Convenience Big Store: Ted Cruz builds early lead over Allred

Allred's name ID challenge

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has a comfortable lead over Democrat Colin Allred in the latest University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll.

The Republican holds a 45 percent to 34 percent lead over the Dallas Congressman who is still struggling to build name identification according to the new poll. Forty-one percent of 1,200 registered voters asked about Allred either had no opinion of him or a neutral view.

The polling puts Cruz in a slightly stronger position going into the final five months of the 2024 campaign than he was six years ago against Democrat Beto O'Rourke. In June 2018, Cruz had just a 5 percentage point edge over O'Rourke in a race that the Houston Republican would win by just under 3 percent points.

Cruz, first elected in 2012, is being helped particularly by Republicans. Seventy-seven percent of voters who identified themselves as Republicans said they had either a very favorable or somewhat favorable view of Cruz. In 2018, after Cruz had emerged from a bitter presidential primary battle with Donald Trump, 74 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of him.

While Allred trails Cruz overall, the numbers show him in a similar position as O'Rourke was in 2018 before the race became one of the most closely watched races in the nation. O'Rourke, in June of 2018, had 40 percent of registered voters with no opinion or a neutral view of him, nearly identical to Allred's 41 percent.

Jeremy Wallace, Texas politics reporter

jeremy.wallace@houstonchronicle.com

Who's up, who's down

Up: Michael McCaul.

Despite warnings from China, the Austin Republican and chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee led a congressional delegation to meet with the Dalai Lama at his residence in India's Dharamshala where he declared that Tibet has the right to self-determination and to be free from repression. "Just this week our delegation received a letter from the Chinese Communist Party, warning us not to come here... but we did not let the CCP intimidate us for we are here today," he said while there.

Down: Joe Biden.

Just 39 percent of Texans polled by the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project said they approved of the job he has been doing. But he can take solace in knowing that in June 2016, then-President Barack Obama was also at 39 percent.

What do you think? Hit reply and let me know.

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*** BESTPIX *** WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 18: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks with Elliston Berry (C), a victim of deepfake image abuse, and her mother Anna McAdams (L) following a news conference to unveil the Take It Down Act to protect victims against non-consensual intimate image abuse, on Capitol Hill on June 18, 2024 in Washington, DC. Cruz introduced the bipartisan 'Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act' (TAKE IT DOWN) which would criminalize the publication of non-consensual intimate imagery and require social media sites to remove nefarious imagery if it is flagged by a victim.

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Pick of the day

Photo by: Jeremy Wallace

That is the number of U.S. Supreme Court cases that still must be resolved with just a couple of weeks remaining in their session. There are cases on guns, abortion and one on a Texas law that regulates how social media companies police content posted by their users.

What else I'm reading

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed Thursday to pass a bill requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in Texas public school classrooms, similar to legislation signed into law Wednesday in Louisiana. The Dallas Morning News reports that State Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, tried to pass such a law but it never made it through the Texas House.