In close race, Cruz fighting back
Senator appeals to ‘common-sense conservatives’ as he calls O’Rourke out of touch with Texas.
GONZALES — Midway through a rousing Ted Cruz town hall meeting at Baker Boys BBQ on Saturday, Yesi Melcher, a slight 10-yearold standing small in the packed house, raised her hand. “Hon, what are you doing?” her grandfather asked. “Papa, I’m going to ask a question,” she replied.
And when Cruz called on her, she did.
“Why do Democrats always blame their mistakes on us Repub-
licans and Trump?” the fifthgrader asked.
“It’s an awfully good question,” Cruz replied. “When Donald Trump was elected there were a whole lot of people in this country who just about lost their minds, who are so filled with anger, they hate him so much, that nothing good can happen. We have record low unemployment, and they hate Trump. We defeat ISIS, and they scream, ‘We hate Trump.’”
But, Cruz said: “We don’t have to respond in the same way. We don’t have to respond with anger. We can respond with joy. We can be joyful warriors.”
In a remarkable turn of events, Cruz now finds himself locked in a competitive race for a second term against U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, his fate tied to the passions excited by Trump, whom he once reviled but for whom he now finds himself a fierce and joyful warrior, and to the open question of whether O’Rourke can transform the crowds and excitement he has generated on the campaign trail into votes.
A slew of polls indicate an unexpectedly close contest, with O’Rourke generally trailing by a few points. But this week brought a Quinnipiac University poll showing Cruz opening up a 9-point lead among likely voters, and, on its heels, a poll, conducted by Reuters and Ipsos and the University of Virginia Center for Politics, that had O’Rourke for the first time with a 2-point edge, less than the margin of error, among likely voters.
Josh Blank, the manager of polling and research at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, said the fluctuations are likely a function of pollsters’ different assumptions about whom to count as likely voters in 2018, thanks to the twin X factors of Trump, and his tumultuous, one-of-a-kind presidency, and O’Rourke, and his once-in-a-generation political talent.
“It’s hard to get a handle on what’s going on because it’s something we’ve never seen before,” Blank said.
‘We’ve seen this show before’
It’s a things-are-bigger-in-Texas version of what’s happening coast to coast in the first midterm election of the Trump presidency.
“I don’t recall seeing an election this volatile in my lifetime,” Cruz told the American-Statesman after a second campaign event Saturday in Columbus. “I think it is possible that we come out of November with Republicans holding or growing our majority in the House and significantly growing our majority in the Senate. We could pick up four, five, six Senate seats. That would enable us to accomplish even more, to really do a great deal in terms cutting taxes, cutting regulations and producing more jobs.”
“I also think it is entirely possible that Republicans lose both houses of Congress, that we lose both the House and Senate. What determines which one of those it is, is turnout,” Cruz said.
“If we turn out common-sense conservatives in Texas, we win,” Cruz said. “If we turn out common-sense conservatives nationally, I think we’ll have a very good election.”
“Listen, we’ve seen this show before,” Cruz said. “Every two and four years the national media starts to swoon and say there’s a blue wave in Texas. Four years ago we saw it. It was (Democratic gubernatorial candidate) Wendy Davis, and like Beto O’Rourke, Wendy Davis raised tens of millions of dollars and thrilled liberal Democrats in Massachusetts and New York and California. But at the end of the day, the platform she was campaigning on was out of step with the people of Texas. I think that’s very much the same case here.”
Davis lost to Greg Abbott by 20 points.
Cruz said that O’Rourke is out of touch with Texans on gun rights, taking pride in his F rating from the NRA.
He said O’Rourke is out of touch with Texans on immigration — opposing the border wall, supporting sanctuary cities and open to abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, what Cruz described as a “loopy” and “far out” idea that became trendy this summer among some on the left. O’Rourke never actually embraced the idea and said it would make no sense without assigning its enforcement duties elsewhere.
Cruz said O’Rourke was making a play for out-ofstate money and celebrity retweeters with his defense of NFL players who kneel during the national anthem.
“In Texas, we stand for the flag, we put our hand on our heart or we salute if we’re in uniform, and it’s a question of respect,” Cruz said. “Listen, everyone agrees that you have a First Amendment right to protest, but you can protest in a way that is respectful to the flag, that is respectful to our veterans.”
