The first debate between Ted Cruz-Beto O'Rourke and the surprising race in the Senate: NPR

It was more of a duel than the debate on Friday night in Dallas, where Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Democratic challenger Rep Beto O 'Rourke clashed from the start. Snappy and heavy on the snark, Cruz and O & # 39; Rourke held nothing back in the first of three debates.

On Friday, the focus was on domestic politics, and candidates opposed immigration, health care, gun control and even their views on professional football players getting kneeling at the national anthem.

Cruz painted O 'Rourke as part of a revolutionary fringe, placing him to the left of Nancy Pelosi, leader of the home minority, and Senator Bernie Sanders. He called O 'Rourke a politician "out of step with the people of Texas," who wants to abolish immigration and customs law enforcement, remove Texas weapons and attack President Trump.

"We see national socialists like Bernie Sanders, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and, in fact, Congressman Beto O. Rourke, who defend these same policies," Cruz said.

O 'Rourke accused Cruz of worrying more about corporate tax cuts than his constituents, saying he wanted to "expel every dreamer", accusing him of being an absent senator who was spending more time in Iowa than working for Texas.

"In 2016, he missed half of the votes in the US Senate," said O & # Rourke. "You tell me who can miss half the days of work and be rehired for the same job in the future.This is not what Texans want."

The surprisingly competitive Senate race has become one of the most-watched and high-profile contests in the 2018 midterms. Once considered a safe seat for Cruz, recent polls show that candidates are one-digit. 39 one of the other. This week, Cook's political report reclassified the race as tossup.

It's a big deal in Texas, which has not elected a Democrat at a state-wide office since 1994. And it's also a national problem: Democrats are likely to regain control of the House in November and overthrow Cruz-O 'Rourke and other nearby races could take control of the Republican Senate as well.

Immigration and border security

The big differences between the two candidates on almost every current topic were on display, particularly immigration and border security.

"In terms of immigration, we must do everything humanly possible to secure the border," Cruz said. "It means building the wall, it means technology, it means infrastructure, it means boots on the ground, and we can do it while celebrating legal immigrants."

O & # 39; Rourke said that the United States had to "get people out of the shadows, allow them to get the law."

O 'Rourke blamed Cruz for supporting legislation that would have allocated billions of dollars to build a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico and called for a path to citizenship.

"The alternative, as Cruz has proposed, is to expel 11 million people from this country," said O. Rourke. "Imagine the cost, imagine the spot on this country for future generations".

Senate candidate to fight

The crowd attending the debate at Southern Methodist University on Friday was very busy as Cruz and O & Rourke took guns, police violence and mass shootings.

The Dallas debate comes as North Texas tackles the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white Dallas police officer and the assassination of a Fort Worth police officer who was shot dead while he was trying to stop a robbery. A few weeks ago, a white officer from the Dallas suburbs was convicted of murdering a black teenager.

A question about the shooting of 26-year-old Botham Jean entered Cruz, reprimanding O'Rourke for calling the police to shoot, using hateful rhetoric and "turning people against the police." He spoke of the killing of five Dallas officers in an ambush in 2016 by a veteran of the troubled military, who was reportedly upset by stories of police brutality.

Cruz said that O 'Rourke wanted to get rid of the Second Amendment, prompting O' Rourke to say that this was not the case. O 'Rourke talked about learning how to shoot as a child, but also stated that it was time to check the universal background and prohibit weapons from going to school. assault.

Cruz and O & Rourke will face off again on September 30 in Houston and October 16 in San Antonio.