TEXAS, USA — This article was originally published by our content partners at the Texas Tribune. Read the original article here.
U.S. Rep. Colin Allred raised $30.3 million for his Senate campaign in the third quarter of the year, outpacing U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s haul over the same three-month period, according to figures announced by both campaigns.
Cruz, the Republican incumbent, raised more than $21 million across his three fundraising accounts, which include a leadership PAC that cannot spend directly on Cruz’s reelection and a joint fundraising committee that sends money to Cruz’s main campaign account and his leadership PAC.
The fundraising deficit is nothing new for Cruz, who has struggled to keep pace with Allred this cycle after being vastly outraised by 2018 Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. Before the latest fundraising quarter, Allred had raised $38 million to Cruz’s $23 million across their main campaign accounts. When including affiliated PACs, Allred held a narrower advantage: $41.2 million to Cruz’s $40 million.
Cruz closed out the quarter — which ran from the start of July through the end of September — with $16.2 million cash on hand across his three accounts, according to the GOP senator’s campaign. Allred’s campaign did not say how much cash he had in his accounts.
Allred’s $30 million haul is a massive sum, though short of the record $38 million O’Rourke raised in the third quarter of 2018. The Dallas Democrat has raised nearly $69 million since the start of the campaign, however, surpassing the $61 million O’Rourke had collected by the same point.
The fundraising news comes as Allred appears to be narrowing the gap in a race that Cruz has led from the start. Allred has been routinely polling within the margin of error with Cruz, and national Democrats announced last month they were including Texas in a multimillion-dollar ad buy from their Senate campaign arm. Two leading elections forecasters have recently shifted their outlook for the contest from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican.”
The latest staggering fundraising numbers mean that Cruz and Allred have collectively raised at least $132 million since the start of the Senate race, smashing the nearly $90 million Cruz and O’Rourke had collected by the same point in 2018 and even surpassing the roughly $119 million they combined to raise by the end of the campaign. Cruz defeated O’Rourke by less than 3 percentage points.