by Ted Cruz
Mike and I immediately bonded. A couple of months later, after I launched my Senate campaign, we spent another couple of hours talking in D.C. He said, “Well, is there any way that I can help you?”
I replied, “Sure, you could endorse me.”
He said, “Done. I’m happy to.” He looked at his staff, who were standing alonside, and asked, “I can do that. Right?”
After they nervously assured him he could, Mike said, “What else can I do?” I asked for his help reaching out to the other key conservative leaders in the Senate. He said, “Ted, I will move Heaven and Earth to get them to back you.”
Over the next several months of 2011, Senators Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, Tom Coburn, and Jim DeMint all endorsed me. Of those five, the most impactful was Jim DeMint’s, and the reason is simple: The senator from South Carolina had been, for a number of years, a lonely conservative voice in Washington, D.C., who spoke for those outside the Beltway. He had found in fight after fight that he had virtually no support in the Senate.
And so, in 2010, Senator DeMint decided to do something radical for a sitting senator. Something extraordinary. He decided that he was going to get involved in Republican primaries, because the only way to get the Senate Republicans to stand for conservative principles was to elect a different kind of candidate. He formed a group called the Senate Conservatives Fund, and Senator DeMint went on to play a critical role in helping elect Paul, Toomey, Lee, Ron Johnson, and Marco Rubio.
Every one of those senators might well have lost without the boost given by DeMint, who not only endorsed them but also began raising vast sums of money to help underdog conservative candidates defeat the choice of the party bosses in their primaries. The party bosses’ choice can always be counted on not to rock the boat, and Senator DeMint understood that if we’re going to change our ship’s course before it careens over the waterfall, we need a lot of boat rocking to turn it around.
I first met with Senator DeMint in December 2010, before I had announced. DeMint had already endorsed Michael Williams for the Texas Senate race when everyone thought Kay Bailey Hutchison was going to step down—and when I was still running for attorney general.
Williams is a charismatic African-American conservative, a powerful speaker, and a good man, and he had already won statewide election to the Texas Railroad Commission. But when I sat down with Senator DeMint, I tried very hard to make the case for my candidacy. Number one, I thought my record of standing and fighting for conservative principles and winning was much stronger than that of my opponents. Number two, in order to beat David Dewhurst, you had to be able to raise enough money to run an effective statewide campaign, and I didn’t believe the other candidates in the race could do so.
Senator DeMint listened and appeared interested in what I had to say, but he remained unconvinced. He told me, “Okay, I like what I’m hearing. Now show me. Go do it. Don’t tell me you’re going to raise money. Don’t tell me you’re going to build grassroots support. Don’t tell me you think conservatives will unite behind the campaign. Go and do it, and then come back.” I had the same reception from other major conservative groups, including FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth.
I was disappointed. I would have loved for Senator DeMint to say, “I’m supporting you right now.” But what he was saying was exactly right. And today, when Senate candidates ask for my support, I say the same thing—show me. Build grassroots support. Raise money. Gain momentum. Put yourself in a position to win. And, then, if I can play a positive role and help push you over the edge, I’ll do it gladly.
The gains made by conservatives in the 2010 midterm elections gave me confidence that a grassroots campaign for the Senate might work. I knew how tired people were of the usual politicians promising the usual things. There was a genuine sense of cynicism, even downright despair, about what was going on in Washington, D.C., now under a Democrat administration. I sensed an opening.
In our first benchmark poll, we asked a series of questions to assess where I stood compared to Dewhurst. One of those questions would become famous internally in our campaign: Question 10. It asked voters if they would be more or less likely to support me if they knew that “Ted Cruz understands that politicians from both parties have let us down. Cruz is a proven conservative we can trust to provide new leadership in the Senate to reduce the size of government and defend the Constitution.” Among Republicans, those two simple sentences polled north of 80 percent. At the same time, they garnered a majority of Independents, and even 20 percent of Democrats. They became the centerpiece of our campaign.
As with the attorney general’s race, a big question was money. Contrary to many pundits’ misconceptions about the importance of money in politics, a candidate does not have to raise the most money to win—and we could never outraise a self-funder like Dewhurst. But we did need to raise enough to be heard. For a statewide U.S. Senate race, we calculated that we’d need a minimum of $5 million, and would ideally be in the ballpark of $10 million.
In that effort, we confronted a problem—the federal government’s campaign finance laws. A great many people in Washington, backed by the media, proclaim the need to control the amount of money being spent on political campaigns. Campaign finance laws are the Holy Grail of so-called good-government types who want to do something to fix the problem. As is often the case in Washington, their solution makes things worse.
In Texas state government races, there are no limits on individual donations under state campaign finance laws. This had made it a lot easier for an unknown like me in the attorney general’s race to raise money from a committed group of donors, compete, and potentially win against entrenched incumbents.
