Colin Allred won Texas' newly redrawn 33rd Congressional District on November 3, 2026, beating Republican Patrick Gillespie and setting up a return to Congress after his failed 2024 Senate run against Ted Cruz. The result gives Allred a House seat in a district drawn to sit entirely within Dallas County after Texas' 2025 congressional redistricting.
The win matters now because CBS News projected the race after Tuesday's midterm election, turning a closely watched district into a finished result. Allred, who previously represented Texas' neighboring 32nd Congressional District from 2019 to 2025, had first tried to go back to the Senate in 2026 before shifting to this race, a turn that put him on a different path back to Washington.
Allred defeated Patrick Gillespie, who had twice challenged Democratic U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey for the seat in 2022 and 2024 and lost both times. This time, the district's map had changed, and Veasey did not seek reelection after his Fort Worth political base was left outside the redrawn lines. The new 33rd Congressional District is considered Democratic-leaning and has a large Latino population, making the seat a better fit for a Democrat than the old version Gillespie had been chasing.
That is the part that gives the race its edge: Allred lost to Ted Cruz in 2024, yet he is now heading back to the House instead of staying on the sidelines after that defeat. He campaigned on lowering costs for working families, protecting voting rights and challenging the Trump administration, while Gillespie ran on stricter immigration enforcement, reducing federal spending, balancing the federal budget and strengthening national defense.
Allred will succeed Marc Veasey in the U.S. House, and the next question is not whether he is back in Congress, but how he uses a newly configured district that lies entirely within Dallas County to build his next political chapter.
