The battle to be the Texas GOP Senate nominee is this year’s most important Senate election – and the primary runoff between Tea Party backed Ted Cruz and establishment Republican Lt. Governor David Dewhurst is July 31, a mere two weeks from tomorrow.
Ted Cruz overcame long odds in the primary to force the well-funded establishment favorite Lt. Governor David Dewhurst into a runoff in the race for this open Texas U.S. Senate seat.
After trailing Dewhurst for months, but depriving him of a majority in the first primary -- to force the July 31 runoff -- Cruz has now taken the lead in the race.
According to a poll released July 12 by left-leaning Public Policy Polling, Cruz holds a 49 percent to 44 percent lead among likely voters. These numbers are backed-up by other polling; in a separate survey of likely runoff voters by Wenzel Strategies, Cruz leads 48 percent to Dewhurst’s 38 percent, with 14 percent undecided.
But Dewhurst, the establishment GOP and the Texas good old boys club aren’t giving up.
The Dallas Morning News reported that Dewhurst spent more than $20 million of his own personal funds to get elected lieutenant governor in 2002, and has already spent $10 million from his own pocket on the Senate race.
And a “super PAC” funded by a group of Dewhurst’s good old boy club friends has also stepped in to help the establishment candidate in the crucial final weeks of the campaign by raising nearly $2.5 million in the second quarter.
The reason the establishment is so invested in Dewhurst is, to borrow a phrase from David Grant, The Christian Science Monitor's congressional correspondent, because Dewhurt’s endorsement page “reads more like the RSVPs for an A-list Austin lobbying shindig…” than a grassroots conservative-based campaign.
Ted Cruz, in contrast, is endorsed by Senator Jim DeMint, Dr. James Dobson, conservative commentator Sean Hannity, the Tea Party Express, FreedomWorks, The Club for Growth, Senator Rand Paul, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and other leaders of the conservative movement and the Tea Party.
As a Hispanic, small government constitutional lawyer, Ted Cruz is a game changer for conservatives. Cruz’s youthful energy, intellect and constitutional scholarship will be like adding an entire division to General Jim DeMint’s small, but rapidly growing army of conservatives in the U.S. Senate.
“What we need in the Senate is a fighter,” Cruz told a town hall last year. “We don’t need another establishment, career politician that’s going to put his arm around the Democrats and keep compromising in growing the size and spending and power of the federal government.”
Ted Cruz is exactly the kind of conservative “boat rocker” conservatives want to send the Senate to change how Washington works.
It is time for grassroots conservatives and Tea Partiers to head to the sound of the guns in Texas. The establishment and their chosen candidate, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, will spend whatever he thinks it takes to win.
Ted Cruz can win the July 31 runoff only if Tea Partiers and grassroots conservatives will keep the momentum going and get to work to match Dewhurst’s money and inside connections with grassroots enthusiasm and organization. Regardless of where you live, get in the fight and help Ted Cruz win the run-off by going to http://www.votetedcruz.org/ .