The former Reagan campaign consultant Ed Rollins tells a story of a group of eight California businessmen wanting to support Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign. They sat around a table and asked how much the novice candidate and former B-movie actor might need to win the race. The businessmen were told he’d need at least $2 million. So all eight promptly wrote checks for $300,000 each, giving the Reagan campaign the infusion of cash it needed to compete. Those eight men—not household names, just California small business owners—changed the course of history.
By contrast, federal campaign finance laws make such an effort impossible in a race for the U.S. Senate. They impose strict limits on the amount any individual can contribute, in effect rewarding candidates with deep pockets who can self-finance (since there are no limits on what you can donate to yourself) or those who are already well-known across the state. Written by political incumbents, these rules function as incumbent protection laws designed to combat what they see as a great evil—that some outsider could raise enough money to defeat them.
As a result (and by design), it is practically impossible for someone who is not an incumbent politician—without an existing, massive fund-raising apparatus—to raise enough money in small increments to run statewide in a large state like Texas. To win, we had to fundamentally change the rules, and bring thousands of new players to the campaign.
As we were assessing the Senate race, I spent six months systematically sitting down with a couple of hundred potential donors and friends—over breakfasts, lunches, and coffees. I started out with the obvious—I was planning to run for the U.S. Senate against a man with universal name recognition and limitless funds. “Am I nuts?” I’d ask.
Almost all of them chuckled and said, “Yes.” But in the end many added, “If you do it, I’m with you.”
The strategy at the heart of the campaign was empowering people—to make ordinary citizens the central part of our crusade.
We decided to emulate an unlikely example: President Barack Obama. Thus we made the conscious decision to explicitly model our campaign on his 2008 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. Back in 2008, Hillary Clinton was the most formidable primary candidate in modern history who was not an incumbent president. As with Dewhurst, the conventional wisdom was that she was unbeatable. But Obama ran
a scrappy, grassroots, guerrilla campaign—phenomenal in the annals of politics—and beat her. He was the David to her Goliath.
We resolved to do the same. Indeed, I bought copies of Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe’s book, The Audacity to Win, and gave it to our senior team. “We are going to shamelessly steal from their playbook,” I told our team. Our goal was to build a grassroots army and make sure it was their campaign. With them, we would go to Washington to turn things around. And unlike Barack Obama, I knew I would keep my promise.
Through the years, Obama’s use of the campaign slogan “hope and change” has won justifiable mockery. That’s because it was only that: a slogan. But I too believed in hope. Our campaign was based on it. I knew that so many Texans, like the rest of our country, really believed in the Promise of America, really worried about its future, and were certain that we could find a way to restore America to the world’s greatest, most respected, nation again. I also believe in change—but not merely a change of parties or a change on the surface.
Washington is broken, and our country is in crisis. To actually solve the massive fiscal and economic challenges facing America, we have to empower citizens to bring fundamental changes to the way Washington operates. I knew that David Dewhurst was a nice man, an honorable man. But he was not a person who would go to Washington and shatter china, challenge convention, and be willing to stand up to members of both parties—the kinds of actions that would be needed if we were really to change an entrenched system.
On January 19, 2011, we announced our campaign for the U.S. Senate in a rather unorthodox way: on a call with dozens of bloggers, rather than at a press conference with the usual political reporters.
The reason for our decision was that the mainstream media has a herd mentality. They all shared the conventional wisdom that Dewhurst would win in a walk, and they were sure to pleasantly ignore our campaign as long as they could.
But in an era of twenty-four-hour news and the Internet, the mainstream media is a sagging dinosaur. The world that we knew growing up—where three news networks and the daily paper decided what the news was—was over. In the age of new media, one blogger can be heard around the world. The representatives of new media would be the ones who would help us frame our campaign—as a battle between a traditional career politician and a proven conservative fighter.
If that became the message of the campaign, the race would be over. But hoping to frame a campaign is not the same as knowing how to frame a campaign. Voters are more sophisticated than pundits and politicians believe, and grassroots voters are especially savvy. For good reason, they wanted proof—repeated demonstrations—that I wasn’t going to be a part of the establishment crowd.
One of the ways I tried to demonstrate I was different was by showing that I knew it takes more than just a good voting record if you’re going to fight for conservative causes—it takes accountability. Thousands of times, I told voters across the state, “If I go to Washington, and I just vote right a hundred percent of the time, I will consider myself an abject failure.” That’s because we’re in a time of crisis, and we need senators who will stand up and lead. “If I am not standing on the front lines with arrows sticking out of my torso, I won’t be doing my job.” (I didn’t quite realize during the campaign just how many scars I’d acquire in the next couple of years.)
I told Texans over and over again, “I want you to hold me accountable. Hold me accountable for these commitments. When I come back in front of you in six months or a year, if I haven’t done exactly what I said, if I’m not leading the fight to get back to the free-market principles and the constitutional liberties this country was built on, I want you to stand up and look me in the eyes and say, ‘Ted, why did you break your word and why did you lie to me?’ ”
Throughout the campaign, we focused on Question 10, the one that took both parties to task for what was going on in Washington. Our opponents did not understand this strategy, which led to one of the more amusing moments of the campaign.
