The Texas Republicans I know aren’t criticizing Cruz at all for his trip to Mexico. If anything, they admire it. The prevailing logic is:
If I could go to Cancun right now, I would.
A US Senator has no role in handling this crisis anyway. It’s not like he’s going to be climbing utility poles.
I’m amazed at how the strongest argument Cruz supporters have is “Our guy is pretty much useless in a crisis.” That’s a ringing endorsement.
However, the fact that no one likes him is seen as a positive, not a drawback. Cruz owns the libtards and that is really all that matters. Well, that and guns and abortions. Cruz isn’t going to have a serious primary contender. He’s a loyal Trumpist, he hates the Federal government (in spite of being an integral part of it), he’s pro-gun, he’s anti-abortion in all cases, and the libs hate him. He ticks all the boxes that matter. The fact that he is a raging asshole is irrelevant.
Cruz isn’t popular among (some) Republican officeholders. He’s much more popular among Texas Republican voters. According to a Morning Consult poll, his approval rating among Texas Republicans fell after the assault on the Capitol – from 81% to 76%. That’s still higher than Texas’ other Republican Senator, John Cornyn, who was just reelected by ten points.
I’m sure his approval rating will dip again due to this, but I just can’t see this being fatal for him.
"I will tell you that it’s hard to have sympathy for Ted Cruz, because Ted was right on board making fun of me back in 2017 when I had that incident on the beach.”
… it does not feel good to be on the same side as Chris Christie against Cruz.
It makes me wonder he he has calculated that this will all blow over and that Texans don’t or won’t give a shit about their dead and dying… that no one will do anything about Cancun Cruz in the short run and that in 4 years no one will remember this article.
No, to handle that kind of crisis in Texas, it takes a U. S. Representative from New York! AOC raises $3M+ for Texas, then goes there to volunteer at a food bank in Houston.
But you’ll never see this story on Fox News. Oh, wait a minute . . .
You’re missing the bigger picture around this which is that politics has become 99% nationalized which means that Ted Cruz’s fate ultimately depends on the overall electorate and we’ve seen Texas trending more purple for a decade now. Cruz’s trip on top of other Republican leadership mismanagement is another straw that is inching closer to tipping the state blue. His antics may not have convinced the bulk of Republicans but they don’t need to, convincing just 2.5% of Republicans to switch to the Democrats is all that’s needed to flip the state.
Plus, you’re assuming that he’s not going to have another scandal in the next 4 years but that seems unlikely for someone with such poor seeming political instincts as Ted Cruz. Scandals multiply on each other because they just serve to reinforce the narrative. Maybe he’ll have another scandal 3 months from the 2024 election that, if he hadn’t had this scandal, he could have weathered but now he can’t.
The Texas wing of my family is just enraged, not by Cruz’s actions but by the “predictable piling on of the media to distract attention” from the failing Democrats, the Green New Deal.
One of my brothers moved to Texas almost 30 years ago (job related). At the time he was banging the drum about global warming when few people had even heard about it, he took an unpopular stance in favor of gays in the military and used to work in homeless outreach. Now he’s active in a campaign to criminalize homelessness, rants about various “globalist conspiracies”, flirts with Holocaust denial and claims that this cold spell debunks Global Warming once and for all.
Walking proof that demography is not political destiny. His kids are pretty liberal, but once they’ve made their first million or two, I fear it’s not going to last.
Or a similar number of non-voters that politics actually has an impact on their lives and it matters who is in power.
Again, the repercussions will come up in the midterms. Every Democrat will be running on the “remember, Republicans can’t keep the lights on, and they don’t care”, and Ted on the way to Cancun will be everywhere.
