And so Colin Allred’s three-year journey through the wilderness of ambition ends more or less where it began.
Three years ago, the NFL player-turned-civil rights attorney left behind a deep-blue U.S. House seat composed largely of Dallas County residents. On Tuesday night, he effectively won a deep-blue U.S. House district composed entirely of Dallas County residents. In ordinal terms, he budged an integer: from the 32nd to the 33rd.
In between, he established himself as a politically mercurial, occasionally perplexing figure in Texas Democratic politics—the final avatar of statewide liberal hopes in those murky middle ages between Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 near-win and this year’s (projected) blue wave of possibility.
His 2024 campaign for U.S. Senate is generally discussed as a cautionary tale, his overreliance on TV ads and weak reach among even the Dem base treated as missteps to be avoided this time around. This is what today’s Democratic Senate hopeful, James Talarico, referred to earlier this year as “mediocre” (more on that in a moment).
One could see this narrative as unfair; after all, Allred did run 5 points ahead of Kamala Harris by margin of defeat. But, when your opponent is Ted Cruz, you’ll simply always be held to a higher standard, and a 9-point loss just can’t be spun into a moral victory. That, and, well, the vibes were what they were.
In his fruitless bid, the flat-affected Allred dutifully moved to the right where the consultant class had deemed it necessary. He came out against trans youth participation in athletics, in a confusing and bloodless way; he voted for a mendacious GOP resolution against “open borders” and even praised the announcement of new border wall under President Joe Biden—somehing the president himself had described as an unfortunate legal inevitability. Six years prior, when first campaigning for the House, Allred had called the border wall “racist” and said his generation would “tear it down.”
It all amounted to little at the polls, even after he raked in a record-breaking fundraising haul. The following year, when he announced he was trying again for the Senate, the reception was sufficiently lukewarm that Talarico, an unseasoned state House representative from Austin, was undeterred from jumping in—as was Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who stepped over Allred and into the race herself on the last possible day, a move that caused Allred to begrudgingly lower his sights and aim to recover a spot in the House.
He took with him the money from his Senate bid, which helped give him a significant cash advantage over Congresswoman Julie Johnson—who had succeeded Allred in his old district before last year’s Trump-mandated gerrymandering yanked the seat from under her. Johnson was less than pleased with Allred’s last-minute entry, and she tried to paint him as a parachute candidate, but she was defeated by about 10 points in the runoff nomination contest Tuesday. The general election will be a formality.
The stakes and meaning of the Allred-Johnson runoff were exquisitely murky. “This is not a classic progressive versus moderate war the way that it used to be in the Democratic Party, but there are definitely shades of a more centrist coalition-focused Democrat like Allred, who is challenging a more progressive activist-oriented Johnson,” an oft-cited political science professor told an Observer reporter last month.
Indeed, these “shades” bordered on invisible. If Johnson was the progressive—and she did rightfully hit Allred for his reactionary posturing on immigration—she was a progressive amply supported by AIPAC who’d trade shares in Palantir. And if Allred was the moderate, he was a moderate who now said things like: “ICE has to go. I think we should get rid of ICE, abolish ICE, whatever you want to call it”—while being backed by the Texas AFL-CIO and by Crockett, who in her own convoluted primary, which ended cleanly in March, found herself painted as the progressive.
Somewhere back in the haze of all this, after Allred switched seats but before Talarico won his Senate nomination, Allred also engaged in perhaps the most interesting and pointless of his political interventions over the past three years. Clearly aggrieved at the party’s passing him over, he latched in early February onto comments made by an influencer, who had relayed that Talarico had privately called Allred a “mediocre Black man” (to which Talarico has responded that he simply referred to Allred’s campaign as mediocre.)
In a straight-to-camera broadside, Allred told Talarico, referencing the latter’s frequent deployment of liberal Christianity: “You are not saving religion for the Democratic Party or the left. We already have Senator Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock for that. We don’t need you.”
He endorsed Crockett, called Talarico a “hater,” and advised: “Don’t come for me unless I send for you.”
Recall: This was a candidate who seemed to be studiously unstimulating, to the dismay of many Democrats, throughout the 2024 cycle. It was an (admittedly entertaining) outburst almost impossible to fit with what came before, and it amounted to little—as Talarico prevailed a month later. Allred has since, though without much enthusiasm, said that he will back the Democrat for Senate after all.
So it is that the pursuit of power can make any of us seem a bit silly, and yet victory releases us from the past. Now is not the time for relitigation; it is the time for shielding one’s eyes from the blazing dumpster fire that is the Republican side of these runoffs, and for acknowledging a man who left his haters, whoever they may be, behind.
You can’t go home again, but Colin Allred came close Tuesday night.
The post The Eternal Recurrence of Colin Allred appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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