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When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) launched his U.S. Senate bid, he was the preferred choice of a mere 3 percent of Texas Republican primary voters in a field of a half-dozen credible candidates. Chief among his rivals was a powerful three-term lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, who possessed a net worth of $200 million, enjoyed the near-unanimous support of the Texas GOP establishment and began the 2012 election cycle with a commanding lead in the polls. A year-and-a-half later, Cruz soundly defeated Dewhurst in a primary runoff with 57 percent of the vote and was on his way to the U.S....

A Republican congressman believes Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, would be as great of a president as Ronald Reagan. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., made the comparison while talking to Yellowhammer Radio with Cliff Sims. “I believe Ted Cruz would be an excellent president. The parallels between Ted Cruz and the way he conducts himself, his belief system, and Ronald Reagan are uncanny,” Brooks said....

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Just a couple of more sound bites here related to Ted Cruz. Now, this is interesting, too. Two sound bites here from Jeffrey Toobin, who is the legal analyst at CNN. He was on Fresh Air, a program on NPR yesterday, the host Terry Gross, and said to Toobin, "For your New Yorker profile of Ted Cruz, you interviewed him several times. Tell us more about your conversations with Ted Cruz and what you learned about him through these conversations."TOOBIN: He's just a very smart guy. He is a very polished speaker. I think people who watched...

Donations to Ted Cruz's campaign, during his presidential announcement.Ted Cruz's entire decision of whether to jump-start his presidential candidacy at the end of a fundraising quarter hinged on the ability to raise $1 million in the first week. The Texas senator ended up hitting that milestone in just over a day. Fueled by a team of 10 data scientists who are tasked with conducting real-time analysis of prospective supporters, the reach of and return on Cruz's rollout has already exceeded the initial expectations of even the campaign's top advisers. While initial media reports detailed Cruz raising $500,000 on the first...

Somewhere former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker are having a good laugh. “The onetime friendship between Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul has grown frosty as they both vie to become the leading conservative in the 2016 GOP presidential primary,” the Hill reports. “The Kentucky senator stepped on his Texas colleague’s campaign rollout this week by questioning his electability, a move that Cruz’s allies saw as a deliberate attempt to distract from his message.” Well, duh. This is a contest after all. Did Cruz expect his opponents to lay off? Paul says Cruz has no appeal...

On Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) became the first major contender to announce his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Dan Balz has written that Cruz’s candidacy “tests the limits of conservatism,” and based on his congressional roll call voting record, Cruz is the fourth-most-conservative member of the Senate. But how does his ideological position compare to those of Republican primary voters, especially in early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire? Very favorably, as we will see. We use data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). The 2014 CCES asked respondents to place themselves and several...

Scott McCay had a short, but good post about the sneering from the anti-Cuban bigots liberal elitists at the New Yorker calling Ted Cruz “uppity.” It’s just the latest in a series of attacks on Cruz by his “betters” in the liberal elite and the RINO establishment (okay, I’m being redundant). The elitists are also attacking Ted Cruz’s music choices. He said that he became a country music fan after 9/11 because he didn’t like how rock musicians responded to it and he feels more emotionally connected to it. Instead of just leaving those remarks for what they are, his...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had a simple response to Fox News Channel's Megyn Kelly when she asked him whether he could win the presidency: Look at 2012. That was the year in which Cruz, then Texas's solicitor general, was elected to the Senate. “We brought together conservatives and libertarians and evangelicals and women and young people and Hispanics and Reagan Democrats,” Cruz said of that race. To which I say: Who knows? The reason for the uncertainty is that there was no exit poll in 2012 in Texas. It was one of 19 states where the broadcast networks and the...

I did … not think we’d be seeing Rand, of all people, making electability arguments at the expense of other candidates, but if there’s any guy in the field whom Democrats would demagogue more gleefully than they would him, I suppose it’s Cruz. The money line here comes when he talks about “not just throwing out red meat, but throwing out something intellectually enticing to people who haven’t been listening to our message before.” That’ll be his core attack on Cruz throughout the primaries, partly of necessity since there’s not much that divides them on policy (by Paul’s own admission)....

Sen. Ted Cruz has "rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office" -- let alone president -- by insisting that humans aren't to blame for global warming, California Gov. Jerry Brown says. Brown, a Democrat, took aim at Cruz during a Sunday appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," the day before Cruz is expected to announce his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination during a speech at Liberty University in Virginia. He blasted Cruz's comment during a late-night television appearance that climate change "alarmists" have a problem. "The science doesn't back them up," Cruz had said on NBC's...

If Ted Cruz announces he is running for president on Monday, you won’t read much about it here. Even if he is serious and not, as The Daily Beast believes, only interested in drawing attention to himself, the first-term senator from Texas is not going to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, much less the 2016 election. He is a political lightweight whose has managed to alienate just about everyone except the most reactionary of Republican activists with his bluster and sabotage. Cruz’ McCarthy-esque denunciations of his political opponents don’t suggest he’ll be able to persuade many Democrats to switch...

