Ted Cruz is looking cocky. Rocking Ray-Bans and an “I Voted” sticker on his lapel — it’s the first day of early voting in Texas — he is easing his way across the parking lot of his local polling place, toward TV cameras set up beside his campaign bus. Backed by sign-waving fans, he starts his brief remarks, only to be interrupted by an angry man shouting from a few yards away: “You’re a traitor to democracy!”
Some pro-Cruz women yell back, and the heckler wanders off through the parked cars. Mr. Cruz seems not to even notice, plowing ahead with his call to “Keep Texas Texas” — his campaign motto — and talking up jobs, freedom and security. (That last category consists largely of horrifying stories about violent crimes perpetrated by “Venezuelan gang members.”) He takes shots at his Democratic opponent, Representative Colin Allred, whom he calls a formidable candidate “if he were running for City Council in San Francisco.” (Mr. Cruz uses this line at multiple stops. It’s a real crowd pleaser.) And when asked if he’s concerned about the influx of new voters to Texas in recent years and the state’s shifting demographics, he fires back with absolute confidence:
“We’re going to win.”
With his buoyant delivery and smug smile, Mr. Cruz wants to remind you of something: He is never happier than seeing a liberal fantasy and crushing it. The Democratic dream of turning Texas blue is approaching middle age with nothing to show for it, but this particular hope never dies — and the goal of ousting Mr. Cruz, a bête noire of Democrats if ever there were one, will endure as long as he’s in office. As in his last race in 2018, he is Democrats’ top Senate target this year, with recent polling showing him just a few measly points ahead of Mr. Allred, generally within the margin of error. And once again he is being dramatically out-raised by the Democrats, a disparity made worse by the millions of dollars that national Democratic groups are pouring into the contest. It’s not just that the Democrats see unseating Mr. Cruz as their best shot at holding onto their Senate majority. They also see him as the most promising opportunity to break the Republican Party’s multidecade lock on statewide offices here — giving them that first crucial step toward their dream of turning Texas, if not blue, then at least purple.
But don’t look for Mr. Cruz to crumble. This is basically how he rolls. The senator was a divisive, bomb-throwing, lib-owning loudmouth years before Donald Trump entered the political arena, basking in his critics’ hate as if it was winter sunshine. He is known for annoying his own teammates with bone-headed moves. (Remember “Green Eggs and Ham”?) Yet he somehow manages to be disruptive and bombastic enough to impress Texas Republicans without alienating at least a portion of the state’s independent voters. And his in-your-face partisanship may help him walk an ideological line that might trip up other, subtler Republicans.
In a party where Mr. Trump has dragged down candidates and upended elections for years, with so many Republicans redefining themselves in his image, Mr. Cruz has stood out as a pretty indestructible character for someone so disliked. Or if not indestructible, he persists, and persistence can go a long way in Texas politics. It helps that voters here like their politicians on the scrappy side with a dash of sass. (Pace, Ann Richards and Lyndon Johnson.) It also helps that Mr. Cruz knows how to modulate his extreme partisan jerkiness when useful. Even many voters who find him personally insufferable — and they are legion — wind up pulling the lever for him.
Admittedly, this isn’t the prettiest or easiest way to stay in office. In 2018, he came within less than three points of losing re-election to Beto O’Rourke, who was then the Texas Democrats’ star of the moment. And who knows? This election, a less flamboyantly grating Republican candidate might very well be on a glide path to victory rather than locked in a dogfight. Still, Mr. Cruz’s unique brand has served him well enough — and attracted a curious coalition of voters who will probably be enough to win him a third term on Nov. 5.
After he voted, Mr. Cruz headed to a smallish rally at a Mexican restaurant in the northern suburbs of Houston. In a quiet moment once he was done speaking, I asked him why he thought his race looked like a tight one. “It isn’t complicated,” he said. “If you are a hard-core partisan Democrat, after Donald Trump, there’s nobody in the country you want to beat more than me. You saw this at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago, when my opponent spoke about three minutes, at the end of which the entire stadium spontaneously burst into a chant of ‘Beat Ted Cruz.’ There was no other elected official that got that particular treatment. And I have to admit that I’m actually pretty proud of it.”
