Ted Cruz is not known as the most brilliant campaign strategist. Despite winning 12 states in the 2016 presidential primary, Ted’s camera-ready smile and oratory style of speaking straight from story night in the basement of the local library proved to be no match for appealing to the raw emotion of voters hungry for an attack dog.
During that primary, the eventual winner, Donald Trump, personally attacked Cruz and his wife Heidi, including attacks on her attractiveness, and suggested that perhaps Cruz’s father was involved in assassinating John F. Kennedy — a laughable premise, but one which somehow Ted was never able to successfully ignore like the idiocy that it was. In fact, it was more Ted responding to Trump’s hilariously terrible attacks that made him look like he wasn’t running a real campaign, even with running mate Carly Fiorina standing next to him looking very serious.
Now the Texas Senator is in the race of his career against a Democratic upstart named Beto O’Rouke, and he’s feeling the heat so bad that he’s actually courted Trump’s endorsement and asked him to come campaign in the Lone Star State for him.
But Ted just can’t stop shooting himself in the foot in his campaigns, and it seems like every time he tries to simply respond to something, he makes things worse for himself.
Senator Cruz released a series of campaign ads that can most charitably be described as “misguided,” especially considering the swift response from the Beto camp. In one ad, Ted suggests that Beto wants to legalize heroin:
.@TedCruz also has a new TV ad contrasting his work on unemployment drug testing with @BetoORourke‘s 2009 comments about the war on drugs (Background: https://t.co/cLxvNdigIs). #txsen pic.twitter.com/leVOnazXaN
— Patrick Svitek (@PatrickSvitek) August 3, 2018
But Beto knew well in advance that Ted would try that line of attack — he called it out six weeks ago, as he pointed out with a tweet. In a speech to a crowd of supporters at the end of June, O’Rourke predicted that Ted would try to say exactly what he said in his attack ad:
Now Beto’s supporters are using Ted’s lies to raise money, and boy, have they.
In response to Friday’s attack ads, you just raised $1,274,528 over the weekend. No PACs, just people — making 39,000 contributions at an average of $32. pic.twitter.com/FTcP7ytwu3
— Beto O’Rourke (@BetoORourke) August 6, 2018
Every poll has O’Rourke within just a few points of Cruz in deep red Texas, and Ted just can’t afford these kinds of mistakes. He’s running out of feet to shoot himself in.
Featured image via screen capture
