Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) could be in Iowa, trying to repeat his come-from-behind victory in the last round of competitive GOP caucuses nearly eight years ago.
Instead, Cruz is in the nation’s capital working on legislation and in his home state of Texas running for a third term in the Senate despite a state law dating back to Lyndon Johnson that would have allowed him to do both simultaneously. He insists he is exactly where he wants to be right now.
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“My goal is singularly focused on representing and fighting for 30 million Texans,” Cruz told the Washington Examiner. “I am blessed to have the incredible responsibility to stand up every day for Texans across our state.”
Cruz then combined the longtime slogans of one Democrat, former President Bill Clinton, and one Republican, the late Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes, though both catchphrases have been uttered by others on the campaign trail.
Polls have repeatedly shown deep-seated economic pessimism across the electorate despite President Joe Biden’s emphasis on low unemployment and robust GDP growth. More than 60% of voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, with a December CBS News poll showing the president 24 points underwater on the economy.
“My No. 1 priority is jobs,” Cruz continued. “And it has been laser-focused on jobs, jobs, jobs since the day I was first elected, and the reason for that is that’s the top priority of Texans all across the state.”
“From East Texas to West Texas, from the Panhandle down to the Rio Grande, Texans want jobs,” he said. “We want more jobs, we want higher wages, we want greater opportunity for our kids and grandkids.”
What Cruz is less interested in doing is commenting on the 2024 Republican presidential race. Asked whether he has any insight on how to beat former President Donald Trump in Iowa having done it before, he demurred.
“Oh, I have no idea,” he replied. “Nobody else does, either. It’s still quite early polling. Particularly, national polling this far out is rarely dispositive.”
But Cruz was willing to sound a unifying chord. “My view of the race is I am good friends with President Trump,” he said. “Then I’m also good friends with Ron DeSantis. I think he’s done a terrific job as governor of Florida. I’m staying out of the front. I like them both.”
Cruz hasn’t exactly mellowed out, however. He argued that the Senate, where Democrats hold a narrow 51-49 majority and needed Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote for control of the chamber in the previous Congress, is exactly the right place to fight for conservative priorities.
“The Senate is the battleground, right?” Cruz said. “In the Senate, every day I am, No. 1, leading the fight against idiotic policies from the Biden administration and Senate Democrats. And I’ve never seen Democrats as radical as they are.”
Cruz’s imagery then took a more gladiatorlike turn. “In many ways, the Senate feels to me like the Roman Colosseum, where my job is to strap on some armor and grab a battle ax and go fight the barbarians,” he said. “And it is a daily endeavor, where I am leading the fight each and every day.”
This is in keeping with Cruz’s reputation as a conservative warrior. In his first year in the Senate, he waged a fight to defund Obamacare that led to a 17-day government shutdown. Cruz warned at the time that Obamacare needed to be rolled back during the politically vulnerable period where the costs were beginning to take effect but many of the benefits had yet to materialize.
“President Obama’s strategy is simple: On Jan. 1, the subsidies kick in,” Cruz said in an interview in 2013. “President Obama wants to get as many Americans addicted to the subsidies because he knows that in modern times, no major entitlement has ever been implemented and then unwound.”
In some ways, Cruz looks prescient. By the time Republicans finally won unified control of the federal government, Obamacare repeal had ceased to be popular. The law gained majority approval in the Gallup poll for the first time in April 2017, up 13 points from the previous presidential election.
A KFF poll this year found that Obamacare’s future was more than twice as likely to be “very important” to Democrats than Republicans. Voters trust Democrats more than Republicans on dealing with the Affordable Care Act by 20 points.
But Republicans who did not want to pick the Obamacare defunding fight a decade ago could also point to the remote chances of Barack Obama ever signing off on the unraveling of his signature domestic policy achievement, which would have been required for the plan to work. Democrats also controlled the Senate at the time.
For many, that legislative battle became a parable for Republicans exaggerating their leverage — and for Cruz’s inability to play well with others.
For his part, Cruz is eager to talk about all his collaborative efforts in the Senate, especially those that involve the Texas Republican reaching across the aisle. He worked with Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) on an amendment to expand the Interstate 14 corridor across the South. “It will be a big, big deal in terms of moving oil and gas and crops and livestock and people and manufactured goods from Texas all the way to the Atlantic,” Cruz said.
“Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, stood up and said, ‘Well, Cruz is for it, Warnock is for it, we all got to be for it,’” the Texas senator said. “And it passed by acclamation.”