Being disliked by all the right people is a badge of honor for Mr. Cruz, and he plays it up at every opportunity. At the restaurant rally, he reminded the crowd of the time he attended a baseball game at Yankee Stadium during the 2022 playoffs decked out in Astros’ orange: “I had more than 200 New Yorkers suggest I do something that is anatomically impossible.” It is a charming bit of self-deprecating humor. It is also a reminder that he delights in being a burr in the butt of the folks his voters hate. For this crowd, being jeered by snotty New Yorkers is almost as good as being flipped off by tree-hugging Californians.
I’ve been talking with Republicans about Mr. Cruz for years, and feel the need to clarify one point: You know the kind of politician who puts on a big show of being a fire-breathing, narcissistic jerk in public but is widely beloved behind the scenes for his big heart or personal charm? Mr. Cruz is not one of those politicians. Pretty much everyone agrees that Ted is all about Ted. You can almost smell the ambition wafting off him, and his unlikability has long been a punchline in Washington. “Here’s the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz,” Al Franken, the former senator from Minnesota, wrote in his 2017 autobiography. “I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”
As Mr. Cruz might observe, the reasons are not complicated. He came barreling into the Senate in 2012 as one of the Tea Party revolutionaries whose core mission was to cause trouble for their party’s leadership, which they considered too compromising and compromised. He quickly established himself as the opposite of a team player, promoting himself at the expense of even his Republican friends. Early on, he was best known for shutting down the Senate by reading “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss on the chamber floor in some misguided effort to kneecap Obamacare — a stunt Republicans say taught them how not to handle a showdown. The former House speaker John Boehner once called Mr. Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.”
Of course, Texas Republicans are often willing to forgive their leaders a multitude of sins, provided those leaders are sufficiently skilled at owning the libs. (See: State Attorney General Ken Paxton.) So Mr. Cruz’s Washington shenanigans weren’t likely to damage him too deeply back home. By contrast, his decision to flee to Cancun, Mexico, while millions of his constituents sat shivering without electricity or water in the wake of a freak winter storm in 2021 left serious scars. A photo of the senator masked up and wheeling a roller bag through the airport went viral, capturing his me-first nature in a way that stuck in people’s craw. Three years on, multiple voters pointed to that episode in explaining to me their deep distaste for the senator.
His political and personal challenges notwithstanding, Mr. Cruz is not an unhinged Marjorie Taylor Greene-style raver. He knows that to win statewide in Texas, he needs not to come across as too extreme or crazy, and he can dial down the vitriol when it serves him. Of late, he has been striking a more bipartisan note in ads and on the trail. A key piece of his stump speech involves listing bipartisan infrastructure legislation he has championed. He boasts of joining forces with this Democrat to get this highway bill passed, and that Democrat to get some bridges built. Get it? He’s a political bridge builder. Message to Texans: I can own the libs all day long and still reach across the aisle to deliver for you. Double goodness!
It’s questionable how many voters are buying Mr. Cruz’s bipartisan shtick. In a recent poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, likely voters rated the senator as much more ideologically extreme than Mr. Allred. Even so, the poll also showed that Mr. Cruz has the second-highest job approval rating of the state’s major political leaders, behind only Gov. Greg Abbott.
In some ways, Mr. Cruz is less of an outrageous outlier than he used to be. Back in the day, he stood out as a Senate renegade. But Republicans note that with the emergence of MAGA super-minions such as Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee and JD Vance, Mr. Cruz looks almost establishment these days.
Similarly, his political ideology hasn’t kept pace with the party’s rightward creep toward national conservatism, with its protectionist, isolationist, big-government impulses. It’s an interesting dance for him, with Mr. Cruz straddling the line between the new breed of Trumpublican and the slightly older model of conservative.
