Linebacker, Congressman, and . . . Democrat?

Can Colin Allred, a former NFL linebacker, unseat Ted Cruz?

Dear readers, 

Spring has sprung here in Brooklyn, but if you still find yourself inside, we would recommend tuning into the NBA playoffs. The current round of conference semifinals features some old-school rivalries revived for a modern era (Celtics-76ers, Knicks-Heat), two aging superstars battling it out once again (LeBron James’ Lakers vs. Steph Curry’s Warriors), and a series that includes one of the most transcendent and strange basketball talents of all time (Nikola Jokic propelling the Denver Nuggets through the playoffs against Kevin Durant and the Phoenix Suns). 

Meanwhile, there’s another former pro-athlete running for Senate in Texas. We’re discussing his pitch below. Enjoy!

-Ian and Calder

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On Wednesday, retired NFL linebacker-turned-congressman Colin Allred announced that he’s challenging Ted Cruz for his Texas Senate seat in 2024. 

Thanks to the vitriol that Cruz inspires on the left, the race is likely to be among the most expensive and closely watched of the 2024 cycle. In Allred, Democrats have found a young, successful, and potentially competitive representative who unseated a Republican in 2018 to get into the House in the first place. They’ve also found an athlete, something that Allred reminds his constituents of immediately in the new video announcing his candidacy.

The first words that Allred speaks in the video are, “When I left the NFL, I thought my days of putting people on the ground were over.” He then recounts his experience in the Capitol on Jan. 6, when he claims to have taken off his suit jacket and readied himself to tackle anyone who came through the door. Meanwhile, Cruz reportedly hid in a supply closet. 

That’s the broader theme of the announcement video: Allred’s a tough-guy football player, and Ted Cruz is a coward. 

This is hardly a novel pitch coming from an athlete-turned-politician, and it’s a trope that will be familiar to anyone who paid even a little attention to Herschel Walker’s doomed Senate campaign in 2022 or Tommy Tuberville’s successful run in 2020. But as those two examples suggest, it is an unusual pitch coming from a Democrat. The last major sporting figure to run for Congress as a Democrat was Alex Lasry, senior vice president at the Milwaukee Bucks. But Lasry was an executive (and a millionaire), not an athlete, and he based his pitch to voters on his business acumen, his support for the Bucks’ racial justice activism during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, and a general air of managerial competence. Unsurprisingly, he lost.

But it appears that Allred — who stands at 6’ 1” and weighs 240 pounds — is leaning into the tough-guy athlete persona. (As others pointed out on Twitter this week, he does have the two physical attributes that seem to work well for insurgent Democrats: he’s tall and bald.) That pitch might be especially effective against Cruz, who has a history of embarrassing himself as a fake sports fan. In 2016, he called a basketball hoop a ring. He got into a spat with Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban about why he wasn’t watching the 2020 NBA Finals (hint: something to do with Black Lives Matter). He got brutally booed at Yankee Stadium when he showed up for a 2022 playoff game. He regularly switches allegiances between various Texas teams — often rivals of one another. 

On the policy front, Allred appears to be a pretty standard liberal-ish Democrat. Before running for Congress, he worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Obama administration, and in Congress, he sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Committee on Veteran Affairs, and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He voted twice to impeach Trump, has supported an assault weapons ban, and voted for a bill to prevent the Trump administration from sending troops to the southern border. His closest political ally is Julian Castro (which doesn’t augur well for his political fortunes).

If we’re being honest, the majority of voters in Texas probably don’t care too much about Allred’s policy record. Like most electoral contests today, the race in Texas will boil down to two things: first, partisanship, and second, personality. And if Beto O’Rourke couldn't make it happen in a much more friendly environment for Democrats in 2018, it’s unlikely that Allred — or whatever Democratic ultimately runs against Cruz — will be able to make up the difference (though maybe he’ll manage to snag a nice Annie-Leibovitz-shot Vanity Fair cover along the way). What Allred can do is force Republicans to spend money in Texas that they could be spending in other places, and maybe give us a few more reasons to make fun of the sitting Senator from Texas. 

But if Allred is smart, he’ll go beyond the generic “athlete-as-tough-guy” schtick to explore the real possibilities that sports offer Democrats as a political motif. Today, America’s professional sports leagues are run by a small number of wealthy executives and owners who are, as a general rule, much more conservative than the athletes themselves. (This is especially true in the NBA and NFL, Allred’s home turf.) In this respect, the political landscape in sports increasingly resembles the American political landscape more broadly, where conservative Republicans (and their allies on the Supreme Court) are pushing abortion restrictions, constraints on the rights of LGBTQ people, immigration restrictions, guns laws, and cuts to Social Security and Medicare that are broadly unpopular with the American electorate.

In this context, Allred has an opportunity to use his background as an athlete to highlight more than his physical toughness. His pitch could be: As an athlete, I’m used to standing up to conservatives who want to keep workers under their thumbs, restrict your rights, and gut the things you love for profit. All he has to do is say it.

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RODNEY’S ROUNDUP

Do you want to read about . . .

. . . a brewing legal challenge to the NFL? “Attorneys General to Investigate the N.F.L.’s Treatment of Female Employees,” by Katherine Rosman and Ken Belson in The New York Times (May 4, 2023).

. . . tragedy at the Derby? “Deaths cast shadow over Derby,” by Jeff Tracy in Axios (May 6, 2023).

. . . why Black marathoners are treated differently than White ones? “Erika Kemp Wants to See More Runners Who Look Like Her,” by Matthew Futterman in The New York Times (May 6, 2023).