Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) launched a new element of his campaign, Democrats for Cruz, aiming to poach Democrats from his challenger, Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX), and show his bipartisan ability.
Reps. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Veronica Escobar (D-TX) laughed at the idea that Cruz could be bipartisan.
“Honestly, my response would be my laughter,” Escobar said. “That challenge didn’t wake him up to the fact that Texas voters want leadership and governance instead of performance,” she said, adding, “He should be scared, frankly.”
But Cruz disagrees.
“I am a principled conservative, and I am not afraid of a fight. But if you look at my record of authoring and passing bipartisan legislation, it has been tremendously impactful for Texas,” Cruz told NOTUS.
“One can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he added.
Cruz is pursuing a bipartisan angle in his state possibly because of the view that Texas is becoming more competitive for Democrats. Cruz handily won his Senate seat in 2012 but nearly lost it to Beto O’Rourke in 2018, defeating the Democrat by less than 3 percentage points.
“I think he and a lot of other people are coming to the realization that Texas may not be as reliably red as it has been in the past,” Beth Cubriel, a lobbyist who formerly served as executive director of the Texas Republican Party, told the outlet.
“I think that his margin of victory last cycle was maybe a little bit too close for comfort, and I think he’s got a good story to tell, and I’m glad to see that he’s reaching out and telling it,” she added.
The Lugar Center, an organization founded by former Republican Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, produces a metric called the “bipartisan index,” which aims to quantify “congressional members’ bipartisan behavior on the basis of bill sponsorship and co-sponsorship.”
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Cruz, who has served in the Senate since 2013, scored second worst among all senators that year. In the most recent tabulation in 2021, Cruz improved to eighth worst among 98 eligible senators.
The recent score rates as “very poor” on the metric’s index, further substantiating some Democratic lawmakers’ views that Cruz is one of the least bipartisan lawmakers in the Senate.