Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will win reelection to a third term, CNN projects, defeating Democratic challenger Rep. Colin Allred and denying Democrats one of their best chances to mitigate potential losses elsewhere.

The Longhorn State has long been a Republican stronghold, with the GOP winning every statewide election there since 1994. However, amid demographic shifts, Democrats have long seen Texas as a potential future battleground and national party groups poured millions of dollars into trying to boost Allred’s candidacy in the final months of the race.

Allred, a former NFL linebacker who defeated GOP Rep. Pete Sessions to win his House seat in 2018, was seen as a viable challenger. He tried to tie Cruz to the state’s abortion ban, running ads featuring Kate Cox, whom the state Supreme Court blocked from having an abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with a deadly genetic condition.

Allred also went on offense on immigration, trying to flip the script on Republicans. He attacked Cruz for voting against the bipartisan border deal and featured testimonials from border law enforcement officers in his own ads.

But Cruz had also beaten back stiff competition before, narrowly defeating Rep. Beto O’Rourke in a 2018 race in which the Democrat shattered Senate race fundraising records.

This year, he tried to tie Allred to the Biden-Harris administration on inflation, the border wall and transgender issues. (The latter attack prompted a response from the former football player, who said in an ad, “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.”)

Cruz became a lightning rod early in his Senate career, when he led a government shutdown in a bid to defund then-President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He was a 2016 presidential candidate, and one of Donald Trump’s most vocal critics in that Republican primary. But he has since aligned himself with the former president, endorsing him in early 2024 ahead of a GOP primary that Trump ultimately coasted through.