The Guardian reports:

The notoriously verbose Ted Cruz has gone largely silent on abortion, one of his favorite topics to legislate on and bloviate about, during his Senate re-election campaign in Texas – an ominous sign both for Cruz and the anti-abortion movement writ large.

Indeed, Texas representative Colin Allred has mounted an unusually strong campaign for Cruz’s Senate seat at a time when Texas has become ground zero in the grisly maternal health disaster unfolding across the country since the fall of Roe v Wade. As of the latest University of Houston poll, the race between Cruz and Allred is currently a dead heat, with Cruz leading the former NFL player by only two points (47-45%). This is remarkable for Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat in a statewide race in three decades and has never elected a Black US senator.

Abortion is a particularly toxic issue for Republicans this presidential election cycle, so much so that even Donald Trump posted after the Democratic national convention that his administration “would be great for women and their reproductive rights”.

Cruz had openly celebrated the US supreme court overturning Roe in 2022, calling the decision a “massive victory”. But since Texas women began pouring out personal horror stories and suing the state left and right for denying them emergency abortions under the state’s draconian ban, he’s gone quiet. [Continue reading…]