We Fact-Checked Colin Allred's New Campaign Ad: 'All Hat, No Cattle'

Depending on how you view it, we either have only four months to go before Election Day or we still have four months to go before Nov. 5 rolls around.

Certainly the presidential showdown between incumbent Joe Biden and former president and recently convicted felon Donald Trump will get the most attention, but here in North Texas, another race will be almost as closely watched as the one at the top of the ballot. For the second election in a row, Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz faces a tough Democratic challenger for his seat.

Colin Allred, the Dallas U.S. Congressman who hopes to do what Beto O’Rourke could not do in 2018, managed an impressive primary win in March, but has consistently trailed Cruz in the polls since then, though not by much. Judging from Allred’s new TV campaign ad, he’s hoping his bipartisan message can cut through the ideological noise to convince those who might be on the fence to give him a shot.

Depicting a sheriff and other law enforcement officers walking along the border wall while speaking to the senatorial candidate, the ad goes pretty hard toward attempting to craft a tough image for Allred. Before long, the officers are doing the tough talking on behalf of Allred and are taking shots at Cruz.

In fact, there are a couple of intriguing claims made in the ad, entitled “All Hat, No Cattle,” so we wanted to run a fact-check on it. Here’s how the claims in Allred’s newest campaign TV ad hold up.

THE CLAIM: “Colin Allred is tough, he’s standing up to extremists in both parties.”

THE FACTS: Perhaps as much as pointing fingers at Cruz, a hallmark of Allred’s campaign has been his effort to establish himself as an aisle-crossing bipartisan. And it’s true that Allred has shown an ability to vote against his own party from time to time, although his opponent does that, too, and according to a recent report, Cruz seems to vote against his party a tad more than Allred.

“A ProPublica analysis of congressional voting records shows that Cruz votes against his party slightly more often than Allred,” a KXAN report states. “On average, Cruz votes against the Republican Party 7.9% of the time, while Allred votes against the Democratic Party at a rate of 6% of the time.”

Allred wasn’t having that. In the same report, he called the notion Cruz was more bipartisan than he “outrageous,” before explaining why he felt comparing his role in the House with Cruz’s in the Senate as less than apples-to-apples, while bringing out the E word again.

“There’s a reason why I’ve been named by outside groups the most bipartisan member of the entire Texas congressional delegation, and there’s also a reason why I’ve been given awards for it,” Allred said. “And it’s because certainly, there’s a difference between the House and the Senate, and there’s also a lot of times when Ted Cruz is voting against policies that have been put together by Republicans that he is opposing because he’s so extreme.”

Perhaps the splashiest example of Allred “standing up” to his own party, however, is the very one the ad is referring to. As that portion of the script was being read, the logo for The Texas Tribune appeared on-screen with the headline from Jan. 18, reading “Colin Allred joins Republicans to condemn Biden’s handling of the border.”

Indeed, Allred was one of three Democrats to sign a resolution blasting the president for his perceived inaction in dealing with the influx of migrants at the Texas-Mexico border.

“The resolution ‘denounces the Biden administration’s open-borders policies’ and ‘condemns the national security and public safety crisis’ that Republicans claim the administration has created on the border,” the Tribune article highlighted in the TV ad stated. Allred did in fact take some heat from fellow Dems for his decision to align with so many Republicans against Biden.

His then-opponent, state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, declared that Allred “sided with GOP extremists,” which goes against Allred’s claim in the ad. However, the Congressman has vocally supported plenty of legislation near and dear to liberal hearts, including laws regarding abortion and gun safety, that certainly didn't make GOP extremists all that happy.


THE CLAIM: “When there was actually a good plan backed by sheriffs and border officers, Republicans and Democrats, Ted Cruz said, “We don’t need a border bill.”

THE FACTS: As that claim was mentioned in the ad, a graphic showing The Washington Post logo with the date Jan. 31, 2024, appears on screen. And indeed, The Post includes a Cruz quote stating “We don't need a border bill” in an article entitled “GOP says no need for new immigration laws. That’s not what it used to say," from the day noted in the ad.

But that quote was included in a bullet-pointed roundup of GOP statements that had recently been made regarding the border legislation that Biden and the GOP House leadership were battling over at the time. A link from that Cruz quote leads the reader from WaPo to a Business Insider article that sheds more light on Cruz’s view and provides more context than Allred’s ad grants the viewer.

“Ted Cruz says there's no need for more border legislation and Biden should simply mimic Trump's immigration strategy,” reads the headline for the Business Insider piece. The article notes that Cruz told Fox News on Jan. 25, "We don't need a border bill. We achieved the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years under Donald Trump. What was different, is you had a president that wanted to secure the border."

So, Cruz isn’t against any border bill, as Allred’s ad seems to indicate, it’s just that he was against the specific bill Biden was touting while also kissing up to the former president. One may not agree with Cruz’s stance, and we've had plenty to say about Cruz in the past, but in this case, Allred’s possible suggestion that Cruz is simply against any type of border legislation could've benefitted from further context.