Vice President Kamala Harris will campaign alongside this year’s Texas Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred on Friday in Houston, according to a senior Harris campaign official familiar with the plans. The idea is to bring attention to the Lone Star State’s abortion restrictions and get some earned media attention by flying to a red-leaning state in the final days of the campaign. Her trip will also give the Democratic congressman a bit of a boost in his bid against the two-term Republican Senator Ted Cruz.
Harris’s trip isn’t the greatest news for Cruz, whose polling lead is a bit too close for comfort in the final stretch. Most Republicans are confident that Texas will stay red, and think Allred’s campaign doesn’t have the same grassroots feel as Beto O’Rourke’s blue-wave year campaign did in 2018, when Cruz held on by just two points. My preferred election forecaster, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, currently rates Texas’s Senate race as “likely Republican,” like Florida.
Here’s an interesting tidbit from Elizabeth Findell’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal:
Allred has been running what might be considered the opposite of an O’Rourke campaign. He has focused on television advertisements over rallies, has been less prominent in the media and made many of his in-person events small gatherings centered on professional or industry groups. The soft-spoken former professional football player elicits little excitement and mostly talks about his reputation as a centrist. At times, some fellow Democrats have questioned whether he is trying hard enough.
As for Harris’s decision to travel to Texas a week and a half out from Election Day? Her goal is to draw attention to the state’s abortion restrictions and make the case that Trump will sign a national abortion ban if elected to a second term. (He has said he will not do so.) Recall that she isn’t the only presidential candidate who is traveling to non-battlegrounds in the final stretch: Donald Trump made a recent appearance in deep-blue California and is scheduled to hold a rally this weekend in New York City.