At a big rally in the blazing heat, on the steps of the state capitol, with Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and thousands of young people in attendance, I said something very similar to the message of Question 10: that career politicians in both parties are responsible for the mess we’re in, and that we need the people to help get us out of it. We needed leaders who stood for Texas and who didn’t just listen to Washington political bosses. Those assertions drew passionate cheers, just as they always did.
The Dewhurst campaign pounced on the comment, thinking I’d made a gaffe. They blasted out my statement to everyone. Their spin: “Ted Cruz is blaming Republicans for the problems in Washington. Can you believe that?”
It was a telling moment—reflecting the widening gulf between establishment Republicans and the grassroots. Their side viewed criticism of the GOP and its leaders as heresy. Our side saw it as a statement of the obvious.
What the Dewhurst side didn’t understand, because they weren’t talking to the same people, was that when I had said something like that to a meeting of the Republican Party in Houston, or to a Republican women’s club in any county in the state, the response was a standing ovation. Everyone was sick and tired of Republican politicians saying one thing and doing another thing once they went to Washington. Of course, the only people who didn’t know that were the establishment Republican politicians. The voters instinctively knew that big-government Republicans contributed to the problem just as much as Democrats, and in some ways even more, because the establishment Republicans lied to us over and over again by mouthing conservative platitudes that they didn’t really believe or would never fight for.
In the early days of the campaign, I was often a lone traveler, with no driver and no scheduler. I climbed into rental cars and headed to dinners or events in small venues, meeting with a handful of local leaders a few dozen at a time. People like that wanted to get to know the candidates personally to find out what made them tick.
One of the points that I made often on the campaign trail was about my campaign website. Just about every political candidate for any office has an “issues page” on their campaign website. In Texas, that page was pretty predictable. If you took five Republican statewide candidates and printed out their respective issues pages, on just about every issue they would say the exact thing, almost word for word.
So I often pointed out to the grassroots activists that my website, TedCruz.org, did not have the customary issues page. In its place we put a page called “A Proven Record.”
Our website explained, “Far too many candidates say one thing and do another. Every one of us should ask any candidate who stands before us, ‘you say you believe these principles, show me. When have you stood up for them, when have you bled for them, and what have you accomplished.’ ”
Take, for example, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—the “right to bear arms.” Every Republican candidate in Texas, and just about every Democrat, would say on his or her issues page, “I support the Second Amendment.” In Texas, unless you are clinically insane, that’s the right answer for a candidate.
But nowhere on my website did I say that I supported the Second Amendment. I said nothing about what was hidden in the deep recesses of my heart. Instead our website described how, as the solicitor general of Texas, I had led a coalition of thirty-one states before the U.S. Supreme Court defending the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, and we had won a landmark decision upholding that constitutional right. And we then linked to my being awarded the NRA’s 2010 Carter-Knight Freedom Fund Award, given each year to one of the leading defenders of the Second Amendment nationally.
That was true on issue after issue after issue. I often quoted my former boss at the Department of Justice, John Ashcroft, who used to say, “If I’m ever accused of being a Christian, I’d like for there to be enough evidence to convict me.” That’s powerfully true, and it’s also true of being a conservative. If you’re really a conservative, you shouldn�
�t have to tell anybody—you will bear the scars, because you will have been in the trenches fighting.
As the Scripture says, “You shall know them by their fruits.” This was the kind of argument that powerfully resonated with the grassroots of Texas.
We also had the good fortune of an overconfident Dewhurst campaign, brimming with highly paid consultants who didn’t really understand what was happening with the people of Texas. At the outset of the campaign, with nine candidates in the primary, a variety of grassroots groups, Republican women groups, and tea party groups began hosting candidate forums. I attended almost all of them, as did most of the other candidates. Dewhurst skipped them all.
Given our limited resources, we had to find ways to communicate that did not involve millions of dollars. One of the best ways to do so is with humor. At the cost of about two thousand dollars, we created an animated cartoon, narrated with a Rod Serling–type voice, that began, “Some creatures defy explanation. Elusive objects of great mystery. The chupacabra has been spotted across Texas, a mythical coyote-like animal blamed by ranchers for killing livestock.” Across the screen, an animated chupacabra danced in and out of the shadows.
The ad continued, “In East Texas, many have claimed to have seen the tall, mysterious animal known as Bigfoot or Sasquatch. But conservative Texans don’t seem to catch a glimpse of the political animal David Dewhurst, despite his height. Since he entered the race on July 21, Dewhurst has skipped nine candidate forums, tea party forums, Republican women forums, and county party forums. He simply won’t stand and answer hard questions from grassroots voters.” A tumbleweed blew across the screen, past a schoolhouse with a Gadsden Flag.
“Why do Texans have a better chance of spotting a chupacabra than their own lieutenant governor? What is David Dewhurst hiding from?”
If you’re going to be at all negative, it’s important to be light and funny. Our ad was campy, not vicious. It ended with a picture of Dewhurst dancing across the screen like the chupacabra and Bigfoot.