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الوسم: Texas

  • Why AP called the Texas Senate race for Ted Cruz

    Why AP called the Texas Senate race for Ted Cruz

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Associated Press declared that Republican Sen. Ted Cruz successfully defended his seat against Democratic Rep. Colin Allred based on the incumbent’s competitive showing in the state’s large population centers, bolstered by his overwhelming leads in more conservative rural areas across the state.

    Cruz’s victory, which the AP declared at 11:39 p.m. ET, blocked a possible path in which Democrats might have retained control of the Senate by offsetting possible losses by vulnerable Democratic incumbents in other parts of the country.

    The AP only declares a winner once it can determine that a trailing candidate can’t close the gap and overtake the vote leader.

    CANDIDATES: Cruz (R) vs. Allred (D) vs. Ted Brown (Libertarian)

    WINNER: Cruz (R)

    POLL CLOSING TIME: 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET, depending on the part of the state

    ABOUT THE RACE:

    Facing their most difficult Senate map in years, Democrats looked to the Cruz-Allred matchup as one of their only chances to possibly defeat a Republican incumbent and offset an expected loss in West Virginia and highly vulnerable seats in Montana, Ohio and elsewhere. Cruz first won this seat by a 16-point margin in 2012, when he ran to replace 20-year Republican incumbent Kay Bailey Hutchison. He faced a much tougher contest in 2018, when then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke gained national attention for coming within 3 percentage points of defeating Cruz.

    Allred, a former NFL linebacker and civil rights attorney, represents the Dallas-area 32nd Congressional District. He defeated 11-term Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions in 2018. Sessions returned to Congress in 2021.

    Allred has slightly outspent Cruz for the cycle, with each spending about $77 million on the race as of mid-October. Cruz entered the final stretch of the campaign with a $9.6 million to $2.5 million cash advantage.

    Texas was once a heavily Democratic state, but Republicans have dominated statewide politics since the 1990s. A Democrat hasn’t held a U.S. Senate seat in more than 30 years. In more recent elections, Democratic candidates tend to perform best in the population centers of Dallas, Harris (Houston), Travis (Austin), Bexar (San Antonio) and El Paso counties, as well as along the southernmost border with Mexico. Republicans won by large margins across most of the state, as well as the more competitive counties surrounding Dallas and Houston.

    WHY AP CALLED THE RACE:

    At the time the AP called the race, Cruz led Allred in the statewide vote by more than 10 points with about 76% of the vote counted from almost every county. The incumbent posted big leads in traditionally Republican areas in the east and in the plains regions that make up much of the state. But he also stayed competitive with Allred in both the Democratic population centers of the Dallas/Ft. Worth and Houston areas.

    Cruz was outperforming Trump’s 2020 share of the vote in those areas and narrowed the Democrats’ traditional advantage there. He was trailing Allred by about 4 percentage points in the area, while Trump trailed Democrat Joe Biden in those areas by between 8 and 9 percentage points in 2020.

    Allred also underperformed in almost all of the state’s most populous counties compared to O’Rourke in his 2018 run against Cruz. He was slightly trailing O’Rourke’s performance in Harris (home of Houston), Dallas, Travis (home of Austin) and Bexar (home of San Antonio) counties but was far behind in O’Rourke’s home county of El Paso by 15 percentage points.

    In order to overtake Cruz’s statewide lead, Allred would have needed to win the remaining untabulated ballots by more than 30 percentage points over Cruz, but he was not performing at near that level in the areas where the most outstanding votes remained.

    The 2024 election is here. This is what to know:

    News outlets globally count on the AP for accurate U.S. election results. Since 1848, the AP has been calling races up and down the ballot. Support us. Donate to the AP.

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    Learn more about how and why the AP declares winners in U.S. elections at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

  • AP Race Call: Donald Trump wins Texas

    AP Race Call: Donald Trump wins Texas

    Former President Donald Trump won Texas for the third consecutive election on Tuesday, adding 40 electoral votes to his tally.

  • Texas church removes four elders over Trump-linked founder’s abuse of girl, 12, in 1980s | Texas

    A Dallas-area Christian megachurch has removed four of its elders after an internal investigation into how the institution handled revelations of child sexual abuse by its founder, a former spiritual adviser to Donald Trump.

    An official at Gateway church announced during a service on Saturday that the ousted leaders either knew that Robert Morris molested a girl for several years beginning in 1982, when she was 12, or “failed to inquire further” after being informed of it, the Dallas Morning News reported.

    Gateway did not identify the removed leaders, but the Morning News found four names had been taken off the church’s elders page: Jeremy Carrasco, Kevin Grove, Gayland Lawshe and Thomas Miller. Remaining were Kenneth W Fambro II, Dane Minor and Tra Willbanks, who made Saturday’s announcement about the other elders, who had belonged to what was essentially Gateway’s directing board.

    Willbanks added that those who knew Morris’s molestation survivor “was 12 at the time of the abuse” but failed to act “are fundamentally wrong and simply cannot – and will not – be tolerated”.

    The announcement from Willbanks provided another chapter to a scandal centering on a figure with ties to Trump’s two prior presidential runs. And it came days before the election on Tuesday, in which Trump is also running.

    Morris resigned in June over his admission that he engaged in “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a girl – who has publicly identified herself as Cindy Clemishire – between 1982 and 1987, starting when she was a preteen. He made it a point to say that the sexual contact stopped short of intercourse, though he described “kissing and petting … [that] was wrong”.

    Morris has said he took time off from preaching in 1987 after confessing the abuse to his superiors back then, but the details of the molestation did not immediately become public. He later founded the Gateway church in 2000 in Southlake, Texas, and it grew into one of the largest institutions of its kind in the US, with more than 100,000 congregants.

    The Christian Post religious publication first reported the allegations from Clemishire which precipitated Morris’s resignation. The Gateway church condemned Morris’s actions while initially maintaining that it did not have all the details of the “inappropriate relationship between [him] and the victim, including her age at the time and the length of the abuse”.

    In a statement provided to the Guardian, the church elders claimed to have believed that Morris had engaged in an “extramarital relationship … with ‘a young lady’” and had no prior indication he had sexually molested a child. But, as described on Saturday by Willbanks, the findings of an internal investigation conducted by Texas’s Haynes and Boone law firm have seemingly contradicted that in the case of most of the church’s elders.

    Willbanks said he could not discuss the matter further because of litigation and a criminal investigation that were pending. He did not elaborate on precisely who or what authorities were investigating.

    Morris was reportedly among a half-dozen people to refuse to cooperate with Hayne and Boone’s investigation. Willbanks also said Morris reacted to Clemishire’s going public about his abuse by instructing church staff to issue a statement minimizing her account.

    The 63-year-old Morris had previously occupied visible spots alongside Trump as The Apprentice star won the presidency in 2016 and then lost it in 2020.

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    Morris was on Trump’s evangelical advisory board for the first of those campaigns. And, for the second of those campaigns, he took part in a roundtable discussion with the former president and faith leaders at Gateway.

    Trump’s team has said Morris has not been a part of the Republican nominee’s third run for the White House, culminating on Tuesday against the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris.

    Morris was a traveling evangelist at the time he began abusing Clemishire and was friends with her family. Clemishire said Morris asked for – and received – forgiveness from her father. But her family did not want him to ever return to ministry.

    Another official to resign from Gateway church after Clemishire spoke out was Morris’s son, James, who in September launched a new church.

    At one point, during a recorded telephone call, Morris offered to pay Clemishire to remain silent about her abuse, NBC News previously reported, citing a transcript.

    Yet he reportedly hung up after Clemishire asked for $2m.