Texas Senate race 2018: Beto O’Rourke loses to Ted Cruz

After a surprisingly competitive Senate race that drew national attention to Democrat Beto O’Rourke, Ted Cruz has defeated his challenger and retained his seat in the Senate.

The incumbent Republican, who ran for president in 2016 but failed to win his party’s nomination, claimed victory in an outcome that wasn’t necessarily surprising. Texas is a Republican stronghold, with the party holding the governor’s mansion, both Senate seats, and safe majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Of the 36 congressional districts, only 11 are held by Democrats.

After a surprisingly competitive Texas Senate race that drew national attention to Democrat Beto O’Rourke, Ted Cruz has defeated his challenger and retained his seat.

The result was a major disappointment to Texas Democrats and many progressives nationally, who saw a rare opportunity with O’Rourke — a third-term lawmaker from El Paso, a largely remote and isolated district in Texas. The challenger made Cruz actually worry about his reelection campaign.

Update: Ted Cruz won re-election in Texas.

Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke is trying to mount one of the biggest upsets of the 2018 midterm elections with a long-shot bid to unseat conservative Sen. Ted Cruz.

Shortly after winning the Democratic primary for the 14th Congressional District in New York City this June, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a picture of her worn-out shoes. “[H]ere’s my 1st pair of campaign shoes. I knocked doors until rainwater came through my soles,” she tweeted, above a picture illustrating the aforementioned soles. “Respect the hustle. We won bc we out-worked the competition. Period.”

This summer, Democratic Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke made headlines for sweating through his shirts. The Beto sweat is so iconic it was a popular low-effort Halloween costume. “Supporters young and old wore the signature light-blue button-down that Beto has worn throughout the midterm campaign season,” wrote Opheli Garcia Lawler at the Cut, “making sure to drench the front and back of the collar area.”

There’s a small-but-real possibility that Democrat Beto O’Rourke could unseat Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in November. In two separate polls in September, O’Rourke has been 9 points behind Cruz and 2 points ahead of him. Going into Election Day he sits about six points behind the Republican incumbent. All those numbers are shockingly close for a race that’s been comfortably handed to Republicans for the past 30-odd years.

But even if he loses, O’Rourke could still be a big winner — and it wouldn’t just be a moral victory.

The final polls show Democrats remain underdogs for control of the Senate going into Election Day. They face an extraordinarily difficult map, defending far more seats than the GOP, including many in conservative states.

But many key races remain quite close, and the party has paths remaining to retake the chamber — though they’re difficult ones.

Early voting is surging in Texas and boosting optimism for Democrat Beto O’Rourke in his bid to unseat Republican Ted Cruz in the US Senate.

More than 4.5 million people cast early in-person ballots and nearly 370,000 mailed in their ballots during Texas’s 12-day early voting period, according to a report from the Texas Tribune. In the 30 counties in Texas where 78 percent of the state’s registered voters live, 40 percent of all 12.3 million registered voters in those counties have already cast their ballots.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke might only have a long shot at flipping one of Texas’s US Senate seats blue, but he is making gains among one group that generally votes Republican: Texas independents.

O’Rourke, the Democrat challenging Republican incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz, is trailing his opponent by six points, according to a new poll from the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune. The survey found that 45 percent of likely voters said they would cast their ballot for O’Rourke, compared with 51 percent for Cruz. (That’s consistent with other recent polls of the Texas race: RealClearPolitics’ average has Cruz leading by about seven points, though one outlier poll conducted last month found O’Rourke beating Cruz by two points.)

Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke has raised an astonishing $38.1 million in the past three months in his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz — more than triple what Cruz, at $12 million, hauled in. Unfortunately for O’Rourke, the polls don’t reflect quite that same enthusiasm.

So far O’Rourke, who seemed to tie up the race merely one month ago, now appears to be behind Cruz in the polls. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows that Cruz has a 7 percentage point advantage in the race.

An old mugshot and photos from the punk rocker past of Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the Texas Democrat making a long-shot bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), are flying around on social media — thanks to the Texas Republican Party.

The official Texas GOP account began circulating a photo of 20-something O’Rourke, with a voluminous head of hair and cool-kid stare, trying to paint O’Rourke as an immature drunk and former-criminal punk rocker.