One of the biggest moments from Tuesday’s US Senate debate in Texas was about high school sports. For months Sen. Ted Cruz and other Republicans have charged that Democratic Rep. Colin Allred wants to allow “boys in girls’ sports”—citing, among other things, a vote he cast last year against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which aimed to defund school sports programs that allowed transgender athletes to compete as a gender other than what they were assigned at birth. Republican outside groups have been spending almost unfathomable sums of money on this line of attack. A recent New York Times story found that they had spent at least $65 million on various anti-trans ads in key states. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown alone has been targeted by $37 million in anti-trans attacks.
If you are a supporter of trans equality, the line about boys playing girls sports is not technically true, because it rests on a false and malicious premise—opponents are misgendering people who do compete. But everyone in either camp understands who and what this is about, and what exactly Republicans in Washington would like to do about it.
In the last week, Allred, a supporter of the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, has begun to push back in a more aggressive, though sometimes confusing, way. On Friday he responded to the deluge with a direct-to-camera ad in which he says he doesn’t support “boys in girls sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.” And on Tuesday night, the former NFL linebacker used his past work experience to flip the issue back on Cruz. After Cruz unspooled a long list of votes where Allred appeared to show a troubling degree of support for trans rights, Allred shot back:
I stand here as a proxy for millions of Texans who are sick and tired of this act. When Cruz starts talking about teen sports, you gotta watch out because the only position he ever played was left out. I’m not trying to be mean, senator, but sit this one out please. Listen, I don’t support boys playing girls sports. I don’t. What I think is that folks should not be discriminated against. And what Sen. Cruz should try to explain to you is why he thinks they should. But ultimately what he’s trying to do is a little game called distraction, to distract you from his record of abandoning us when we need him most. Of not being here when we need him. That’s what he’s trying to do. And that’s why he’s spending so much time on this.
These, in a nutshell, are the two competing theories of what might now be the closest Senate race in the country: Cruz says Allred is a liberal; Allred says Cruz is a loser.
Allred, as my colleague Serena Lin reported earlier this month, is running a far different campaign than Beto O’Rourke did in 2018. O’Rourke was willing to say just about anything and go anywhere. Allred is a lot more cautious about his message, but spending a lot more money on television ads to get it out there. He is pushing a far more centrist set of policies when it comes to the federal government’s role on the southern border.
But Allred can also draw from an even richer list of things that Cruz has done in the last six years to piss people off. While Cruz returned to the subject of trans rights frequently during the debate, Allred spoke again and again about the inherent smallness of the man standing next to him—painting the junior senator as AWOL, a coward, and a lackey.
Twice at the debate, Allred brought up Cruz’s very specific whereabouts on January 6th, 2021, in what felt like an obvious attempt to emasculate the former Princeton debate champ. Here’s one of those moments:
The officers locked all the doors we barred the doors the president walks through to deliver the State of the Union with furniture that we usually use to hold paper, and I texted my wife Ally—who was seven months pregnant with our son Cameron and at home with our son Jordan, who wasn’t yet two—‘Whatever happens I love you.’ And I took off my suit jacket and I was prepared to defend the house floor from the mob. At the same time after he’d gone around the country lying about the election, after he’d been the architect of the attempt to overthrow that election, when that mob came, Senator Cruz was hiding in a Supply Closet.
“And that’s okay—I don’t want him to get hurt by the mob, I really don’t,” Allred said with a smile. But, he added, “This election is accountability.”
Cruz shook his head during all of this, but Allred was correct: Cruz did hide out in a supply closet. In fact, the anecdote comes from Cruz’s own book, Justice Corrupted.
“He’s never there for us when we need him,” Allred said at another point, linking the insurrection to another infamous episode in Cruz-lore. “When the lights went out in the energy capital of the world, he went to Cancun. On January 6th, when a mob was storming the capital, he was hiding in a supply closet. And when the toughest border security bill in a generation came up in the United States Senate, he took it down. We don’t have to have a senator like this.”
As these exchanges make clear, this line of attack is not neatly partisan or left-right. Allred is hoping to appeal to at least some people who agree with Cruz on transgender equality. He needs the votes of some people who are demanding harsher policies on the southern border, and has adjusted his messaging accordingly. But above all, he is banking that Democrats might just flip this seat if enough people can put aside their differences, and agree on one thing: Ted Cruz is kind of a loser, right?
