WASHINGTON — With his leading rival reporting Sunday that he’s raised only $631,000 so far, Dallas U.S. Rep. Colin Allred has emerged as the runaway favorite of Democratic donors aiming to topple Sen. Ted Cruz.
Allred now has nearly a 20-1 edge over state Sen. Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio, who entered the primary months later than Allred.
The three-term House member, a former NFL player and civil rights lawyer, has also edged out Cruz, bringing in $10.9 million since announcing his Senate bid May 3.
Cruz’s tally for the last six months is $8.8 million. Most of that — $5.3 million — came in during the third quarter, according to reports he filed Saturday with the Federal Election Commission.
Of that, $2.4 million went directly to Cruz’s Senate campaign. The rest went to a pair of joint fundraising committees he controls. He sent $900,000 of that to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s Senate campaign arm, and $390,000 to the Texas GOP.
The senator’s $3.4 million haul from April to June fell short of Allred’s by a wide margin, though he closed the gap somewhat in the next three months.
Cruz headed into October with a $5.7 million stockpile, and as a two-term incumbent, he likely won’t need much to win his primary in March.
Allred showed $7.9 million in the bank in the quarterly report he filed Sunday. He announced the top-line tally last week.
Gutierrez reported $380,000 in the bank. He’ll need millions more to advertise and to run a robust get-out-the-vote operation in a state as vast as Texas.
The 2018 contest was the costliest Senate race in Texas history. Allred has been outpacing Cruz’s adversary that year.
At this point in the 2018 contest, former three-term El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke had raised just $3.3 million of the $80 million Democrats nationwide ended up showering on him.
O’Rourke lost by just 2.6 percentage points, the best showing for a Democrat running statewide in Texas in a generation.
Gutierrez is Allred’s best-known rival for the Democratic nomination. He entered the race after the deadline to file a second-quarter FEC report, as did state Rep. Carl Sherman of DeSoto.
