Something strange is happening in Texas: a Democratic challenger is within striking distance of winning a Senate seat. Stranger still, that challenger, Colin Allred, is a former professional football player who is running as a Democrat.
Allred played for Baylor University, then spent four years in the N.F.L. as a linebacker for the Tennessee Titans, before making his way into politics. It’s the central part of his campaign biography—the son of a single mom in Dallas overcomes long odds to make it into the N.F.L. The rest of his story gets shorter shrift: law school; his work as a civil-rights attorney in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under Barack Obama; his stint in Congress, after he upset the incumbent Republican Pete Sessions for a House seat, in 2018. His rhetoric is studded with football references. The launch video for his Senate campaign was filmed in an empty football stadium; he once even referred to the border with Mexico as the “one-yard line.”
Politicians often turn to the gridiron for shorthand. The guys on the other side are always moving goalposts. But Allred can talk about the pain involved in sacrifice and mean it. He had to have two vertebrae in his neck fused after a collision with the former Dallas Cowboys tight end Martellus Bennett during a power run.
There are only two sports in Texas: football and spring football. (And also whatever was happening when Nolan Ryan was on the mound.) The appeal, to many Texans, of a politician who has roots in football is obvious. The appeal of a Democrat, on the other hand, is not, and the Democratic Party is still sorting that out. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke lost to Ted Cruz by less than three percentage points in the Texas Senate race, after O’Rourke had capitalized on a surge of national attention (and the cash that came with it). O’Rourke was a lanky, foulmouthed progressive, and became a celebrity overnight; documentary cameras followed him everywhere. Allred is nothing like that. He’s physically imposing but seems reserved. He’s not exactly press-shy, but not quick to call a press conference, either. He prefers small audiences to O’Rourke’s style of barnstorming. His main appeal isn’t to young people involved in a grassroots movement but to moderates. His campaign boasts of his track record of standing up to “extremists in both parties.”
And for months the Democratic Party wrote off Texas; Allred was largely on his own, not that he may have minded it. Allred spoke at the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, this past August, but he’s kept his distance from the Harris campaign, too. When Politico asked him whether he wanted Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, or Joe Biden to come to Texas to campaign for him, Allred replied, “What I’ve always said is that if anyone wants to come down here and talk about issues that are facing Texans and how we can solve them, they’re welcome. But I’ve never been a big surrogate person.”
That approach had helped Allred unseat Sessions, and it may work again. Allred has outraised Cruz by a considerable margin. And once it became clear that Allred has a real chance—and that flipping the Texas seat would help give the Democrats a shot at holding on to the Senate—the Party mounted a late multimillion-dollar investment in his campaign. At the start of this month, Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, Greg Casar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to Texas to campaign for him, presumably to generate enthusiasm among younger voters. Allred himself, unsurprisingly, was not around.
Allred touts being named by the Common Ground Committee as one of the most bipartisan members of Congress. He has opposed his party on several issues affecting his constituents, notably border and oil-and-gas issues, but his record otherwise tracks his party pretty closely, and his campaign has foregrounded protecting access to abortions, among other Democratic priorities. He was the first member of Congress to publicly take paternity leave.
Maybe it’s easier to do that sort of thing when you were once the captain of Baylor’s football team. Nobody dares question your masculinity. Walz, another Democratic politician who leans heavily on his football biography, has said that coaching a high-school football team gave him the right profile to sponsor an L.G.B.T. group. “It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” Walz said, in a 2018 interview. Football doesn’t just give Allred an easy way to weave in the usual clichés about toughness and teamwork—though it does hit a little different when Allred describes taking off his jacket in preparation for tackling the MAGA marauders in the Capitol building, on January 6, 2021, while Cruz hid in a supply closet. His past as a football player strengthens his claim to bipartisanship. During an election cycle in which gender plays an increasingly outsized factor in shaping party alignment, having a background that men tend to admire might make it easier to speak persuasively on issues that women tend to care most about, such as reproductive rights.
For much of its history, football has had vaguely conservative associations. It is hierarchical, militaristic, played by men, and games are preceded by paroxysms of nationalism. Those U.S. flags that cover a football field each weigh around a thousand pounds. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan—all football players, all Republicans. (John F. Kennedy, who played on the Harvard junior-varsity team, is the lone Democratic exception among Presidents.) Nearly all the current and former congressmen and senators with ties to college and professional football—including Anthony Gonzalez, Jon Runyan, Steve Largent, Burgess Owens, Tommy Tuberville, Tom Osborne, and J. C. Watts—are Republicans. (Besides Allred, Heath Shuler, a former N.F.L. quarterback and congressman, and Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey who played football at Stanford, come to mind.) And the father of the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, was, in fact, a Republican senator. Several N.F.L. owners have donated money to Donald Trump, though the N.F.L. rejected him when he tried to own a team himself.
There was a time, not long ago, when it seemed the rift would only grow. As more and more evidence of the danger of concussions emerged, and as rules were introduced to try to lessen the risk, many Republicans were angry that the game was becoming too “soft.” The sons of liberal parents, meanwhile, left the game in droves. Then came Colin Kaepernick and his choice, in 2016, to kneel during the national anthem at games, in protest of police brutality against Black Americans—followed by the decision on the part of every team in the league not to employ him once the season was up. Progressive activists celebrated Kaepernick and the other players who subsequently kneeled in support. Meanwhile, Mike Pence, then the Vice-President, went to an Indianapolis Colts game just so that he could walk out after a few players knelt during the anthem. By the time of the George Floyd protests, in 2020—when the league did things like write “END RACISM” in tiny letters on the end zones of every field, a move that satisfied no one—the N.F.L. had become a political football. But the sport was still the biggest thing that Americans had in common. Eighty-two of the hundred most-watched television broadcasts in 2022 were N.F.L. games. And that was before Taylor Swift started showing up.