Cruz also mentioned teaming up with Sen. Ben Lujan (D-NM) on creating a new Interstate 27 corridor: “Again, overwhelmingly huge impact in terms of jobs and commerce.” Warnock has helped Democrats hang on to the Senate majority. Lujan chaired the House Democrats’ campaign arm before being elected to the upper chamber.
Democrats scoff at these initiatives as isolated examples of bipartisanship. Meanwhile, Cruz downplays the notion he is any different. “My time in the Senate, I passed 94 separate pieces of legislation into law,” he said, adding he is equally committed to “fighting left-wing radicals” and “simultaneously working to pass positive, bipartisan, pro-jobs, pro-growth legislation.”
“I believe that you can do both,” he said. “You can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Three important things do appear to have changed, however: Cruz’s Senate longevity, the makeup of the Republican conference in which he serves, and Texas’s ruby-red political dynamics.
When Cruz arrived in Washington to begin serving his first term, he had just turned 43. In the Senate, that is young enough to qualify as a young man in a hurry. And that was how many in both parties viewed Cruz, who ran for president as a freshman senator, announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the White House a little over two years into his term.
In presidential politics, fortune often favors the bold. Obama was elected president as a freshman senator. Two of Cruz’s primary opponents, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rand Paul (R-KY), were also freshmen. They lost to Trump, who was seeking public office for the first time, though he had flirted with White House bids in at least two previous election cycles.
If Trump hadn’t run in 2016, Cruz might have been the first movement conservative to win the Republican nomination since Ronald Reagan and just the third since Barry Goldwater. Only Reagan made it to the Oval Office. Goldwater lost in a landslide and stayed in the Senate until 1987.
Nearing the end of his second term, Cruz is now looking at a longer stay in the Senate himself. There will be no presidential opening until 2028, at the earliest. If Trump wins next November, his vice president would be heavily favored in four years. Any other Republican nominee would be constitutionally eligible to run for reelection.
Unless Trump picks Cruz as his running mate, it’s hard to see the Texan back on the presidential campaign trail for a while. But he hasn’t closed the door on doing so again, saying, “We came very, very close” in 2016.
“We outraised George W. Bush. We outraised John McCain. We outraised Mitt Romney,” Cruz said, referring to their Republican presidential primary campaigns. “We ended up receiving 8 million votes and winning 12 states. Other than Trump and myself, no other Republican won more than a single state.”
That doesn’t sound like a man who has given up on his presidential dreams, even as he grows a beard and settles into the Senate. Cruz broke down where Rubio and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich won in 2016 unbidden. “We came very, very close to winning,” he repeated. “And I can tell you that campaign was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.” At 55, Cruz still has time. He is younger than actor Tom Cruise and singer Gwen Stefani. More pertinently, he is decades younger than the incumbent president and the front-runners for both major party nominations.
Cruz also hopes to be on the right side of the generational shift among Senate Republicans. “There’s absolutely a change in the Republican conference,” he said. “It is getting younger. It is getting, I hope, more conservative. It is getting more responsive to the voters.”
Texas may also be changing, though not as quickly or as clearly as Democrats would like. Trump won just 52.1% in 2020 and 52.6% in 2016 after four straight elections in which the GOP presidential nominee’s floor was in the mid-50s. George W. Bush broke 60% in 2004 and came close in 2000. He was a former Texas governor, but Mitt Romney also received 57.2% in 2012.
Cruz won reelection by less than 2.6 points in 2018, albeit in what was a Democratic year nationally. He is a major target of liberal donors across the country, no matter the odds of unseating him. And Democrats have not abandoned their hopes of turning Texas blue, though recent rightward trends among Hispanic voters suggest this may not be as easy to accomplish as liberals hoped just a few years ago.
There haven’t been many polls for the 2024 Texas Senate race, though Cruz leads in both surveys included in the FiveThirtyEight average. Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) is seen as the front-runner for his party’s nomination. Sometimes a few encouraging polls for Democrats challenging particularly reviled Republicans is all it takes to siphon liberal money away from more winnable races, as happened in recent bouts featuring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
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The 2024 Senate map is generally encouraging for Republicans, who are trying to win back the majority. The early presidential matchups have been, too. Republicans swept Texas’s statewide offices in 2022.
If Cruz wins another six-year term, he will have options in the Senate and perhaps beyond. “There’s no lack of ambition in the United States,” Cruz said. “There’s an old joke. How do you make 100 senators turn their heads? You call out, ‘Mr. President.’”
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. Emily Jacobs is a congressional reporter for the Washington Examiner.
