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U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was crisscrossing Texas this week, meeting with constituents in Houston, El Paso, San Antonio, Laredo, Amarillo, Lubbock, Dallas and Tyler. It wasn’t how Cruz had once hoped to be spending the second week of August, when, had things gone his way, he might have been hopscotching battleground states as the Republican nominee for president.
Instead, it was Donald Trump with rallies and speeches in North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and Pennsylvania — Donald Trump, who Cruz refused to endorse for president in his speech at the Republican National Convention in July, and who, the day after he accepted the nomination in Cleveland, said he would not accept Cruz’s endorsement if it were offered and swore he would spend what he could to defeat Cruz for re-election.
And so, Cruz found himself doing what a U.S. senator does during the August recess, particularly a senator who is up for a second term in two years and who, for the first time in his swift rise in Texas and national politics, finds himself not the hunter but the prey.
“I know there are people looking for someone to run against Ted Cruz because I’ve had four or five national leaders call to ask if I had an interest, which I don’t by the way,” said former Texas Republican Party Chairman Steve Munisteri, who added that Cruz’s traversing Texas is exactly what he ought to be doing right now.
Among Republicans being recruited to challenge Cruz, according to a recent CNN story, is U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a six-term congressman from Austin who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee. McCaul spokesman Walter Zaykowski said the congressman is focused on his job and re-election campaign this year — but he did not rule out a Senate run.
“I think it is far too early for somebody to assume that Sen. Cruz would be vulnerable in 2018,” Munisteri said. “It doesn’t mean he won’t be, but it’s way too early and Sen. Cruz has time to rebuild his base.”
“It looks like he’s trying to batten down the hatches and reconnect where he’s been disconnected,” said Lubbock County GOP Chairman Carl Tepper, an early Trump supporter, who said West Texas farmers have been waiting a long time for Cruz to lend them his ear.
“He hasn’t been much of a senator from Texas,” Tepper said. “His interest has been running for president.”
‘Running hard for 2018’
Four years since he won a low-turnout, midsummer runoff against then-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst for the Republican nomination for an open U.S. Senate seat in what became the model for the kind of tea party insurgency that has come to dominate Texas Republican primary politics, Cruz for the first time looks less than invulnerable.
He ran a strong but losing campaign for his party’s nomination for president, but now finds himself estranged from his party’s nominee and from party loyalists — including indispensable allies and donors — and with his national ambitions hinging on Trump losing and Hillary Clinton winning the White House.
A second Cruz run for the presidency would presumably be built on the argument that nominating Trump instead of Cruz was, as he warned, a terrible mistake and that only a through-and-through “constitutional conservative” like Cruz can carry the party to victory.
But first Cruz faces the predicament of how to wage a re-election campaign even as he is laying the groundwork for a presidential run that would have to begin in earnest almost as soon as he takes office for a second term. Cruz announced his candidacy for president in March 2015. March 2019 would be only three months into a new Senate term.
“You don’t do it,” said Jason Johnson, the chief strategist for Cruz’s Senate and presidential campaigns. “There’s not a parallel campaign.”
“If you’re seeking re-election to the United States Senate in Texas in 2018, that’s the campaign you’re running,” Johnson said. “As people say, you run scared or you don’t run at all. I tend to say you run hard or you don’t run at all. He’s really running hard for 2018.”
But how will Cruz respond when a rival — possibly McCaul in the primary, or Democratic U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio in the general election — asks whether he intends to serve his full term if he is re-elected to the Senate?
“We’ll see how he answers that in 2018,” Johnson said. “My looking glass gets a little foggy looking that far out.”
‘Effective conservatism’
The more fundamental problem for Cruz, said Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California in San Diego, is how he goes back to the Senate or justifies extending his stay there.
“He’s the most despised, distrusted and disliked member of the United States Senate,” said Popkin. As became apparent in the campaign just past, his colleagues in Washington have no interest in helping him either as a senator or as a presidential candidate.
By effectively laying waste to the Republican Party in Washington, Popkin said, “Cruz is the man who made Trump possible.”
“He never picked a fight that he knew he could win,” said Popkin, who studies the presidency. “He had an Alamo strategy to be the last one to die.”
He ran for president with a “now-or-never strategy. He did not have a Plan B. This was burn every bridge so you can’t go back,” Popkin said.
Or, as his Texas colleague, Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said of Cruz in an interview with KERA-TV in April, “clearly, he didn’t come here to remain in the Senate. He came here to run for president.”
But can Texans’ stake in Cruz’s ambition sustain a re-election campaign?
“In Texas, we like conservatives, but we just want to see effective conservatism,” Tepper said. “There is nothing wrong with negotiating and cutting a deal.”
