As 2024 got underway and political insiders started drawing up lists of competitive Senate races, few gave Texas a second look. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was seen as a shoo-in for another term, despite his poor record and unpopularity.
But as Election Day nears, the Lone Star State’s contest has become a lot more interesting.
Public polling generally shows the GOP incumbent with small but steady leads over Rep. Colin Allred, a well-liked Texas Democrat and former NFL star. But private polling is causing fresh anxieties for Cruz and his party: Politico reported this week that the latest round of polling from the Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate Republicans’ top super PAC, found Cruz’s advantage over Allred “slipping … from 3 points in mid-September to 1 point in October.”
This comes on the heels of Chris LaCivita, a senior campaign adviser for Donald Trump, recently writing via social media, “What the hell is wrong with the Senate race in Texas?” A new Wall Street Journal report on the contest asked in a headline, “Is Ted Cruz Blowing His Re-Election Race?”
It’s against this backdrop that the controversial senator has begun whining a bit about intraparty support. The Hill reported:
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) vented his frustration with the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), for not spending any money in his competitive reelection race, accusing McConnell of using the group to “punish” his critics in the Senate GOP conference.
“Mitch McConnell runs the largest Republican super PAC in the country and has $400 million, but that super PAC is used to reward the Republican senators who obey him and to punish those who dare to stand up to him,” Cruz told conservative talk show host Mark Levin. The Texan went on to complain that “not a penny“ from the Senate Republican super PAC’s coffers has been spent on his race, before pleading with Levin’s audience to send him some money. Hours later, in a move that probably wasn’t a coincidence, Donald Trump used his social media platform to publish a couple of fresh Cruz endorsements. I won’t pretend to have any special insights into the race, but as a rule, confident candidates on pace to prevail don’t look and sound like Cruz looks and sounds right now.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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