The Democrats’ Senate candidate against Ted Cruz has never really done much besides be a partisan.
The Democrats’ Senate candidate against Ted Cruz has never really done much besides be a partisan.
W hy would anybody want to vote for Colin Allred? There are two obvious answers. First, Allred is a Democrat and a reliable party man, so if you’re a party-line Democrat, you’d vote for him. That’s why Kamala Harris is campaigning with Allred on Friday. Second, if for various reasons you find Ted Cruz intolerable and prefer a generic Democrat to Cruz, you’d vote for Allred.
The problem for Allred — why he’s trailed Cruz this entire campaign, and currently trails him by 4.5 points in the RealClearPolitics poll average — is that there just aren’t enough voters in Texas in the first group to make a statewide election particularly close, and there don’t seem to be enough in the second group to make up the difference. In order to win, Allred needs to offer something to voters beyond just Democratic Party loyalty. Yet, his biography isn’t just that of a generic Democrat; it’s that of a Democratic campaign operative.
What he’s settled upon is the argument that he has worked as a voting-rights lawyer, casting himself as a man who stood impartially for the right to vote. But a closer examination of his record shows two things. First, Allred has done the bulk of his work in this area as a partisan Democrat, working on voter turnout and assisting litigation on behalf of Democratic campaigns. Second, Allred has exaggerated the extent to which he was a voting-rights lawyer at all, when much of his work on voting came before he was admitted to practice law.
Colin Allred, the Myth
Working as a “voting rights lawyer” has been a recurring theme in Allred’s description of his own biography, repeated hundreds of times in news coverage of his career. In April, Allred tweeted, “I’ve fought for Texans’ freedom to vote and have their voice heard as a voting rights lawyer.” In August, he tweeted, “I was a voting rights lawyer in Texas, and I’ve seen the effects of voter suppression firsthand. Texans need a Senator who will always stand up for the freedom to vote.”
In a February interview, Allred told the Texas Standard, “I was a voting rights lawyer before I came to Congress” and “I’ve served my state both as a voting rights lawyer, and now in my sixth year in Congress.” In an August interview, he told Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket: “My practice as a lawyer was working in voting rights, and I worked on the ground here in Texas, particularly in 2014 after the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act (in 2013), including the preclearance provisions, and made sure that Texas could move ahead with their voter ID law. I’ve been dealing with this for over a decade now.”
Take note of the outlet with that one. Elias, as a Democratic Party mouthpiece, plays a role in the Allred story a lot larger than just as proprietor of a website observing him from afar.
In a 2023 campaign fundraising email, Allred (or at any rate his campaign, over his signature) placed this at the center of his campaign biography:
I was in law school when I heard that the Texas GOP had decided to trudge up a racist tactic from the Jim Crow South. . . . There was no way I could stand idly by and let them attack our right to vote — which is why I bought a ticket back home after graduating. I became a voting rights lawyer in Texas — something I’ve always compared to “being a firefighter in hell” — and I fought back against extremists like Ted Cruz who used racist conspiracy theories about “voter fraud.”
He’s been doing this for quite a while. When Allred began his first campaign for Congress in 2017, he said in his launch video, “I’m most proud of my work as an attorney. Defending civil rights and voting rights across Texas.” In 2018, he claimed that he was a “voting rights litigator” in Dallas and across the country and, “I grew up in this district and have worked in this district [in Dallas] as a voting rights attorney.”
Allred has painted his work registering voters as nonpartisan. In 2023, he tweeted, “When I was a voting rights lawyer registering folks to vote, I didn’t ask what party they belonged to — I just wanted to make sure they could make their voices heard.” In 2020 remarks he posted to Twitter, he said, “I didn’t care who someone voted for, I wanted to make sure they were able to vote if they were eligible.” This, too, is a claim you can find him making as far back as 2019 remarks to a Rotary Club and on a 2024 podcast.