Mr. Cruz’s performance against Mr. Allred looks not that different from his race against Mr. O’Rourke, according to the Texas Politics Project’s poll. As in 2018, Mr. Cruz is trailing among independents by double digits and enjoys a slight lead among likely voters in the suburbs. In urban areas, however, Mr. Cruz is faring better against Mr. Allred (50 percent to 45 percent) than he did against Mr. O’Rourke (64 percent to 31 percent). He is also polling much better with Hispanic voters. In 2018, the Texas Politics Project showed Mr. Cruz losing Hispanics by a margin of two to one, 33 percent to Mr. O’Rourke’s 60 percent. In this month’s poll, he and Mr. Allred were neck and neck, 49 percent to 47 percent. (In recent years, Texas Republicans have been aggressively working to expand the political inroads Mr. Trump has made among Hispanic voters.)
For all his swagger, Mr. Cruz can at times sound a touch defensive about how the race is going. He has complained publicly that the national party hasn’t given him enough financial help. And he stressed to me that the Allred campaign had been running ads on TV for several months before Mr. Cruz did. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be on air. It’s that we didn’t have the money.”
That said, he continued, “we’re going to win this race because substance matters. Because records matter,” he added. “And that’s how campaigns should be decided. By the records of each of the candidates.”
This is one of Mr. Cruz’s favorite lines. And you can’t help but think he has latched onto it because it downplays more nebulous, more personal political gifts, such as likability, courage and charisma — in which, to review, Mr. Cruz lacks a natural advantage.
Team Cruz definitely recognizes the threat posed by Mr. Allred. The guy has a great back story, especially in a Democratic Party criticized by Republicans as too elitist and feminized: He was raised in Dallas by a single mother who taught at a public school. (He never knew his father.) He played college football for Baylor University, a Baptist school, then spent five years in the N.F.L. before going to law school and becoming a civil rights lawyer. His badass linebacker image is well suited to this political moment — and to Texas’ rough-and-tumble self-image more generally.
More strategically, even Republicans acknowledge that Mr. Allred has run a smarter campaign than Mr. O’Rourke. He is targeting moderates and keeping the national party at arm’s length. And he came out early with direct attacks on Mr. Cruz, helped by the flood of campaign cash that let him dominate the airwaves.
That said, Mr. Allred is a little light on pizazz. He isn’t the electrifying, if ultimately disappointing, leader of a movement à la Betomania. Perhaps more concerning for Democrats, Mr. Cruz prevailed in 2018, even though that election came in the thick of the Trump administration, when many voters were looking to put a check on the president and his party. This year, with many voters feeling nostalgic for the prepandemic Trump era, the national political winds don’t feel as though they’re blowing as strongly against Mr. Cruz.
As people drifted in and out of the polling station where Mr. Cruz was voting, I chatted with many die-hard conservatives who were voting “Republican all the way,” basically because they think Democrats are ruining America. Several said they liked Mr. Cruz because they could “trust him.”
I also met Democrats aplenty who felt about the bombastic senator as you might expect. “He’s a total A-hole,” said Ray Mills.
But the kinds of voters whom Team Cruz is counting on are those like Laura Sanchez and her father, Albert. Both Sanchezes voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. Laura, a Gen Z-er, says she voted a straight Democratic ticket. They consider themselves political junkies and moderates. They both voiced unhappiness with the direction of the Democratic Party, and both had just voted for Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump.
Their stated reasons for souring on the Democrats ranged from basics such as the party’s handling of inflation and immigration — “My parents came into the country legally, and they had to hustle,” said Laura — to more specific discontents, such as the party’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and Ms. Harris’s response to the recent hurricane in Florida. And while Laura isn’t thrilled with the Republicans’ position on abortion rights, “At the moment, that’s not my concern,” she said.
“As Hispanics, we’re conservative by nature,” noted Albert, explaining that while they’re all for gay rights, what they “are not for is the whole transgender position and all that other stuff they’re doing now.” (In Texas, as in many other states this election, Republicans are wielding trans rights as a political cudgel.)
All things considered, said Laura, “Cruz is all right. Mostly.”
Albert was more pointed: “Cruz comes across as being an idiot on TV, but when you look at his voting record …. ”
This, ultimately, may be the secret to Mr. Cruz’s political survival: his ability to cobble together a coalition of voters, many of whom don’t even like him but nonetheless see him as an unapologetic fighter for Texas and for key issues they support — or at least against those they don’t. He may be a jerk. But he is their jerk.
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