The Texan spent the last months before his presidential campaign showing off his knack for articulating the most conservative position on numerous issues.Sen. Ted Cruz will reportedly launch his 2016 presidential campaign during a speech Monday, the Houston Chronicle wrote Saturday night. The Texas Republican has been laying the groundwork for a run for months—visiting early primary states, meeting with Republican activists, and hiring political strategists to manage his campaign—and has chosen the evangelical Liberty University in Virginia as the site of his official announcement. Though Cruz is not considered a favorite to win the GOP nomination, he will undoubtedly...

Texas Senator Ted Cruz just made it official: He's running for president. He made the announcement in a tweet, accompanied by a video, shortly after midnight, eastern time. Ted Cruz ✔ @tedcruz I'm running for President and I hope to earn your support! (VIDEO-AT-LINK)Cruz believes he has a path to the GOP presidential nomination by winning the Tea Party vote, and doing well enough with both social conservatives and libertarians to knock out potential rivals, according to a Houston Chronicle report published over the weekend: Cruz's senior advisers, however, see a path to victory that all but ignores [the GOP...

He’s going to skip the exploratory committee and go straight for the jugular. Ted Cruz plans to run for president. The Houston Chronicle broke the news just before midnight Saturday evening, citing senior advisers speaking on the condition of anonymity who said that Cruz, the Texas Tea Party Republican elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, would pursue the presidency. The announcement would make Cruz the first Republican to officially declare his candidacy. Cruz will announced his candidacy at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, the Chronicle reported. The senior advisers cited by the Chronicle said Cruz aims...

Video of 3-year-old Julia Trant questioning, in a tremulous-sounding little-girl voice, Senator Ted Cruz's assertion that "the world is on fire" caught fire itself over the weekend. But the headlines were all wrong, her mother tells PEOPLE. "The world is on fire?" asked Julia. "The world is on fire, yes," the Republican from Texas told the preschooler. "Your world is on fire." Might be the stuff of nightmares to some little ones – especially coming from someone so official – but "Julia was actually quite happy" at Cruz's political appearance Sunday before New Hampshire's Strafford County GOP, Michelle Trant tells...

Ted Cruz said something this weekend you will basically never hear a politician say: Unlimited campaign contributions are good. At a Republican event in New Hampshire on Sunday, the Texas senator said free speech means everyone "has a right to speak out in politics as effectively as possible" -- whether that means putting a sign in your yard or donating money. And last year, he proposed eliminating direct political contribution limits. While Republicans generally favor rolling back campaign finance laws, few talk in these terms. And that's because the vast majority of Americans support some limits. An October CBS News...

On Sunday, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz addressed a crowd of over 100 people in Barrington, New Hampshire. During his speech, the Texas Senator served up the fiery, intemperate rhetoric he has become known for. With typical bombast, he told the audience: The Obama economy is a disaster, Obamacare is a trainwreck, and the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of leading from behind – the whole world is on fire. His comment caught the attention of 3-year-old Julia Trant who responded nervously, by asking, “The world is on fire?” Senator Cruz, rather than clarifying to the child that he was speaking metaphorically,...

The Walker surge in Iowa, Hillary’s Obama problem and other news from Week One of our yearlong insiders’ survey from the ground in 2016’s first-in-the-nation races.Most Iowa insiders believe Scott Walker would win their state’s Republican caucuses if they were held this week. But they’re not this week, and virtually none of the most influential thought leaders in the Hawkeye State believe that the Wisconsin governor will sustain his recent bounce in polls. This is one of several intriguing findings in the debut survey of The POLITICO Caucus. More than 100 of the most plugged-in activists, operatives and elected officials...

(AUDIO-AT-LINK) Former New Hampshire GOP Chairman Fergus Cullen is preparing to host a meet-and-greet at his Granite State home for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — but said firebrand Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz represents “everything that is wrong with the Republican Party.” “Ted Cruz is someone who will not darken our doorstep ... He doesn’t seem to be very interested in campaigning to all of Americans but only seems to be interested in appealing to a fringe,” Cullen said during an appearance this morning on Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program. “I think he has been irresponsible in Washington...

Category Benefits / Fundraisers Date Mar 15, 2015 Time 6:00 PM Grafton County Republicans have announced that US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas will be the keynote speaker at the Annual Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner on Sunday, March 15 at the Indian Head Resort in Lincoln. Bruce Perlo, Grafton County Republican Chairman, said that he, and fellow Republicans, are delighted that Senator Cruz accepted their invitation to speak . "This will be an incredible evening for voters to listen to one of our country's leading conservative voices." Senator Cruz is widely seen as a top-contender for the Republican nomination for President...