Allred has sometimes exaggeratedly described himself as a “civil rights lawyer.” You can hear that in his Senate ads here and here. When pressed, he clarifies — as he did on the Daily Show in April — that “I was a civil rights lawyer, but I was a voting rights lawyer specifically.” That segment is billed as “Meet the Voting Rights Lawyer & Dad Running Against Ted Cruz.”
Colin Allred, the Reality
In reality, Allred’s life after a neck injury ended his football career was pretty much a straight line into left-wing activism and Democratic Party politics. There’s no sign that he ever did legal work for voting rights that wasn’t partisan representation of campaigns — largely or entirely outside of Texas. In fact, much of his experience — and apparently all of his Texas experience — is in get-out-the-vote work for Democratic campaigns.
Allred attended U.C. Berkeley Law School from 2011–14. He told Above the Law in 2018 that when he got to law school, “I was considering a career in sports law. But Professor Haney Lopez rekindled my interest in civil rights. The book I helped him research, Dog Whistle Politics, delved into the way politicians from both parties used implicit racial appeals to get elected.” Who is Haney Lopez? A critical-race-theory activist. Miranda Devine explains how Allred’s “stint as articles editor on a leading CRT publication, the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy” was consistent with his mentor:
In the acknowledgments, Lopez praises Allred as one of the “loyal cadre of research assistants” who “believed fervently in getting these arguments right and in getting them out broadly.” According to “Dog Whistle Politics,” white Americans are racist until proven innocent, there is no such thing as an “illegal alien,” and Hispanics who become Republicans are racists who are afraid of “darker-skinned immigrants.” Suburban Americans also are racist because of where they live, and school choice is a racist ploy to destroy public education. The book singles out Republicans for special vitriol, claiming “they typically disregard blacks except as a disposable foil for racial posturing.” It derides Republican Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida as “minority mouthpieces.”
After a stint as an intern with the Obama White House Counsel’s office and a spring internship with the United States Attorney’s Office in Maryland, Allred, upon graduation in the spring of 2014, went to work for Battleground Texas and the Wendy Davis campaign for governor, which got crushed by Greg Abbott in November 2014. FEC filings from the time show that Allred listed his occupation as a “campaign worker.” Campaign fundraising emails for Allred’s Senate campaign over Davis’s signature say that he worked as “DFW Regional Voter Protection Director.” Judging by Allred’s own tweets at the time, he was doing GOTV work for “#TeamWendy” and was canvassing for Davis. In 2018, Allred described his background as voter contact — in other words, campaigning.
Allred was admitted to the bar in April 2015. Finally, he was a lawyer able to pursue a dream of being a nonpartisan civil-rights attorney, right? No, he went immediately to work under Elias in the Washington, D.C., office of Perkins Coie, working, by his own description, as “a voting rights attorney . . . and counsel to a range of clients including national and state political candidates and advocacy organizations.” [Emphasis added]
Allred did this for a little over a year, but by the fall of 2016, he was working in the Obama Department of Housing and Urban Development, and just three months after Obama left office, Allred announced his first run for Congress.
What did Allred do in less than a year and a half of private legal practice? Perkins Coie had lawyers in Dallas, but Allred wasn’t one of them. He was in D.C. His donations to Hillary Clinton in 2016 show that he was living there at the time. He was registered to vote in D.C. on May 16, 2016, and voted in the June 14 primary and November 8 general election, until he canceled his D.C. registration on August 19, 2018.
Who did Allred work for in D.C.? He represented the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Correct the Record, and the left-wing super PAC NextGen Climate Action Committee. The main case in which Allred shows up was a 2015 effort to help Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid by overturning Wisconsin’s voter ID law, in connection with which he was admitted to practice in the Western District of Wisconsin on June 18, 2015. Filings here and here show Allred as one of at least six Perkins Coie attorneys working under Marc Elias on the case. It’s not unusual for a new law firm associate to be thrown into such a case as the all-consuming business of his life, but it’s hardly how Allred has portrayed his life as a nonpartisan Texas voting-rights champion. The New York Times reported in 2015 that the lawsuit was supported by Clinton’s campaign and bankrolled by George Soros. Robert Barnes of the Washington Post reported in August 2016 on how “Democratic superlawyer” Elias, the chief outside counsel to the Democratic Party, was nakedly partisan in his choice of lawsuits:
The legal battles against voting restrictions continue to be led by civil rights groups. . . . But Elias’s efforts explicitly on behalf of Democrats have made 2016 different. Besides joining the efforts of civil rights groups in several states, he has also struck out on his own, bringing additional claims in states that are especially important for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and future Democratic candidates. These include Ohio, Arizona and Virginia.
