O’Rourke, Cruz take different tacks
Dueling media gambits indicate seriousness of U.S. Senate race.
The race is on to define Beto O’Rourke.
The Democratic Senate candidate’s campaign announced Monday that it had raised $1.27 million in a single weekend in response to attack ads by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and would spend that money to air positive ads this week about O’Rourke in all 20 media markets that reach Texans, from Texarkana to O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso.
O’Rourke’s first paid ad will be released and begin airing Wednesday.
Almost as soon as the Cruz campaign, in its first ad buy, began airing four TV ads Aug. 3 — three of them negative — O’Rourke’s campaign launched a drive to raise $1 million to offer a positive rebuttal ad in the same spirit as its recent web ad, “Showing Up,” about the three-term congressman’s visits to all 254 Texas counties. The campaign exceeded its fundraising goal.
The dueling media strategies make sense from each candidate’s
perspective and indicate the seriousness of a race in which O’Rourke is trailing Cruz by 2 to 6 points in recent polls in a state in which O’Rourke will have to expand the elec- torate beyond usual midterm election turnout to have a chance to win — or even keep it as close as those polls indicate.
Cruz is completing a first term that included a presidential run that left him the last man standing against President Donald Trump in a brutal Republican primary contest. Cruz is almost universally known among voters, who mostly have a wellformed impression about who he is.
O’Rourke remains an unknown to nearly half the electorate.
2-point margin
That polls find O’Rourke running as close to Cruz as they do in deep red Texas suggests that, so far, O’Rourke has succeeded in presenting himself as a positive alternative to the polar- izing Cruz. O’Rourke’s campaign would like to continue to introduce him to Texans in as inviting a manner as possible.
Cruz is determined to flesh out voters’ impressions of his rival as a candidate of the “hard left,” equal parts Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi — or worse. His ads have pointed to O’Rourke as a candidate open to doing away with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who would consider legalizing all narcotics and who supports the impeachment of Trump.
That the incumbent is going negative against his challenger is only unusual in the context of Texas politics, where many a state- wide Republican candidate can coast to re-election with- out acknowledging his or her underfunded and generally unknown opponent.
“In those circumstances there is no reason for the Republican candidate to ever mention the Democratic candidate by name or to spend time or ad dollars trying to negatively define a candi- date who has an uphill chal- lenge just to get known by enough of the electorate to get elected,” said Josh Blank, director of research for the Texas Lyceum poll.
The survey, conducted July 9-26, found Cruz with a 2-point lead among registered and likely voters, with roughly a fifth or more of voters undecided.
In the same survey, Gov. Greg Abbott held a 19-point lead over Democrat Lupe Valdez among registered voters and a 16-point lead among likely voters.
“He’s not the normal candidate a Republican would face,” Blank said of O’Rourke.
Feeling threatened?
Both candidates want to use the waning days of August to set the stage for
the fall campaign, and for both campaigns, that means introducing the Democratic candidate to voters who still don’t know who he is.
For Cruz, Blank said, “You want to spend this time defining who the other candidate is if you feel like you’re truly threatened, and I think Cruz has made clear that he feels that he’s truly threatened.”
While Cruz has said he doubts the contest is as close as those recent polls indicate, he has made frequent reference to O’Rourke raising more money than he has, and he has said the greatest threat to his re-election is Republican complacency amid the anti-Trump fury on the left.
Cruz also has sought to recast O’Rourke as a far-left figure with views well outside the Texas mainstream on issues such as border security and drugs, which were the focus of negative ads suggesting that “Beto O’Rourke is more extreme than he wants you to know.”
Cruz also aired a positive ad in the Beaumont media market about his role in recovery efforts after Hurricane Harvey.
That ad, unlike the three negative ads, was touted in a press release from the Cruz campaign and put on YouTube.
But the Harvey ad brought a rebuke from the editorial
board at the Houston Chroni- cle, which wrote that, “when it came to the essential, and politically risky, responsi- bility of passing a robust multi-billion dollar recovery bill, the credit belongs to Cruz’s Republican Senate
colleague, John Cornyn.”