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The presidential race comes to Texas on Friday, with both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump holding rallies and boosting their party’s Senate candidates.
Harris will deliver remarks at a rally in Houston, where she’ll focus on abortion and women’s health and flex her star power support with a performance by Beyoncé, according to media reports. Just hours before, Trump will speak to reporters at a private jet terminal in Austin on the border and crime. He's reported to appear on popular podcaster Joe Rogan’s show during a taping in Austin.
With just 11 days until Election Day, it’s unexpected that the presidential candidates would spend their precious time in Texas, especially after the Harris campaign made it clear Texas was not seen as a battleground state.
“She should be out campaigning in a battleground state,” state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, said at a pro-Trump rally Friday morning. “But no, the smartest vice president in the world's history is here in H-town.”
For Harris, the Houston rally is less about winning Texas than it is about trying to tip the scales in a tight Senate race, with U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas challenging Sen. Ted Cruz in his second reelection bid. Both Allred and Cruz will be with their parties’ candidates during their Friday visits to Texas.
It will be Allred's first time campaigning side by side with Harris this cycle. Allred has been resistant to tying his campaign to Harris’ except for a brief appearance on the main stage at the Democratic National Convention where he expressed his support for her. He will join Harris on stage on Friday discussing abortion access.
Trump stumped for Cruz during his closer-than-expected reelection campaign in 2018, showing unity after the two engaged in an ugly presidential primary only two years prior. The pair spoke together during a fundraiser earlier this month. Cruz also spoke on the main stage of the Republican National Convention this year, praising Trump for his handling of the border.
In Austin, Cruz said he was delighted to see the news of Harris' visit to Houston because it made the point that his campaign has been pushing all along: “Colin Allred is Kamala Harris.”
He said the two candidates were embracing and running as a single ticket for open borders, inflation and “letting criminals out of jail."
“I couldn’t ask for a better summation of this campaign then Allred and Harris arm-in-arm at the same time that President Trump and I are standing together,” he said. “That’s the clear choice Texans have, that’s the clear choice Americans have.”
Issues backdrop
For Harris and Trump, the Texas backdrop also provides a key stage to broadcast messages about two of the most prominent issues of the presidential race: abortion and the border.
Democrats have zeroed in on the overturning of nationwide abortion access throughout the campaign, and polling has repeatedly shown it a compelling issue among voters who identify with both parties. Kate Cox and Amanda Zurawski, Texas women whose care for health-compromising pregnancy complications were delayed due to the state’s restrictive abortion laws, have been some of the Harris campaign’s most prominent surrogates.
“Texas has had the most horror stories nationwide,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All and a Houstonian who will be attending the rally. “Coming to Texas and bringing the fight directly to Texas allows the vice president to make her case to the American people.”
Trump’s remarks on the border will lean into what have been a pillar of Republican attacks on Democrats since the beginning of President Joe Biden’s time in office. Texas has also been a key battleground in Republican resistance to the Biden administration’s handling of the southern border. Gov. Greg Abbott has gone head to head with the administration and other Democratic leaders with Operation Lone Star, which used state resources to implement physical barriers along the border and bused migrants to liberal cities farther north.
“Kamala's border bloodbath is putting Texas families in danger and exposing every American to the risks of her dangerous policies,” Trump’s campaign said in a statement. “The only leader who will secure our borders and put Americans first is President Donald J. Trump. The stakes have never been higher.”
Trump on Rogan
Brian Smith, a political science professor at St. Edward’s University in Austin, said Trump’s motivation to come to Texas is simple.
“Donald Trump is here because Joe Rogan is in Texas, nothing really to do with how close [the presidential election] is or trying to help out Cruz,” he said of the comedian-turned-podcaster who made Austin his headquarters a few years ago.
Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, was followed by 14.5 million people on Spotify earlier this year. That audience is national and is largely made up of men – a favorable demographic for Trump, particularly those without a college education.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told reporters in Austin ahead of the Trump appearance that he thought Trump’s move to go on Rogan’s podcast was “brilliant” because it appealed to men under 45, a crucial demographic.
“That particular demographic doesn’t vote in high numbers, it’s one of the lowest numbers that turnout to vote,” Miller said. “So if he can make a move there of any percentage it’s a positive.”
Harris made an appearance earlier this month on Alex Cooper’s podcast “Call Her Daddy.” The podcast is the second most popular on Spotify, behind “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
Allred embraces Harris
Harris, meanwhile, is making her first visit to Texas since she formally secured the Democratic presidential nomination in early August. Her team has long made clear they did not intend to make a play for Texas, citing the prohibitive cost of advertising across the state’s many large media markets and the need to focus on more closely contested states.
But while Harris has trailed Trump by several percentage points in most statewide polls, Allred has narrowed the gap in the Senate contest, running between 3 and 4 percentage points behind Cruz, according to FiveThirtyEight’s rolling average of recent polls. National Democrats increasingly see Texas as their most realistic chance to pick up a Senate seat across an unfavorable map — meaning that if Harris wins in November, her hopes of working with a Democrat-controlled Congress could hinge on the Allred-Cruz outcome.
Allred has tapped out all the moderate Republican and independent voters he can get at this point, Smith said. So he’s now trying to mobilize the Democratic base, a large chunk of which is in Harris County, a Democratic stronghold.
Allred’s hopes of an upset depend in part on how he performs in Texas’ largest county, where the electorate has grown increasingly young, diverse and educated — trends that helped Democrats win control of county government in 2018 as Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried the county over Cruz by 17 percentage points.
Since then, Harris County’s voter rolls have swelled to nearly 2.7 million, making it home to about 1 in 7 of all registered voters in Texas.
In a countywide poll published last week by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs, Allred led with 52% to Cruz’s 39%, with 7% undecided. Allred’s 13-point margin suggests he would need to win over a large share of the undecided bloc to match O’Rourke’s 2018 margin in Harris County.
“For him to get close, he needs Harris County,” Smith said. “He needs the bluest of bluest areas” to turn out big for him.
It is a striking shift from Allred’s strategy thus far, which has involved distancing himself from Harris and the more liberal stances of the Biden-Harris administration. Cruz has sought to tie Allred to Harris, insisting there is little daylight between their voting records and true policy stances.
Allred has also increasingly leaned into the fact that he would be Texas’ first Black senator, along with his background as a civil rights lawyer. In a text to supporters this week seeking last-minute donations, Allred’s team wrote, “Black Americans have long faced far too many obstacles like discrimination and the racist voter suppression laws that Texas Republicans like Ted Cruz have championed.”
Additionally, Allred is set to appear Sunday at the 10,000 Black Men of Greater Houston Rally outside Houston City Hall. On Tuesday, he has scheduled a rally at Texas Southern University, one of the nation’s largest historically Black colleges and universities, with Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, his own state’s first Black senator and the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached.
In recent polls, Allred has led Cruz by around 60 percentage points among Black voters — a healthy margin, though less decisive than the 78-point margin by which O’Rourke carried the Black vote in 2018, according to exit polls.
The Black electorate in Texas is not only Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc, but also an untapped source of support. As of 2022, there were 2.9 million Black Texans who were eligible to vote, more than in any other state, according to the Pew Research Center. That same year, Black voters made up 12% of the vote in the fall gubernatorial election.
Carlos Nogueras Ramos contributed to this report.
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