Sen. Ted Cruz‘s two consecutive terms representing Texas in the U.S. Senate have been marked not so much by a lurch toward the right — Cruz was always a card-carrying red state conservative — but by a lurch into the MAGA movement, the Donald Trump-led party doctrine that routinely (and strategically) stokes division, even among Republicans.
That MAGA lurch, and the combative intransigence it requires, is cited expressly by the Dallas Morning News — Texas’s largest daily newspaper — in endorsing Cruz’s Democratic opponent, Rep. Colin Allred this week.
Saying Allred was the better choice for Texans in 2024, the Morning News took Cruz to task for his priorities, saying the Senator routinely “digs in the most partisan mode possible, making no room for common ground.”
Notable examples of Cruz’s failure to put country over party — or Texas over party leader Trump — according to the Morning News were Cruz’s lack of support for the bipartisan border deal, the CHIPS and Science Act, and even for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which funded investment in many Republican-dominated districts.
The Dallas paper’s Allred endorsement — as much a denigration of Cruz as a pitch for Allred — put Cruz’s rejections at 5-for-5, with the Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News, Austin American-Statesman and Fort Worth Star-Telegram also choosing Allred, the former NFL player, lawyer and rising Democratic star.
Texans deserve a new leader in the Senate who can get things done. I’m ready to serve.
Proud to earn the endorsement of @Statesman. pic.twitter.com/QcbTdxVLz3
— Colin Allred (@ColinAllredTX) October 20, 2024
That MAGA lurch for Cruz has endangered his candidacy, the Morning News asserts, not least because it pushed him to endanger democracy. The paper targeted Cruz’s decision to try to block the certification of election results when he “could have supported the peaceful transfer of power in the 2020 presidential election.”
Instead, the paper recounts, Cruz was “the first senator to rise in objection to certifying the electoral vote and one of just six to do so. His actions were a catalyst for what became one of the worst days in our nation’s history.”
Cruz’s MAGA lurch deep into the corner of GOP kingmaker Trump — a man Cruz called a “pathological liar” when he ran against him in 2016 — is portrayed not as a sign of realist strength in these Allred endorsements, though the fealty has won him Trump’s endorsement.
Instead the Morning News and others portray Cruz’s MAGA lurch as a mark of the same unprincipled character that led Cruz to jet off to Cancun while Texas was being ravaged by a fatal winter storm that robbed large sections of the state of power.