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| President |
Donald Trump (R) |
| U.S. Senate |
Colin Allred (D) |
| U.S. House |
Democrats +1 |
| Texas RRC |
Christi Craddick (R) |
| Texas Senate |
No Change |
| Texas House |
Democrats +4 |
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GOP rival Clayton Williams had a big lead in the polls in 1990 before Democrat Ann Richards surged from behind and won the Texas governor's race in a thriller on the strength of crossover votes from Republican women. But the contest had been closer than anyone had realized because the female Richards voters who'd voted consistently for Republicans up to then didn't tell the pollsters or their husbands and friends in some cases that they would back the Democrat in the seclusion of the voting booth.
The Republicans who voted to make Richards the second female chief executive in Texas history were widely referred to as country-club women. And they lifted Richards to victory at the finish line in a race that had the eyes of the world on the Lone Star State.
The Capitol Inside sees the upcoming general election as a ghost voter resurgence in the making largely as a consequence of the way Donald Trump has alienated so many women. The forecast here has Kamala Harris riding a late surge of GOP females who break rank and new women voters to victory next week in the race for the White House. But Texas GOP leaders and lawmakers will deserve substantial credit for giving Harris and the Democrats a nuclear weapon of unprecedented magnitude with an abortion ban that they passed without a clue of the disaster it would be for their party at the polls in 2024.
Thanks to Trump and the law that stripped women of the right to control their own bodies, the crystal ball here has Democrat Colin Allred ousting U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in the election on Tuesday. Texas voters are being reminded frequently how Cruz promised to end "the scourge of abortion" even though he's admitted that he didn't have a vote on the matter as a federal legislator when trying to distance himself from the Republicans back here at home.
While Trump has appeared to be unraveling like he did down the stretch in 2020, the former president can still expect to carry the nation's largest state where he's been leading Harris by nearly 7 points on average in the polls in recent weeks. But an Allred win would give the Democrats their first statewide win in Texas in 30 years. Democrats will emerge from the Texas general election as the real winners here if Harris beats Trump in the Electoral College and Cruz goes down like he fears he could.
The outlook here this morning had Democrats picking up two seats in the Texas House and one in the U.S. House while holding the only state Senate seat that the Republicans think they will win in a legislative district that's blue now. But the Democrats could flip a half-dozen Texas House districts if a potential wave that Trump's cratering - coupled with female ghost voters backing Harris and Allred - could trigger.
But we've upped the forecast for the state House battlefield to a 4-seat gain for the minority party due in large part to the disastrous effect that Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday is having on his support among Hispanics. The predictions for individual legislative and congressional contests in Texas can be found here.
Democrats would take the Legislature's lower chamber back with a net gain of 12 seats - the number they picked up the last time Cruz was on the ballot in 2018.
The ABC News analytic site FiveThirtyEight had Cruz leading Allred by 3 points on Friday - down one from the advantage the Republican enjoyed in the polling on average in the past few weeks. FiveThirtyEight had Trump with his biggest yet in the Lone Star State at 7.3 points based on an analysis of the polls. RealClear Politics showed Trump up on Harris in Texas today by 7.1 points. RealClear had Cruz ahead of Allred by 4.1 points on Friday.
The polling is antiquated however as reflections of the top two races on the ballot when Trump appeared poised to win before the latest apparent collapse got under way. Donald Trump Jr. even warned male voters on Thursday that women have dominated the early voting in a very bad sign for his father.
Down-ballot Texas Republicans in competitive races have to be worried about the baggage that Trump and Cruz could turn out to be in a potential replay of the 2018 blue wave. Trump spent a day this week denying that he's a Nazi after praising Adolph Hitler and having an associate who's traveled with his campaign sport a tee-shirt that claims the German dictator did nothing wrong.
Trump sought on Thursday to shore up the support he's been losing among women voters - insisting that he's the candidate who's dedicated to protecting them whether they like it or not. No shortage of observers on both sides of the aisle agreed that Trump has been talking and acting like a candidate who's doomed to lose.
For the sake of disclosure, we must point out that the crystal ball here ventured on a limb with a prediction that Democrat Beto O'Rourke would defeat Cruz in 2018. But we also predicted that Democrats would flip 11 seats in the Texas House that year when pollsters thought they'd flip half that number at the most. The Democrats posted a net gain of a dozen House seats when Cruz beat O'Rourke by less than 3 percentage points in the incumbent's last re-election race six years ago.
The crystal ball had Cruz winning until the arrow turned to Allred today. The forecast could be a darker shade of blue by Tuesday at the rate the federal contests have been progressing in the past week.
more to come ...
