Republican hardliner and Texas Senator Ted Cruz could screw up his party’s chance of flipping the Senate, the GOP super PAC in charge of delivering the chamber in November has warned.
A memo from the Senate Leadership Fund, obtained by Politico, shows the PAC’s own internal polling has the firebrand podcaster Cruz at 48 percent, leading Democratic opponent Colin Allred by a single percentage point.
Cruz’s lead was three points last month, according to the poll. Support for the incumbent senator in Texas also trails support for former president Donald Trump by two points—Trump, with 50 percent support, leads Vice President Kamala Harris by five points in the state.
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“Beginning in early August, Colin Allred has been heavily outspending Ted Cruz on TV, closing up the multicandidate ballot to a single point,” the memo says, adding that outside GOP outside groups including a dedicated Cruz super PAC are closing the spending gap. “We are carefully monitoring additional media placements and will have fresh polling numbers here next week.”
Cruz is the subject of FEC complaints alleging he struck a sketchy deal to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company that syndicates his three-times-a-week podcast to a super PAC backing his election. He claims he does the podcast as a “volunteer.”
Democrats put a concerted—and prohibitively costly—effort into unseating the Texas senator when he was last up for reelection in 2018: he won by 2.6 percentage points, compared to a nearly 16 point margin of victory when he was first elected in 2012.
The Leadership Forum’s memo says that almost all of its candidates in potential swing seats are trailing their Democratic rivals. That includes Eric Hovde in Wisconsin, Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, Bernie Moreno in Ohio, Sam Brown in Nevada, Mike Rogers in Michigan, Larry Hogan in Maryland and Kari Lake in Arizona.
Republicans are, nevertheless, tipped to flip the Senate, with Tim Sheehy in Montana polling four points ahead of incumbent Democrat Sen. Jon Tester. A New York Times/Siena poll of Montana released last week gave Sheehy a seven point edge.
But another unexpected danger zone has flared up for the GOP, according to the memo, which called Nebraska “a serious trouble-spot as polls show Sen. Deb Fischer in a tight race with Dan Osborn, an Independent in the mold of Bernie Sanders.” Surveys sponsored by Fischer and Osborn’s campaigns have shown their respective candidates leading.
“We are now polling to assess whether intervention is necessary to protect the seat,” reads the memo.
