Former US Representative and current US Senate candidate Colin Allred believes we can overcome the significant hurdles facing our city and state if we set aside political party and work together as Texans.
If you’ve lived in North Texas for very long, the name Colin Allred is not new to you. He served Garland and the surrounding area in the United States House from 2018-2025, helping see us through challenges like the COVID pandemic with an attitude of humble service and genuine concern for his constituents. Allred, who also played for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans for four seasons, is now opposing incumbent Senator John Cornyn and recently sat down with the Garland Gazette to discuss some of the pressing issues facing voters in the upcoming mid-term election.
“I think it’s partly from my football background, but I genuinely want to put in the work,” says Allred, whose messaging has always been about helping those in need. “I think people want to be represented by people who put them first before a party or an ideology. In some ways, we’ve gotten to a point where our elected officials are not really interested in serving and being a public servant and we’ve almost gotten to be OK with that. We shouldn’t lower our standards this way. We shouldn’t accept that we have elected officials who are completely uninterested in doing what we elected them to do. That’s regardless of party.” Going on to add, “As someone who was raised by a single mother who was a public school teacher, we were struggling, that’s one of my focuses in this campaign. I want folks to know that, not only do I know what they’re going through, but there’s something that we can do about it. The system has been rigged and I believe we can un-rig it. To do it, we’re going to have to be more than just partisans. We’re going to have to approach it as Texans and as Americans.”
Of course, the biggest issue facing Texans and making headlines across the country is the attempt to gerrymander five districts to take them away from the leaders who have been elected to represent them. This effort can be considered a violation of the Voting Rights Act. As recently as 2023, the Supreme Court rejected an attempt by the Alabama Legislature to redraw districts to dilute the impact of Black voters. The current attempt being made in Texas does very much the same thing. They used a special session that was supposed to be about disaster relief for the flood-stricken communities hurt by the Guadalupe River surge of July 4th. Instead, it turned out to be a bait-and-switch.
“Texans should first know that this is not when we do redistricting, this is a mid-decade power grab,” says Allred. “What the special session should have been focused on, in my opinion, was disaster relief. It should have been focused on helping the families that I know, I was volunteering in Kerrville, who are still really recovering. They weren’t getting help from FEMA or the state, so they were relying on their church, and without the church they wouldn’t have had anything. That should have been the focus. Gerrymandering is a lot worse than just who’s going to be sitting in which seat, Democrats or Republicans. What it does is remove true representation from communities. You don’t have a member of Congress who knows Garland like I did when I represented it. I grew up in this area and I can tell you every cross street. I knew, for example, that when the Baylor, Scott and White hospital closed, that we should turn it into a VA hospital because it would be a huge benefit to the entire area. The ridiculous lines they draw that combine communities from far-flung areas of the state and communities that have really different interests.”
The purpose of having regional voting districts is to enable residents of a particular area to choose representatives whom they believe will give a voice to their needs to the proceedings in Washington. This is something Allred took very seriously when he was representing our district and is critical to the successful and effective working of government on behalf of its constituents. The proposed gerrymander undermines the fundamental reason for having districts in the first place.
“It means you’re being represented by people who don’t really know what your issues are and you might not even know where their district office would be,” explains Allred. “How would you? The district is this bizarre shape and all spread out. I know when people called our offices they needed help with basic things – with the VA, with the IRS, with the Small Business Administration – who are they going to call when they’ve got these ridiculous lines and illegitimate districts that are only drawn by computers to maximize one side or the other. It really goes against the entire purpose to me. What we have to do now is try and stop it while it’s being considered and do things like what the state legislators are doing by breaking quorum, which is a legitimate use of their legislative offices. If it does go into place, we have to make them pay, electorally, in the next election. I was elected in 2018 and had a Republican predecessor, but I was still able to beat him in that district. I think it’s possible that they’re making a mistake by redrawing those districts.”
How do we go from this extremely partisan mentality to one of unity and standing together as Texans? Allred believes the key lies in addressing kitchen table issues and working to help people as they struggle with the provisions of the new federal budget. Among other things, it will take away funding for schools and Medicaid and ramp up inflation nationwide while providing huge tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent of Americans.
“We have to have conversations about the impact of policy,” says Allred. “There are some estimates that say we could lose 15 rural hospitals across the state, and to put that in context, we’ve lost about 12 in the last ten years and we consider that to be a really bad result. To lose 15 from just one bill is a huge problem for a state. We already have huge areas of the state that are underserved in terms of hospitals, we have sometimes an hours-long drive to reach the nearest emergency room, and this is just going to make that worse. I think we also have to talk about how working people in general, whether they’re rural or urban, are going to see raised costs for healthcare, for their electric bills, and it’s going to make it harder for the VA to help, just so they can give more tax cuts for the rich. At the same time, I talk to folks who want to be fiscally responsible and this is going to add three trillion dollars to the deficit. It makes no sense whatsoever unless your only goal is to reward the wealthiest of the rich and the special interest groups. It’s just a big payoff. I want to make sure folks know that. It’s a betrayal of the people who voted for you. People were sold a bill of goods and they were betrayed. They have to pay the cost of their actions.”
