This just keeps on getting interested:
Groups affiliated with the billionaire Koch brothers —better known for their history of bankrolling Republican candidates — are taking the unusual step of knocking both of Texas’s Senate hopefuls in ads launched this week.
The LIBRE Initiative, a Koch-backed group aimed at engaging Latino voters, launched mail ads Thursday urging Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to get behind a DACA solution the Kochs want, but that the senator has vehemently opposed.
Meanwhile, a different Koch group, Americans for Prosperity, sent out postcards criticizing Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, for supporting Congress’s sweeping spending bill, which the group says was full of wasteful spending.
A spokesman for the Koch network declined to share what the group was spending on the ads. Both are part of larger, nationwide mail campaigns that target lawmakers from both parties.
“We are prepared to support candidates who champion public policies that benefit the American people,” James Davis, a top adviser to several Koch groups, wrote in an op-ed for CNN last month. “But we're finding that these champions are few and far between and our support will not be forthcoming for those who hang back or obstruct good policy.”
The Kochs are among the biggest spenders for conservative causes and candidates nationwide.
The Koch's two largest political groups shelled out $43 million to help Republicans candidates in the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog group. The groups made heavy investments to help six key Senate races to ensure the GOP held the majority.
Now that Republicans control both the legislative and executives branches in Washington, leaders within the Koch network have publicly lamented a lack of action on their top legislative priorities.
I reported this week how the Kochs want to make Trump’s “Political Godfather”, Rep. Lou Barletta (R. PA), pay for being too loyal to Trump and not to them. That’s why they’re willing to spend money to defeat him. But this just goes to show how much Cruz is unliked that even GOP megadonors like the Kochs are sick and tired of him. But I can’t blame them, he is a shameless asshole and his constituents know this:
Two months ago, I marched to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz's office alongside Mayor Sylvester Turner, Chief Art Acevedo and other teenagers who had organized the Houston March For Our Lives with me; an estimated 15,000 people marched behind us. We chanted as we walked, arms linked together, sweating under the glaring Texas sun. It wasn't long before we were standing under our senator's building. I stood up on a scaffolding trying to quiet the crowd. Most people were still marching at this point — I found out later that the crowd stretched back to Tranquility Park, where we began. I was scanning the mass of people, reading the homemade signs, when I suddenly realized what they were saying.
"Where's Ted Cruz? Where's Ted Cruz?"
Over and over again. Standing on that platform, listening to the chanting crowd, I turned around and looked up at my senator's building.
Cruz was in Houston that day, and his staff knew we were coming. I had reached out to his office multiple times about meeting to discuss school safety, with no response. Fifteen thousand of us were on his doorstep, asking to be heard. Asking that one question which to this day I still don't have a satisfying answer to: Where was Ted Cruz? The people wanted to know — I wanted to know. If a march of his constituents this big couldn't get his attention, what would?
I felt abandoned by my senator. I had worked so hard to share my message in a world where children are told to be seen and not heard. When I brought that message to him, he had refused to listen.
Last Friday, I saw what it took to get Ted Cruz's attention. I saw the pictures of him visiting Santa Fe, wiping away tears. He had remained silent as we pleaded for safer communities. Now he mourned in front of cameras, after yet another school shooting.
Let me also highlight how much Cruz sucks when it came to the Santa Fe shooting:
Both Santa Fe and Parkland have roused the nation to seek answers in a decades-long crisis of mass shootings.
But to the dismay of the media, Ted Cruz says, the victims of each school shooting don't agree on a solution.
In an interview with The Daily Signal, Cruz said he visited Santa Fe High School students at the hospital and asked them what could be done to make schools safer.
"Out of a dozen students who just hours earlier had been in this shooting, every one of them said the answer is not gun control," Cruz said. "They said, 'don't take our guns.' They said 'if you take our guns, it won't make us safer, it will just mean the killers and murderers have guns.'"
Cruz said students floated the idea of more metal detectors at school, more police officers, and arming teachers.
"Those are the ideas that the students were suggesting," Cruz said. "Now I will say, it's fairly striking that, you look at the mainstream media, CNN, after the Parkland shooting, it was round-the-clock coverage of the students calling for aggressive gun control because that happens to be the political agenda of most of the media."
"In this case, where the students aren't calling for that, suddenly the media isn't interested in covering it," Cruz said.
First off, local news reports highlight that while Santa Fe is a conservative town, there were students who called for gun control reform:
Also, the majority of younger Texans are supportive of gun control measures:
A University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll from October 2017 shows 58 percent of Texas youngest generation, ages 18-29, believe gun control laws should be more strict.
A more recent poll by Quinnipiac University conducted last month, found 57 percent of Texans, ages 18-34 support, support stricter gun laws in the U.S.
In fact, across all ages, 55 percent of Texans believe in stricter gun laws, per the same Quinnipiac poll that surveyed some 1,000 respondents.
"Throw away the stereotypes. Texas voters are in favor of tighter gun laws by a solid 14-point margin, and fully 94 percent favor background checks for all gun buyers," wrote a Quinnipiac poll analyst.
With or without CNN, those figures are only likely to increase in support of gun reform.
Joshua Blank, manager of polling and research at the Texas Politics Project where the University of Texas/Texas Tribune polls are conducted, told the Texas Tribune the increase in mass shootings will make the possibility of gun control measures more likely.
"With each one of these shootings, what you tend to see is a major uptick in attitudes in favor of greater gun restrictions," Blank said. "With each additional tragedy, there tends to be more people who further embrace the possibility of more gun restrictions."
And Beto has been busy touring the state and getting the base riled up:
Rep. Beto O'Rourke was in Dallas on Thursday to help unify and fire up the Democratic voters he'll need for his underdog campaign against incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz.
But though the rally was dubbed as an event to honor Democrats who ran for office during the primaries, as well as heal the bruises the competitive races created, O'Rourke was making nonpartisan appeals.
"I'm glad the Democratic Party is coming together, that we're done with the primary and runoffs, but unity has to extend beyond our own party. Unity has to mean all of us in the state of Texas," O'Rourke, D-El Paso, told The Dallas Morning News before the rally. "Not only are we not going to win if we can't get beyond just our own party, but we're not going to be able to deliver on the high expectations we're setting for people."
After a bruising primary that created divides within the party, Dallas County Democrats know they need solidarity to beat local Republicans in November and provide critical votes for statewide candidates like O'Rourke and Lupe Valdez, the former Dallas County sheriff who's running for governor against incumbent Republican Greg Abbott.
Dallas County is also ground zero for efforts by Texas Democrats to win at least seven state House seats held by Republicans, while defending incumbent Democratic Rep. Victoria Neave, the freshman lawmaker who represents North Dallas' 107th District.
A deep-blue Dallas County could provide critical votes for statewide Democratic candidates like O'Rourke. A Democrat hasn't won a statewide contest in Texas since 1994, after which the party started to gain control of Dallas County politics.
Party leaders hope to use their clout to boost the margins for O'Rourke and others, such as former state district judge John Creuzot. Creuzot is challenging Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson, the Republican Abbott appointed to replace Susan Hawk, who resigned in 2016 for health reasons.
"We're going to push together on our coordinated campaign," Dallas County Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Donovan said. "We're going to make Dallas County even bluer."
We have a real shot here at unseating Cruz and Beto can make that happen. Click here to donate and get involved with Beto’s campaign.
Also, let’s use this same enthusiasm to flip a Governor’s seat. Click here to donate and get involved with Sheriff Lupe Valdez’s (D. TX) gubernatorial campaign.