Some who have worked on voting issues for years are wary of the optics. “I love Marc, but I want to be very clear about who we are and who he represents,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and general counsel of the NAACP LDF. “I don’t want what we have been doing for years [protecting minority voting rights] to be dismissed as partisan.” She adds that as a civil rights lawyer, “I sued plenty of Democrats.”
Elias joined civil rights groups in some cases but said he also filed lawsuits in places where a favorable ruling will help the Democratic Party. “We’re challenging the laws in the states in which we have the greatest concern,” he said. . . . Elias said he understands that civil rights groups fear that his involvement hinders their hope for bipartisan support for voting rights. . . .
That was a price that both Elias and Allred were willing to pay.
Meanwhile, how many cases did Allred actually handle in Texas? Which oppressed Texans did he represent? What landmark victories did he achieve? It would appear that the answer is zero. A PACER search of all four federal court districts in Texas yields zero results for Allred. Searches in Travis County (Austin), Harris County (Houston), Tarrant County (Fort Worth), and Dallas County (Dallas) also yield zero mentions of Allred. Which is not surprising for a guy who left the private practice of law after a year and a half, all of it spent living in Washington, D.C. In a more candid moment, he told a crowd at a 2018 meet and greet, “If you’ve seen me previously, it’s probably when I was doing voting rights on the Wendy Davis campaign. I was the DFW voting rights director for this area.”
Puffing and Non-Lawyering
What’s left of Allred’s story? In an effort to shore up his credentials, he tends to describe his GOTV work for Wendy Davis as if it was legal practice. But because he wasn’t admitted to the bar yet, that would amount to the unauthorized practice of law. For example, Allred’s campaign websites in 2020 and 2018 used the lawyerly phrasing that he “put his legal skills to work as the Dallas-Fort Worth Director of the first-ever statewide coordinated voter protection program led by Battleground Texas during the 2014 gubernatorial election.” [Emphasis added]. Legal skills maybe, but he wasn’t a licensed lawyer, and he was working for a partisan organization on a partisan campaign that was roundly rejected by the state’s electorate.
He has since said in 2018 that he set up a poll-watcher program because “as attorneys, I believe we should all become voting rights activists,” and tweeted in 2022 that “as a voting rights lawyer, I helped lead a poll watcher program to help eligible Texans vote.” But these were not things Allred did as a lawyer. He did them as a campaign operative.
The puffery doesn’t end there. In March 2021, Allred tweeted, in a thread about the June 25, 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, “I was leading the voter protection efforts in Texas when the Court’s ruling came down. That same day our then Attorney General, Greg Abbott, said Texas would immediately implement its strict voter ID law. It has been open season for voting restrictions ever since.” He repeated the claim on Facebook. In August 2021, Allred said, in a press release, “I was leading voter protection efforts in Texas when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and have litigated under the Voting Rights Act. . . .”
Allred was still in law school in Berkeley at the time. He spent the summer of 2013 interning at the Obama White House, where he was occupied in the White House Counsel’s office defending the White House in the wake of the IRS’s targeting of conservatives, which Allred said was a “whole bunch of stuff about nothing.”
Where’s the Rest of Him?
Maybe all of this doesn’t amount to much. In the career of an accomplished man with much else to his name, Allred’s bits of puffing up his resume would be pretty small beer. But his problem is, that’s all there is. He played football, immersed himself in Berkeley left-wingery, did Democratic campaign work before and after being admitted to the bar, worked for the Obama administration in highly partisan capacities, and ran for office. That’s it. He’s a Democrat and nothing else.
So, why would anybody want to vote for Colin Allred?