… Senator Ted Cruz (R – TX), the Houston Chronicle reports:
Over the course of the primary campaign, Cruz will aim to raise between $40 million and $50 million, according to advisers, and dominate with the same tea party voters who supported his underdog senate campaign in 2012. But the key to victory, Cruz advisers believe, is to be the second choice of enough voters in the party’s libertarian and social conservative wings to cobble together a coalition to defeat the chosen candidate of the Republican establishment.
Make no mistake, Cruz is smart, holding degrees from Princeton (B.A. in Public Policy, cum laude) and Harvard Law School (magna cum laude). While his appeal will mainly be amongst the Tea Party conservatives, he is Hispanic and so may pull in some voters from that ethnic group.
After appointment as Solicitor General of Texas, which he used to argue conservative causes, sometimes in front of the Supreme Court, he defeated sitting Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst for the Senatorial nomination, and then handily beat the Democratic nominee Sadler by nearly 16 percentage points.
For all his educational and political acumen, he’s struck me as a bit of a bull in a china shop so far in the Senate, but perhaps this is purposeful. Can he avoid the blunders of Mitt Romney? Can he build an appeal to the Independents who decide elections these days? Or can the Democrats paint him as a dangerous conservative who would roll back important gains? He certainly does not care for the ACA, but the longer the ACA is in place, the more favor it may gain. It’s a quicksand landscape out there…
UPDATE: When I mentioned “Cruz is smart” to my wife, she remarked, “So why is he Republican?”
