Candidates in Texas Democratic race for U.S. Senate take part in debate
AUSTIN, Texas - In a matter of weeks, the field of Democratic nominees for the Senate race will go from nine to one.
Sunday, the three leading candidates in the race had a chance to plead their case on why they’re the best choice for the nomination.
While the candidates differ in style and approach, they all want to beat incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz come November.
The race for the 2024 Texas Democratic nomination for U.S. senate is heating up.
Nine candidates are in the race, but the top three took the debate stage in Austin.
The Texas AFL-CIO invited Dallas Representative Colin Allred, San Antonio State Senator Roland Gutierrez, and DeSoto State Representative Carl Sherman to participate in the debate.
"I think it presents the greatest opportunity for those who are trying to catch Colin Allred. I think Colin Allred is the frontrunner on the democratic side, but Senator Sherman and Gutierrez want to contrast themselves with him to show a different path forward for Democratic primary voters," SMU political scientist Matthew Wilson said.
Wilson said the biggest difference between the three candidates is style.
"Colin Allred really does stress his propensity for bipartisanship. His desire to work across party lines, at least on some limited number of things. Whereas, Senator Gutierrez really stresses that he is going to be a fighter for Democratic policies and he wants to aggressively take on Republicans and their agendas," he explained.
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Sherman’s style is more out-of-the-box, according to Wilson.
"Sherman is really offering a whole different tag. [He’s] really relying on his ministerial background to articulate kind of a moral and spiritual case for what the nation needs right now and why he would be a good choice," Wilson said.
Those differences came out during the debate.
The candidates debated on topics like immigration, abortion, and gun safety measures.
"If you go to Roland for Texas, you’ll see my five-point plan where we grade a country-of-origin program, we eliminate H2A’s and H2B’s, we allow migrants to come up, get background checked at home and take one of the 30 million jobs that Americans don’t want," Gutierrez said.
"It is not right for man to go further than God who gives us that autonomy, mind body and soul. So I will work to fight to restore the right for women to have choice," Sherman said.
"I think we believe that we should have universal background checks, that we should raise the age of purchase semi-automatic rifles, that we should limit high-capacity magazines, and have red-flag laws in place," Allred said. "And keep fighting to save as many lives as possible as quickly as possible, consistent with the Second Amendment and who we are as Texans."
Whoever wins the nomination will face incumbent Sen. Cruz in the November election.
"[Cruz] has incumbency, he has statewide name recognition, he’ll have a considerable war chest, so the Cruz campaign will be very well funded," Wilson said.
Wilson said one uphill battle the Democratic candidate will face is potentially being on the same ballot as incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden.
"That’s going to be real albatross for whoever the Democratic candidate is, that they are going to be ticket mates in a sense with Joe Biden," Wilson explained. "Particularly where there’s such acrimony with the situation at the border, so definitely whoever wins this will face some serious obstacles."
It’s a serious, but not impossible obstacles to overcome, according to Wilson.
"The overall picture is Ted Cruz has never been widely popular. He certainly has significant fans, but he’s a bit of a polarizing figure, so that means anybody who runs against Ted Cruz is certainly going to have a good chance to keep it close in a heartfelt race," he said.
The Democratic primary election is on March 5, and voters will have the option to choose from the nine candidates in the race.
A candidate has to get more than 50% of the vote to win.
If there isn’t a clear winner, a run-off election would happen in the May primary election.