Kim Ogg, a Texas Democrat, has endorsed Republican Senator Ted Cruz in his campaign for a third term in the Senate against U.S. Representative and former NFL player Collin Allred, a Democrat.
The Harris County District Attorney since 2017, Ogg has a complex history with the local Democratic party, due to her investigations of local officials and staffers.
Explaining her endorsement of Cruz, Ogg told The Texas Tribune, “I am endorsing Senator Ted Cruz because he has taken action at a time when Americans want solutions, not excuses about why Democrats and Republicans won’t work together.”
Ogg’s investigations of other local elected officials subsequently led to her admonishment by the Democratic party in January, as they alleged she, “abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system,” the Houston Chronicle reported.
Her current term ends in December.
Tom Wiliams/Associated Press
Newsweek has contacted Ogg and Cruz for comment via email.
In a joint op-ed written with Cruz for the Houston Chronicle and published July 26, the pair wrote about the murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in June, and how she and Cruz worked to get justice for the family after two suspects in the case were revealed to be illegal immigrants.
Ogg and Cruz also covered the Justice for Jocelyn Act, and their belief that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) needs to change.
Her endorsement will aid Cruz in his mission to gain crossover votes, as he recently launched his effort to rebrand as a bipartisan lawmaker, The Texas Tribune reports.
In a statement to ABC 13, Cruz said the reason Democratic officials are now supporting him is because, “they know that Colin Allred’s radical progressive policies, whether on the border, public safety, or economy, will push Texas back, not forward.”
Allred, however, was ranked as the most bipartisan member of the Texas congressional delegation by the Common Ground Committee, a non-profit organization working to de-polarize politics.
In March, Cruz launched “Democrats for Cruz,” and in a recent ad posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, he writes that “liberty is not partisan.”
Cruz’ bipartisan legislation efforts include working with U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, to set a fast-track 120-day process for the president to approve permits for bridges used to cross the Texas-Mexico border.
Cruz also pushed for the passing of the FAA Reauthorization bill, which when passed, reauthorized the Federal Aviation Administration for five years.
Cruz’ effort to reconfigure his image as a bipartisan lawmaker comes as a challenge due to his previous work promoting a highly conservative image, as the conservative advocacy group Heritage for America classified Cruz as 92 percent conservative.
According to FiveThirtyEight, a data analysis organization part of ABC, Cruz has also voted against numerous bills pushed by Biden, as he votes in line with him 14 percent of the time, while he voted in line with Donald Trump 92.1 percent of the time.
Allred does not believe Cruz is as bipartisan as he seems, telling The Texas Tribune, “I don’t think Ted Cruz is fooling anybody.”
He continued, “He spent 12 years being the most divisive — and proudly so — partisan warrior in the United States. And I think it’s kind of laughable actually that at this point, when he’s in a close race, that he wants to now stress, ‘Oh, actually I have been working in a bipartisan way.'”
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