While O’Rourke has said he would vote to impeach Trump — without prejudging whether he would vote for conviction if he and a Trump impeachment both made it to the Senate — he doesn’t bring the issue up.
In fact, he rarely mentions either Trump or, for that matter, Cruz.
Nonetheless, Cruz said, “if the Democrats take Congress, the day Nancy Pelosi is sworn in as speaker is the day impeachment proceedings begin, and the next two years would become nothing but a partisan circus, a blood bath. You’d see a dozen investigations of every federal agency designed by the Democrats to paralyze and destroy the Trump administration, to end all of the regulatory reform that’s been benefiting Texas business, that’s been benefiting Texas jobs, and I think it would be Mad Max at Thunderdome, just absolute chaos.”
Once the anti-Trump
Cruz said the media coverage of O’Rourke has been of a “gauzy biopic” variety and substance-free.
“Every two or three days you get another glowing profile. The favorite adjective for the media is Kennedyesque, usually with his hair blowing in the wind,” Cruz told the Columbus town hall. “And the profiles are all rainbows and puppies. They don’t talk about his radical record. They don’t talk about raising taxes, raising regulation, impeaching the president, abolishing ICE. They talk about his hair. Apparently we’re electing a clump of hair.”
Cruz also warned his audience that while he has raised more than any Republican Senate candidate — $4.6 million in the second quarter — O’Rourke has raised more than any Senate candidate — $10.4 million that quarter.
Bob Moore, former longtime editor of the El Paso Times, said he has long thought O’Rourke was a “generational political talent.”
“So I knew he would resonate pretty well, but I did not expect this,” Moore said. “I thought he may be able to chip, chip, chip away and maybe lose by 7 or 8 points, or in a really good environment, maybe 5 or 6 points, but I didn’t expect to see polls now showing him 3 or 4 points out. But I think his demeanor more than anything else is what really appeals to people, especially white liberals and moderates.”
“What they’ve really done is they’ve run this masterful digital campaign, especially on the fundraising side, and he has an Obama-like message of hope that’s really resonating with people, so it’s not the individual issues so much, but he really is the anti-Trump in so many ways,” Moore said.
Cruz was once the antiTrump.
On May 3, 2017, the day of the Indiana Republican primary that ended his campaign for president, Cruz told reporters, “I’m going to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump,” describing him as an amoral, pathological lying narcissist and bully.
“I will tell you, as the father of two young girls, the idea of our daughters coming home and repeating any word that man says horrifies me,” Cruz said.
But after refusing to endorse Trump in his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Cruz came around before the election. At the end of August, Trump, who used to relish calling Cruz “Lyin’ Ted,” tweeted: “I will be doing a major rally for Senator Ted Cruz in October. I’m picking the biggest stadium in Texas we can find. As you know, Ted has my complete and total Endorsement. His opponent is a disaster for Texas - weak on Second Amendment, Crime, Borders, Military, and Vets!”
That is the message Cruz will seek to hammer home in the three debates with O’Rourke — Friday night at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Sept. 30 at the University of Houston and Oct. 16 at a TV studio in San Antonio.
In Gonzales, known as the birthplace of the Texas Revolution, Cruz concluded his remarks to boisterous cheers and applause by associating his campaign with the spirit of the Texian rebels who defiantly refused to return a cannon on loan from Mexico: “If we turn out common-sense conservatives, if we turn out freedom-loving Texans, we’ll continue to keep Texas as the greatest state in the greatest nation in the history of the world and, as the people of Gonzales taught the world, when they come for our freedom — ‘Come and take it’ — because we will not go quietly into the night.”
With that, Cruz posed for photos with supporters, including young questioner Yesi Melcher, her grandparents, her mother and her brother, Aiden Noyola, 12.
“Our world’s crazy today,” Melcher told the Statesman when she was asked where she found the courage to raise her hand. “Just seeing all the news just makes you want to say something, and it makes you have the courage to say something.”
Her brother, usually the more voluble of the two — he said his political views regularly resound in the hallways of Gonzales Junior High School — envied her nerve.
“I wish I had more courage because I had a question, and I chickened out at the last minute,” Aiden said. His unasked question: “Why wasn’t Hillary Clinton behind bars?”