Allred believes it’s time to stop talking about what some consider to be abstract concepts and focus on the real issues people are facing every day.
“I was a voting rights lawyer before I ran for Congress and I would love to talk about democracy and the rule of law all day long because when we lose those things we lose a lot of fundamental things that impact every area of our lives. But when you grow up like I did, with a single mom, you realize that unless folks can get by, thinking about those other things is almost secondary. Even though they care, and I know they do, about our democracy, their first task is to make sure they can put enough food on the table, their kids can go to a good school in the community, and my plan to deliver on those things will help people a lot more than John Cornyn’s or Ken Paxton’s would. We have to show that to people and that’s what I’m really excited about in this election. I have a chance to work for our communities, to work for people who are on the job, talk to them about what’s going on in this lives, talk about what we can do to try and address their challenges and get away from the feeling that we are somehow elitist and worried about immaterial ideas that are less practical for folks’ day-to-day lives. We’ve got to get back to the meat and potatoes issues that people are talking about when they sit down at their kitchen tables at night. Can their kids go to a good school? Can they see a doctor when they get sick? What are they going to do about the car if it breaks down? Do they have to get a second job to make ends meet? These are the things we need to address because this level of inequality that we’ve allowed is bad for us. We have to unrig the system to make it help everyone and not just a select few.”
That sounds straightforward enough, but it promises to be a tall challenge for a system that has become all about the money and less and less about listening to the needs of American families. Step one? It’s time to get money out of politics and put the emphasis back on the issues facing the state, the country and the citizens.
“I think campaign finance reform is critical. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has put us in a position where we’re either going to have to get a different court or we’re going to have to draft and pass an amendment to repeal Citizens United and the idea that unlimited money should be put into our elections,” Allred explains. “We had a billion-dollar election on both sides last time. We run into situations where, when I ran in 2018, my opponent took a bunch of money from a PAC and it turned out to be Russian money. There were two guys, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, who were indicted in New York, they pleaded guilty of funneling money to my opponent. We found that out after the fact. In addition to campaign finance, we have to have much more clarity as to where this money is being spent and where it’s coming from. We need to know which special interests are behind it and who’s behind those special interests. It’s not just bad actors here and there, it’s bad actors all around the world who want to take advantage of how lax these laws have become. Our national security is at stake with the way we are handling elections for a lot of reasons. I think everybody’s sick of how much money has gotten into politics. It’s an inherently corrupt system and we have to change it. That’s something I want to take on when I’m in the Senate.”
After his time in the NFL, Allred went back to school and earned his law degree before working in the Obama administration in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He has worked diligently on behalf of those who need help the most, and is disturbed by the current efforts to limit the rights of some of those same people to vote and have representation.
“I think this administration has been so much more blatant about what their priorities are and which groups they think don’t deserve a seat at the table,” says Allred. “When you talk about which cities they’re sending the National Guard into and which cities they’re trying to nationalize the law enforcement, it’s places like LA, which is a majority Black city. When they talk about redistricting, they’re targeting majority minority districts and they’re trying to just completely destroy districts like the one that I used to represent, the 32nd, and eviscerate it so it doesn’t exist any more. This is touching a nerve. Last Wednesday I was in Ft. Worth at a Black Baptist church called Greater Saint Stephen, 200 people packed in to talk about how entire Black neighborhoods in Ft. Worth are losing their Congressman, my friend Marc Veasey, who knows their needs and has represented them both in the state house and now in Congress, and they’re going to lose him and be drawn in with a district that goes up into the panhandle. They were incredibly angry, incredibly fired up, and they knew exactly what was happening. I have to say that over a decade ago, when I first started running, this was a lot more subtle, and some even had a hard time knowing what the discriminatory impact of things would be. The voter ID bill, for example. Now it’s so blatant that everybody’s recognizing it and there’s going to be a backlash. This is something that’s new for us. I think we’ve made some great progress in terms of getting past some of the uglier parts of our history of discrimination. President Bush signed the re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act back in 2006 and it had passed the Senate 98-0. It was not controversial, and now here we are. When some of this happens I do think it rips the masks off of some of these folks and I believe we will see a reaction to it in this mid-term election.”
No matter what political party someone chooses to identify with, when someone runs for government, they are running for a position of service and advocacy on behalf of their constituents. Colin Allred is looking to help get the United States Senate back to the point where its members want to stand up for those who elected them, not just big money interest groups. Surely that is something all Texans, all Americans, can get behind, regardless of political affiliation.
The Garland Gazette has also reached out to Senator John Cornyn’s office and the campaign for Ken Paxton.
