Cruz backers line up for fall push
O’Rourke’s surge a ‘wake-up call’ for incumbent
WASHINGTON — The biggest surprise of the U.S. Senate race in Texas is that, two months out from Election Day, it’s any race at all.
With the polls tightening and a major conservative group making plans to join the fray, the donor network backing Republican incumbent Ted Cruz is taking fresh stock of the national political winds lifting the insurgent challenge of Democrat Beto O’Rourke.
So is President Donald Trump, who has announced an October rally “in the biggest stadium in Texas we can find” to boost Cruz, his most bitter personal rival in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries.
O’Rourke — an El Paso congressman running without PAC money — has surprised the pundits by surpassing Cruz’s prodigious fundraising machine, with $13.9 million banked as of July 1, compared to $9.3 million for Cruz, not counting another $1 million Cruz keeps in two other fundraising PACs.
“It’s a wake-up call that we can’t take this race for granted,” said Texas GOP fundraiser Mica Mosbacher. “There’s no room for com-
placency at this point.”
Oddsmakers and polls still favor Cruz, but not by much in a year when Trump’s acerbic presidency looms over the midterm elections in November.
Nevertheless, Cruz-aligned donors and some outside groups say they are just starting to line up for what could be an all-out digital and television blitz in the fall, particularly if it looks like Cruz is in any real trouble.
Until late summer, few thought that Texas would even be on the national political map for control of Congress.
“Who would have expected a challenger to be able to outraise the incumbent senator, Senator Cruz?” said Texan John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate. “But Senator Cruz, I think, will be adequately funded as well.”
To make sure, the free-market, anti-tax group Club for Growth announced this week that it is planning a seven-figure campaign against O’Rourke, citing recent poll numbers suggesting that Cruz’s lead has diminished to single digits.
Cruz himself, after pressing Senate GOP leaders to cancel the traditional August recess, has remained in Texas much of the past two weeks to campaign, countering O’Rourke 34-day statewide tour, which ended Friday in O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso.
While most Texas GOP strategists continue to discount O’Rourke as an electoral threat, Cruz, 47, has made clear in recent campaign appearances that “this is not a normal cycle” and that he does in fact face a “real race.”
A critical question will be whether O’Rourke, 45, is able to match the coming blitz with his prodigious pool of small dollar donations. Another question — one posed by Cruz himself — is whether conservatives will match the grassroots energy that O’Rourke has tapped on the left.
After a summer of politicking, the two campaigns’ strategies have come into clear focus: Cruz, now tied to Trump — his former political nemesis — will frame O’Rourke as a liberal out of step with Texas’ conservative DNA.
‘Interesting strategy’
O’Rourke, threading a political needle, will try to ride a wave of liberal outrage over Trump while at the same time keeping things positive, veering away from ideological labels and targeting voters outside the traditional Democratic coalition that hasn’t elected a U.S. Senator in Texas since 1988.
“Just as the Cruz campaign is looking to exploit its internal advantages in Texas, the O’Rourke campaign is hoping to exploit the national climate,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.
The contrast was best illustrated in the past weeks as O’Rourke’s defense of NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem went viral among supporters.
“I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights, any time, anywhere, any place,” O’Rourke said, a statement captured on video that has been viewed 30 million times on Facebook.
It turned into an invitation from television talk show host Ellen DeGeneres — and an attack ad from Cruz.
“Nothing more American? Liberal Hollywood was thrilled,” a narrator for Cruz intoned. The ad followed with a testimonial from veteran Tim Lee: “I gave two legs for this country. I’m not able to stand. But I sure expect you to stand for me when the national anthem is being played.”
In a series of television and digital ads, Cruz has sought to frame O’Rourke as too liberal for Texas, highlighting comments on abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, impeaching Trump, and decriminalizing marijuana.
Cruz pollster Chris Wilson takes it a step further, saying O’Rourke’s message is so out of touch in Texas that it would be like Ted Cruz trying to win an election in liberal Massachusetts by running “as far as he can to the right.”
“It’s an interesting strategy,” Wilson said. “You’re hoping there are enough conservatives out there (in Massachusetts) who haven’t voted or stayed home in past elections, when there’s no empirical data that says that’s the case. This guy is coming down on the wrong side of every single issue when it comes to the state of Texas.”
O’Rourke, in turn, has leveraged Cruz’s attacks into fundraising appeals to supporters, helping him raise over $1.5 million over a single week in August.
“We will be the big, bold, confident answer to the small, petty, negative attacks that are coming our way,” O’Rourke said in a statement accompanying his own ad, “Showing Up,” an upbeat compilation of images from his visits to all 254 counties in Texas.
GOP backers
O’Rourke’s fundraising prowess, more than the polls, has caught the attention of Republican donors who still tend to discount O’Rourke’s challenge in deep red Texas.
“I think he will be a flash in the pan,” said Texas GOP fundraiser Doug Deason. “Cruz will win by double digits. There just aren’t enough Democrats. To get it even close in Texas, they need to win all of the independents and some Republicans, and they’re just not going to do it.”
O’Rourke’s fundraising advantage, Deason said, can be partly explained by a summer lull and the general belief in GOP circles that their money could be better spent protecting Republicans in more competitive states.
“All of the big donors are out, and they just don’t want to deal with it,” Deason said. “They’ll be back after Labor Day, and the games will begin. Cruz will be hitting it, and I believe he will quickly neutralize the Beto threat.”
O’Rourke partisans scoff at the suggestion that Cruz donors have only just begun to mobilize.
“Campaigns don’t start after Labor Day anymore,” said Ed Espinoza, executive director of Progress Texas, which promotes Democrats.
Espinoza also dismisses the GOP’s structural advantages in Texas.
“If you dig below the surface and look at where the voter growth has been in Texas, the growth is all in our direction,” he said.
Evidence of that was Hillary Clinton’s 9-point loss to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, a smaller-than-expected gap that has worried some GOP pollsters ever since.
“Those were new voters,” Espinoza said. “Those were not crossover voters.”
O’Rourke also is banking on a wave of Democratic unrest over Trump’s confrontational style and hard-line policies on a border wall and immigration, which could help galvanize the state’s large Latino population, a perennially underrepresented demographic at the polls.
Breaking from past Democratic campaigns in Texas, O’Rourke also is barnstorming rural, small-town Texas, hoping to add to the party’s traditional urban coalition.
“Beto’s not riding the wave,” Espinoza said, “he’s building the wave.”
O’Rourke’s speeches in town halls across Texas often focus on Trump’s remarks denigrating Mexicans and identifying illegal immigration with criminality. He mixes in non-ideological appeals to unity and bipartisan cooperation.
“I mean, it would turn me off if someone said we’re going to make this the brightest blue state,” O’Rourke said in a road interview last month. “I’m just not moved by the color of the state or political party stuff.”
Acknowledging O’Rourke’s fresh-faced charm, built in part on a personal biography of punkrocker hip, Republicans have begun to chip away at his post-partisan image by emphasizing wedge issues like immigration, guns and tax cuts, which many GOP candidates plan to make the centerpiece of the fall campaigns.
“If you look at it purely as a personality attribute, Beto’s a charming guy; he’s a nice guy,” Cornyn said. “This is not going to be ultimately a personality-driven campaign. This will be about issues Texans care about, and Texans are still pretty conservative.”