What Ted Cruz really means when he says “Keep Texas, Texas”

At the end of every event on Ted Cruz’s 53-stop campaign swing through Texas, the state’s junior senator invites supporters to line up and sign his bus. People scrawl their names and their hometowns. Someone wrote “End Human Trafficking” behind the driver’s side mirror. A lot of people write Bible verses; Psalm 91—“No weapon forged against me shall prosper”—is a popular one. People have plugged a plumbing company, a YouTube channel, and even Cruz’s own podcast. A “Free Palestine” message has been crossed out. A “Zodiac 2024” message has not.

The campaign’s slogan, emblazoned in big letters on the front, is “Keep Texas, Texas.” But as Cruz attempts to fend off Democratic Rep. Colin Allred in one of the year’s tightest US Senate races, one simple message written in gold marker on the door captured the essence of his path to victory: “CA Refugee 4 Ted!!”

This is the great irony of the embattled Republican’s reelection bid: For a party that complains about Democrats “importing” voters from across the border, it is Texas Republicans who are relying on migration to remain in power. The people he is seeking to protect Texas from, according to the data, are Texas-born residents (who backed his 2018 opponent, Beto O’Rourke). The people he is hoping will save him are, in no small part, transplants. The result is that the politics that Cruz pitches on the campaign trail is less about addressing the lived reality of Texas—a high-tax and low-services state with poor public health outcomes and a fragile power grid—than about preserving the image it projects to the world. It is a contest, in a sense, between Texas and Texas™.

In the backyard of a brewery in the Hill Country town of Boerne on Saturday night, this sense of an imperiled legacy was palpable. It was not just the de rigueur “Don’t California My Texas” T-shirts—I kept running into voters who had moved to the state in recent years, attracted by the particular brand of freedom that people like Cruz espouse. Cheryl Grosso moved from Washington state three years ago during the pandemic. “My biggest thing is child sex trafficking,” she said. I met a former Democrat who had supported Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 presidential primary before fleeing California and its Covid-19 restrictions. “The left went crazy,” she said, “thinking men can be women” and “shutting down businesses.” I asked her if she’d consider voting for a Democrat again.

“I left that behind,” she said. “I shed it like an old skin.”

Cruz’s remarks were a constant reminder of this Texas™ that was under attack. “How many of you all drove a truck here tonight?” he asked. A mass of hands went up. “This is Texas,” he said. But Democrats’ electric-vehicle mandates would threaten that frontier way of life. “Who the hell is Kamala Harris and Colin Allred to tell you what kind of car or truck you buy for your family?” 

“If there were a vacancy on the city council in San Francisco Colin Allred would be one heck of a candidate—he’d be tough to beat,” Cruz said, “But thank God this is Texas!”

A supporter shouted that Allred should be given a one-way ticket to California.

“How about we just put him on a jackass, head it north and slap its ass?” Cruz said. 

Who was this man, and why did he sound like he was in Blazing Saddles?

“This is a battle between sane and crazy. These people are nuts. Tim Walz waves like this,” Cruz said at another point, opening and closing his hand somewhat like a bird, in what I took to suggest an effeminate manner. “What the hell is that? You do that in Texas, you’ll get your ass kicked.”

I don’t think it’s true that Texans will kick your ass if you wave at them like that, although I’m pretty sure I know who I’d call nuts if they did. But that we don’t do that kind of thing around here is Cruz’s message in a nutshell. Much of his rhetoric onstage—like the message on the accompanying campaign literature, and the message in tens of millions of dollars in campaign ads—was that Allred holds outsider values that make him a threat to their idea of Texas. In particular, he is a threat to Texas women and girls.

“He has voted repeatedly in favor of boys competing in girls’ sports,” Cruz said, “in favor of men competing in women’s sports…Colin Allred has voted not only in favor of boys’ and girls’ sports, but he’s voted in favor of boys in girls’ bathrooms, boys in girls’ locker rooms, boys in girls’ changing rooms.”

Allred and Kamala Harris “are both open border radicals who are both desperately trying to cover up their record and lie to the voters,” he said a little while later. What was the difference? “Well, you might say he’s a man, she’s a woman. But do we know how he identifies?”

It is hard to overstate just how much of Cruz’s attempt to win a Senate race in the world’s eighth-largest economy is about the prospect of transgender students competing in high school sports. He talked about it a ton. Appended to the anti-trans panic was a countervailing vision of masculinity, Texas™ style. 

“Did anyone happen to see Trump’s speech at the Al Smith dinner?” Cruz asked. “I have to say my favorite line of it was he said, ‘Have you guys seen this White Dudes for Kamala?’ And he said, ‘You know, I’m not really worried, because all their wives and all their wives’ lovers, are voting for me.’”

“Bring back alpha males!” a woman behind me shouted. 

This riff on cuckolded men was a sort of strange reference coming from Cruz, a guy who has devoted his recent life to the man who smeared his own wife. And amid all this bravado were obvious signs of weakness. The premise of “Keep Texas, Texas,” after all is that it’s possible you might not. Historically, this sort of existential crisis seems to correlate most strongly with Cruz appearing on the ballot. He won reelection by less than 3 points in 2018, the same year Gov. Greg Abbott was reelected by 13. While some recent polls have shown Cruz and Allred within the margin of error, no one expects Donald Trump’s final margin to be so close. Cruz is still a good bet to win—perhaps especially because Trump is a good bet to win by a wider margin—but he has become a high-floor, low-ceiling kind of guy; there is only so much juice you can really have as the guy who saved bathrooms.

The surest sign that Cruz still has real work in the final weeks of the race to do was the fact that he spent a fair bit of time talking about the work he actually does. Cruz, who has sought to depict himself during the campaign as a bipartisan leader in Washington, spoke at length about his efforts to deliver a nonstop flight between Washington, DC, and San Antonio. He’d worked hand in hand with leaders from heavily Democratic Bexar County. He’d even worked with Pete Buttigieg! It was the sort of deal that the bacon-delivering legislators of Texas’ past—your LBJs, your Jims Wright—used to wrangle before breakfast. Cruz spoke of it like he’d just acquired Louisiana.

If the direct flights don’t save him, the unceasing attack on Allred’s stance on trans rights still might. The spots have hit hard enough that Allred recently responded with a direct-to-camera ad stating that he did not support “boys in girls sports.” It was one of the first things people would bring up when I asked about Allred. And it elicited some of the harshest reactions from the crowd during Cruz’s remarks.

As I waited for the event to begin, I met a voter named Erica Herbert, who was holding a “Women for Cruz” sign. She acknowledged that she had reservations about the Republican candidate. Herbert supported abortion rights and was worried about the state’s hard-right drift—fitting the profile of the kind of person Democrats are banking on to flip the seat. But after watching Cruz’s recent debate with Allred, Herbert considered Cruz “the lesser of two evils.” She wasn’t sure exactly what exactly to believe, but the high school sports issue settled the matter; she wasn’t going to vote for a candidate who could do such a thing. Cruz can be a difficult politician to love, but he is never more adept than when he’s telling voters what they have to lose.