CHICAGO — Congressman Colin Allred, D-Dallas, will speak on the main stage of the Democratic National Convention Thursday “to express his support” for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, according to his campaign.
Allred is running for Senate against incumbent U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s tried to tie him to Harris’ policies and record and called Allred out for keeping his distance from her.
The Congressman addressed the Texas delegation at the DNC Thursday morning.
"I want to both run for this office the way I plan on serving in it, which is that I'm focused on Texas," Allred said in an interview Thursday morning, the Texas Tribune reported. “We have a very singular choice, which is who's going to serve us for the next six years. It's going to be until 2030, past the … term of the next president.”
Allred acknowledged in the interview Thursday that many of the voters he’s trying to win over in his statewide race in Texas may not be supportive of Harris.
"What I'm trying to do in this campaign is make sure that the Texas I know gets the representation that it deserves, and so yes that, of course, will mean that we're going to try to be reaching out to folks who maybe won't be the same targets as some other campaigns,” Allred said.
Allred’s speech will come as a new survey from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs and Texas Southern University’s Barbara Jordan – Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs suggest he’s in a tight Senate race against Cruz. Of those who took the survey, 46.6% of likely Texas voters said they intend to vote for Cruz, compared to 44.5% who said they'd vote for Allred. This is a closer margin than Cruz won re-election against Beto O’Rourke by in 2018, when Cruz won by just under 3 points.
Other House Democrats in tough Senate races are set to take the stage Thursday, including Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, and Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona.
Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, is chairing Thursday’s convention.