‘Political suicide’
Even before the convention, Cruz’s presidential campaign had cost him some of his once-overwhelming popularity with Texas Republicans. His overall approval rating among Republicans in a University of Texas poll dropped from 71 percent in October 2015, to 64 percent in February 2016, to 55 percent in the poll conducted June 10 to 19.
Cruz’s standing nationally took its biggest hit after his speech at the Republican National Convention, which was well received until the very end, when his refusal to endorse Trump and his call for delegates to “vote your conscience” brought a torrent of boos from Trump supporters who took those words as a coded rebuke of their candidate.
A CNN/ORC Poll conducted right after the convention found that while 60 percent of Republican voters nationally had a positive impression of Cruz going into the convention, only 33 percent had a positive view of him coming out of the convention.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey conducted from July 31 to Aug. 3, found that when his unfavorable number was subtracted from his favorable number, Cruz had a minus-31 rating, to Trump’s minus-33 and Hillary Clinton’s minus-24.
Perhaps more significant than these numbers were the harsh critiques of Cruz’s speech from important political benefactors.
The day after the speech, Richard Viguerie, a venerable movement conservative who had backed Cruz, wrote on his website that, “Ted Cruz committed political suicide on national TV.”
“After failing to endorse the Trump-Pence ticket last night, in the eyes of most conservatives with whom I spoke, Ted Cruz became just another self-centered politician who walked back on a promise, failed to live up to his own Biblical standards and, when the battle raged the fiercest, put his own petty hurts before the future of his country and the conservative cause,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, the usually low-key Robert Mercer, who donated more than $11 million to a Cruz super PAC, and his daughter, Rebekah, sent a scathing statement to The New York Times after Cruz’s speech.
“Last summer and again this year, Sen. Ted Cruz pledged to support the candidacy of the nominee of the Republican Party, whomever that nominee might be,” the Mercers said. “We are profoundly disappointed that on Wednesday night he chose to disregard this pledge.”
“The Democratic Party will soon choose as their nominee a candidate who would repeal both the First and Second Amendments of the Bill of Rights, a nominee who would remake the Supreme Court in her own image. We need ‘all hands on deck’ to ensure that Mr. Trump prevails,” the statement read. “Unfortunately, Sen. Cruz has chosen to remain in his bunk below, a decision both regrettable and revealing.”
Tea party support
Cruz’s appearance at the Texas delegation breakfast the morning after his convention speech crackled with tension as he answered questions about why he was not backing the party’s nominee. It was clear that he was testing the patience even of staunch allies like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chaired the Cruz campaign in Texas but had urged the senator to endorse Trump.
“For someone so careful with his brand it was such a misfire to go up and think he was going to be able to thread the needle of not endorsing Trump the way he did it, that he would stand on principle and not endorse him and then step off that stage without taking any flak for it,” said UT political scientist Joshua Blank, manager of polling and research for the Texas Politics Project.
“It was just a self-inflicted wound that had to be about hubris more than anything else,” Blank said.
But Blank said that Cruz, who remains especially strong with the tea party Republicans in Texas who likely will continue to hold sway in GOP primaries, is particularly vulnerable to a primary challenge in 2018.
McCaul, the second wealthiest member of the House, would have the money to spend on an expensive campaign. He is a frequent, articulate guest on the national Sunday TV shows with expertise on a vital issue. But, while he is a conservative, he is not a Ted Cruz tea party conservative.
“Michael McCaul has a 69 percent conservative score from Heritage Action and zero name recognition. Even anyone angry at Ted Cruz would have to be a fool to consider McCaul as a replacement for our senator,” Julie McCarty, president of the NE Tarrant Tea Party told the American-Statesman. “Ted Cruz had little name recognition (when he first ran), but won because the grassroots rallied behind him and got him elected. Given how left-leaning McCaul is, he will not be able to count on grassroots support.”
“I believe that reality, conservatism and time are on the side of Ted Cruz,” said JoAnn Fleming, a tea party leader in East Texas. “As time goes on, the things he has said and the things that he has stood for will stand those tests, and I’m not the least bit worried about Sen. Cruz and his standing in Texas.”
For Cruz, the Republican National Convention that nominated Trump was very much like the Republican-controlled Senate. If Trump’s candidacy proves a disaster, Cruz can wear the convention’s boos as a badge of honor — proof that where other candidates bowed before Trump, he stood, virtually alone, as a matter of “conscience” against him.
“Standing on principle is rarely if ever free. It comes at a cost,” Johnson said. “But, over time, you’re rarely punished for doing so.”
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