Former Rep. Colin Allred drops out of US Senate race, as Jasmine Crockett is poised to enter

Allred will instead run to return to the U.S. House of Representatives in Texas’s 33rd Congressional District.

Former U.S. Congressman Colin Allred has dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination for Texas’s U.S. Senate and will instead seek to return to Congress in Texas’s 33rd Congressional District.

The decision was made as U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett is expected to announce her run for U.S. Senate on Monday.

“I’ve come to believe that a bruising Senate Democratic primary and runoff would prevent the Democratic Party from going into this critical election unified against the danger posed to our communities and our constitution by Donald Trump,” Allred said in a statement.

The Democratic primary election for the U.S. Senate nomination will take place on March 3. Allred was trailing Democratic Texas State Rep. James Talarico, whose national profile has grown substantially–with millions of followers on social media to show for it.

If Allred stayed in the race, his campaign would face even more headwinds against another high-profile candidate in Crockett, who is arguably one of the most recognized and headline-grabbing Democrats in the country.

Allred, who resigned from Congress to seek an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in the 2022 midterm elections, will now aim to make a return to Capitol Hill. The 33rd District is currently represented by Congressman Marc Veasey, who is one of only three Black Democratic members of Congress in the state of Texas (one of whom is Crockett).

Following Texas’s controversial redistricting, the current congressional map makes the 33rd district, which is entirely located in Dallas County, a more challenging one for Democrats to win.

In his statement announcing the termination of his Senate campaign, Allred excoriated Texas Republicans and President Donald Trump for Texas’s “racially gerrymandered” congressional map.

“The 33rd district was racially gerrymandered by Trump in an effort to further rig our democracy, but it’s also the community where I grew up attending public schools and watching my mom struggle to pay for our groceries. It’s the community where I was raised, and where Aly and I are now raising our two boys. It is my home,” said Allred.

The former NFL player continued, “On January 6th, I was prepared to physically fight to defend our democracy. Today, the danger we face from Donald Trump is even greater and has added a level of corruption and rigging of our economy that has made it harder than ever for Texans. But I’ve never been more confident that together we can meet this moment.”

The topsy-turvy aspect of the Texas races for Congress is a result of President Trump’s order that Republicans in Texas and other “red” states redraw their congressional maps to benefit Republicans in an effort to keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Despite a lawsuit challenging Texas’s map, which accused it of racial discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the map to take effect as litigation in the case proceeds.

Democratic strategist Dallas Jones, who is based in Houston, told theGrio that the map “was an attempt to fix that which was not broken.” Despite Texas being a “majority-minority” state, he said the new map forces Black and Latino leaders to jump into crowded primaries against each other. What’s more, he noted that Black and Latino voters have to make the difficult decisions of choosing between “representation of their respective communities.”

“The calculation of the Republican Party, here in Texas, specifically, is capitalizing on what has been the weak infrastructure of the Texas Democratic Party since 1994,” said Jones.

Despite the electoral barriers for Democrats, Jones believes that Democrats can pull off wins in next year’s elections if they can mobilize Black and Latino voters.

“It could tip the scales in our major areas like Dallas and Houston, where we still are dealing with an apathetic voter population, particularly in the Black community.”