A lot of big news out of Texas. First, there’s this:
More than two months have passed since Rep. Beto O'Rourke challenged Sen. Ted Cruz to debates. Cruz has said repeatedly that he fully intends to, when the time is right.
So far, the moment hasn't arrived.
The campaigns exchanged letters this week showing the congressman nudging Cruz to commit, and the senator still playing for time.
"He was a Princeton debate champ. This is his thing," O'Rourke said on Wednesday. "I don't in any way think that this would be easy but I do think it's necessary."
But he said, "It's been hard to pin him down."
The El Paso Democrat's campaign manager wrote Monday to Cruz aides, noting the lack of movement since an initial proposal more than two months ago to set up debates.
"On April 24, we extended an invitation to Senator Cruz to participate in six debates — including two in Spanish — reaching all twenty media markets in the state," O'Rourke's campaign manager, Jody Casey, wrote on Monday.
That letter set a May 10 deadline for a response and when 60 days passed, Casey reiterated the request.
"Because Senator Cruz recently indicated that he is uncomfortable debating in Spanish, our campaign would be happy to add two additional debates in English instead," she added.
Bryan English, a senior adviser to the Cruz campaign, replied the same day, acknowledging the letters of April 24 and July 9.
But then this happened:
Yeah, Cruz is fucking pathetic. But I have to give kudos to Salon for making this point:
The Morning News elaborated on Cruz's debating bona fides:
Cruz was a top competitive debater at Princeton University. He argued nine cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, many as the state's chief appellate lawyer. He held his own through a dozen debates against Donald Trump and others in the 2016 presidential primaries, plus eight other candidate forums.
Cruz has managed to maintain a 5 to 11 point lead over O'Rourke in polls taken over the past month-and-a-half, explaining why would want to avoid compromising his position through a debate that could still conceivably go poorly for him. Perhaps reinforcing that concern on Cruz's part is the fact that O'Rourke has continued to outperform Cruz in fundraising. As the Texas Tribune reported:
Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, raised more than $10.4 million over the past three months, he announced Wednesday, revealing a sum that takes his already massive fundraising to new heights.
And the El Paso congressman again vastly outraised the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz, who took in less than half of his challenger's haul — $4.6 million — at the same time, according to his campaign. O'Rourke also took a decisive lead in cash on hand over Cruz with four months to Election Day, $14 million to $10.4 million.
O'Rourke's latest haul is easily his biggest yet — topping the $6.7 million he raked in during the first quarter, which was far more than Cruz raised for the same period. Cruz's second-quarter fundraising also was his largest yet, though not nearly enough to keep up with O'Rourke's torrid pace.
O'Rourke has now outraised Cruz for every period but one since O'Rourke launched his Senate bid in March 2017.
With Beto constantly outraising Cruz and proving to be one hell of a candidate, no wonder he’s scared shitless to debate him:
If ever there were a moment for Texas to flip, you would think it would be this one. Trump has equated Mexican immigrants with vermin and has locked children in cages at the border, a spectacle that has the potential to mobilize Latino voters. “Donald Trump is a great recruitment strategy for Democrats vis-à-vis Latinos,” Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez told me in late June as he rushed to a protest in Brownsville, Texas. But even before the family-separation policy erupted into a political crisis, Trump was showing signs of weakness in Texas. The president’s average Gallup approval rating over his first year in office was just 39 percent in the state, lower than in many places that are politically competitive. Of course, Trump won’t be on the ballot in the midterm elections. But the senator who will be, Ted Cruz, is someone Democrats hate with a passion, and even he admits Republicans face a risky environment.
“There is no doubt that the far left in Texas and across the country is energized right now,” Cruz told me over the phone in April as he drove between West Texas campaign events. “We are going to see very high Democratic turnout in November.
“That being said,” Cruz went on, “there are a whole lot more conservatives in Texas than liberals.” That is the conventional wisdom, but Democrats believe there are latent reservoirs of liberalism just waiting for the right candidate to tap them. And maybe they have finally found one in Cruz’s opponent, Beto O’Rourke — the vigorous, toothsome, tech-savvy, culture-straddling congressman from the border city of El Paso, who might as well have been conjured to life in a South by Southwest keynote speech.
O’Rourke has defied the campaign strategies that his party usually employs, rejecting both Clintonian triangulation and data-driven microtargeting of likely Democratic voters. Instead, he is running as a populist insurgent in the mold of Bernie Sanders, driving all over the vast state, even to rural areas where Democrats are scarce, trailed by an iPhone camera that beams his every move to Facebook. His campaign has created a sensation both within Texas — where he draws huge, adoring crowds — and among his national social-media following. Largely through online appeals, O’Rourke has raised more than $13 million, more than any other Senate challenger, Republican or Democrat, and he has done so by running as an unabashed liberal.
At freewheeling town-hall meetings, O’Rourke espouses gun control, single-payer health care, and other progressive positions, sprinkling his speeches with folksy anecdotes and occasional profanity. But his signature issue is immigration. For months, even as national Democratic leaders have hemmed and hawed about the proper response to Trump’s outrages, O’Rourke has embraced immigrants regardless of their status — “The right thing to do is to legalize America,” he says — and rhapsodized about the Tex-Mex ethnic mix of the border region. On Father’s Day, he led a protest outside the tent city in Tornillo, where the authorities were holding unaccompanied minors.
“You have this moment where the very viability of our democracy is in question,” O’Rourke told me recently. “It just wasn’t within your imagination that we would be taking 3-year-old kids from their moms. Yet what I see everywhere I go is that people are definitely calling this out, and they’re describing their concern and the urgency and just how fucked up all this is.” That blunt message might seem better designed to appeal to a reader in New York than a swing voter in Texas, and yet O’Rourke has managed to pull within striking distance of Cruz. In mid-June, the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune published a poll that showed O’Rourke down by five points among registered voters, with 17 percent undecided. He’s been helped by a surge of local volunteers who found one another on Facebook. “They’ve just said, ‘Look, we’ve got to get this shit done because of what’s going on, and we’re the people to do it,’ ” O’Rourke says. “There’s a real power to it, and there’s a real joy in it.”
Let’s seal the deal and win this damn thing! Click here to donate and get involved with Beto’s campaign.