Ted Cruz’s operatives are quietly reaching out to Rand Paul’s early supporters and endorsers, making the case that the Texas senator is their best bet if they want a Republican nominee who is friendly to libertarians.
Saul Anuzis, the former Michigan GOP chair who is working for Cruz, recently traveled to New Hampshire to meet with Paul backers and make that case, my colleague David Weigel scoops for the 202. The key to his pitch: Paul is floundering and Cruz is viable. Other sources tell me that Cruz is poised to roll out a few endorsements from 2012 supporters of Ron Paul who have held off on signing with Rand.
The Texas senator has a robust network of super PACs, with the hefty backing of hedge-fund magnate Robert Mercer, while the head of Rand’s main super PAC got indicted by the feds last week on 2012-related campaign finance charges. Cruz allies are also circulating recent news reports that highlight organizational problems within Paul’s orbit.
The Kentucky senator, who is simultaneously running for reelection and president in 2016, is struggling to expand his coalition while consolidating the libertarian purists. After spending 2013 as a media darling, he’s drifted out of the conversation and slipped in the polls. A survey released yesterday by Public Policy Polling found Paul getting just 3 percent among likely Iowa caucusgoers, down from 10 percent in April. (Cruz is in sixth place at 9 percent.)
Cruz himself freely acknowledges that he wants to dip into the libertarian bracket. The Texan is on a bus tour this week across the South, with a focus on states with early March primaries. Katie Zezima, on the Cruz beat for The Post, relayed between stops in Tennessee that Cruz is invoking the Fourth Amendment, a Paul favorite, whenever possible.
On Sunday, during a rally in Huntsville, Ala., Cruz pivoted twice to libertarian-leaning answers. First, he bragged about being “an original co-sponsor” of Paul’s “Audit the Fed” bill. “What the Fed is doing is dangerous,” he said. “They are debasing the currency with QE1, QE2, QE infinity!” Then, asked about databases kept by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to track diversity, Cruz touted his unrelated work “to lead the effort to end the federal government’s bulk collection of phone metadata.”
In contrast to Paul, who brought the Senate to a standstill to force the Patriot Act’s expiration, Cruz supported a compromise bill, which President Obama signed into law. In Iowa this spring, Cruz criticized Paul for making the perfect the enemy of the good. “If you’re a terrorist, we need to track down everything you do and we need to go out and find you and kill you,” Cruz said to cheers Sunday, per Katie. “But, if you’re a law-abiding citizen, the federal government has no business seizing your phone calls or your emails.”
Cruz got relatively short shrift from debate moderators last Thursday, but online polls suggest that he’s since gotten a statistically significant bounce nationally. His campaign says it raised $1.1 million during the 100 hours after the debate from more than 10,000 contributors.
A year ago, it was widely assumed that Paul could count on the very base of support Cruz is now coming after. A spokesman for Rand did not respond to a request for comment about how they’ll respond to Cruz.
