Ted Cruz holds on to win Texas Senate race

In the latest high-profile statewide race in Texas, the Senate contest between GOP incumbent Ted Cruz and Democratic Dallas-area Congressman Colin Allred has been called for Cruz.

The result was called by Fox News and NBC News.

Allred, a former NFL star and civil rights attorney, had been running in hopes of becoming the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas since 1994 — the single longest all-Republican statewide election streak of any state in the U.S.

Texas, long the most populous state controlled by Republicans, has been trending more to the center amid an influx of educated, white-collar professionals settling in the suburbs around the major "Texas Triangle" cities of Austin, San Antonio, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Houston. However, for years it has remained out of reach for Democrats, due to large reservoirs of Republican votes in the highly populated outlying mid-sized cities.

Cruz, who became infamous as a far-right firebrand in the Senate, first faced a surprisingly close re-election against former El Paso Congressman Beto O'Rourke in the 2018 midterm election, being held to under a 3-point margin.

In this election, Cruz has tried to paint a more moderate image of himself by highlighting his bipartisan work in the Senate — but at the same time, he and other Texas Republicans have pushed culture-war panic against Allred, running a relentless ad campaign warning voters he would allow transgender women to compete in women's athletics.

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Allred, in turn, has blasted Cruz as hypocritical on border security for backing former President Donald Trump when he sabotaged a bipartisan border proposal, and has also targeted him for enabling the January 6 attack and for fleeing Texas to vacation in Cancún during a catastrophic winter freeze that caused widespread death and property damage across the state.

Democrats had to contend this year with a deeply disadvantaging Senate map that exposed many of their own vulnerable incumbents while almost none of Republicans'. The Texas race was one of their only chances to go on offense to protect their narrow Senate majority.