, and their message rings clear as a bell across our great state: Texas will remain in Texas,” Mr. Cruz said in a speech declaring victory to a crowd of cheering hundreds in a downtown Houston hotel ballroom.
He highlighted gains with Hispanic voters in the traditionally Democratic areas in the Rio Grande Valley: “We are seeing generational change in South Texas,” he said.
Mr. Cruz congratulated his opponent, Representative Colin Allred, a Democrat from the Dallas area who earned his seat in 2018 during a wave of Democratic enthusiasm that nearly ousted Mr. Cruz in his last re-election fight.
This time, Mr. Cruz tried to shed some of his reputation as a conservative firebrand for a newer image as an experienced senator who could work with Democrats. It was to counter the moderate image that Mr. Allred brought as a former N.F.L. player and civil rights lawyer who was willing to work with Republicans.
As Mr. Allred attracted millions of dollars in donations, Mr. Cruz warned Republicans nationwide that the contest would be close. And it was: Polls showed Mr. Cruz leading by only a few percentage points heading into Election Day.
Mr. Cruz found himself frequently on the defensive as Mr. Allred attacked him repeatedly over his support for Texas’ near total-abortion ban and for his decision, during a winter power outage in 2021 that killed hundreds of people across the state, to go on a family trip to Cancún, Mexico.
But Mr. Cruz was able to highlight issues on which Texans largely agreed with him, including stricter controls at the U.S. border with Mexico and the harmful effects of inflation on Americans during the Biden administration.
It was the second time that Mr. Cruz survived despite a concerted effort by Democrats to make him the first Republican since 1994 to lose a statewide race in Texas. His last re-election fight, in 2018, was against a different member of Congress, Beto O’Rourke, who ran a very different kind of campaign, barnstorming across the entire state, holding rallies in deep-red rural communities and energizing Democrats and small-dollar donors around the country through his personal charisma.
Mr. Allred leaned into a much more traditional campaign that focused on the biggest concentration of Democratic votes in Texas, the large cities of Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio, and their surrounding suburbs. His campaign rapidly raised millions and went up on television early to attack Mr. Cruz and establish Mr. Allred as a moderate Democrat willing to break with the national party on issues like border security and support for the oil and gas industry.
The Cruz campaign spent heavily on television ads linking Mr. Allred to Vice President Kamala Harris, who had been polling worse than Mr. Allred in the state for much of the contest, and attacking him for his past positions against a border wall and in support of L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
Ads from Mr. Cruz and outside groups focused in particular on transgender athletes in women’s sports, echoing a tactic by Republicans across the country aimed at turning suburban voters away from Democratic candidates.
In Texas, Mr. Cruz also appeared to benefit from the inroads that Republicans had been making among Hispanic voters, particularly in the small towns and rural areas of South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley. Republican campaigns in Texas in recent years have aggressively courted conservative Hispanic voters in those areas, which had once been bastions of Democratic support.
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