He’s disparaged his own Republican leader as a liar and dismissed fellow senators as part of the «Washington cartel.» But now, with his presidential prospects hanging in the balance, Ted Cruz is moving closer than ever to the D.C. establishment.
Directly and through surrogates, the Texas senator is aggressively reaching out to his Senate colleagues as he prepares for the possibility of a convention floor fight against Donald Trump. And Cruz’s emissaries on Capitol Hill are now signaling to senior Republicans that Cruz would be willing to work with them as the GOP nominee in a way Trump would not.
So far, Cruz can tout only two Senate endorsements, from conservative Mike Lee and the deal-making centrist Lindsey Graham. But Senate Republicans are now at least listening to an intensified pitch from Cruz and his allies: That he’s a far more stable choice for the top of the ticket and for the GOP’s hopes of keeping the Senate.
His trouncing of Trump in the Wisconsin primary Tuesday night could bolster Cruz’s case to senators.
“With Cruz we can win the election, hold the Senate,” said former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), who was tapped by Cruz to lead outreach to members of Congress. «I think with Trump we almost certainly lose the Senate, lose the election for president, even lose the House.”
With a big win in Wisconsin, Cruz may finally draw the establishment support from Congress he’s so far lacked in his cage match with Trump. But he and his scant supporters on the Hill have their work cut out for them: The Texas senator is still perceived by many fellow GOP senators as an uncompromising hardliner willing to do anything to further his own ambitions, but nothing to help the party.
But Lee said in an interview that after talking to more than two dozen of his colleagues, he believes the bulk of Republican senators no longer hold a grudge toward the Texas firebrand.
“I hope and expect a lot of them will end up endorsing Sen. Cruz. It hasn’t happened yet … but I do think it’s going to be coming,” Lee said Tuesday. “A lot of them have some real concerns with Mr. Trump. That resonates. And for that reason I think most of them will come around.”
Cruz himself has directly spoken with influential conservative Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and traded voicemails with Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, whose late-voting state could be critical to blocking Trump’s path to the nomination. Cruz’s campaign acknowledges that at this key juncture in the election, he must broaden his support within the party.
“We’re in a situation where we’re trying to galvanize Republicans behind us,” Cruz communications director Alice Stewart said Tuesday. She declined to say whether Cruz still considered Senate leadership to be part of the “Washington cartel,” but insisted that engaging fellow senators wouldn’t compromise his conservative record.
That the Cruz campaign is doing outreach at all is a turnabout from three weeks ago, when his campaign manager Jeff Roe told reporters that “it’s not like we have some phone tree of United States senators» to seek out for endorsements.
Much of the effort underway is being left to his surrogates. Gramm has spoken with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), as well as House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), he said. The former senator explained to them why he’s backing Cruz, and noted that Cruz, unlike Trump, lines up with Republican leadership on fiscal and national security issues.
Lee and Graham have been calling and meeting with Republican senators to gauge their level of enthusiasm for a colleague who’s called McConnell a great leader for Democrats and devised the tactics that resulted in the first government shutdown in two decades.
Graham has even been on something of a comedy tour, taking his quick wit to venues such as «The Daily Show” to explain why he’s backing Cruz after joking a few weeks ago that there would be no conviction if the Texan were murdered on the Senate floor.
“People have asked me why I did what I did,” Graham said in an interview. “I think we can form a party with Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and others. I think that’d be a strong, viable Republican Party.”
Largely absent from the Capitol as he campaigns nonstop, Cruz made a key step toward his colleagues last month by bringing onboard Gramm, a longtime Texas senator who ran for president in 1996 and was backing Marco Rubio before he dropped out. Gramm has stressed that Cruz, as the nominee, would actively work to highlight areas of agreement with the rest of the ticket, while Republicans can count on no such thing from Trump.
“When this is over, we need to be together on a set of issues we agree on,” Gramm said, characterizing the message he relayed to McConnell and others in Senate leadership. “The good news is, while people may have had conflicts with Ted, our basic leadership totally agrees with him on the issues. It’s a huge difference with Trump, but basically we’re all together.”
Gramm said, however, that he’s not making a hard sell with senators. And Cornyn confirmed that in an interview, saying the former senator merely explained his own reasoning for publicly backing Cruz and pushing his candidacy. A spokesman for McConnell confirmed that Gramm has spoken with the majority leader but said the conversation was not centered around prodding the GOP leader to endorse Cruz.
Cruz’s outreach efforts are complicated by his physical distance from Washington. It’s been weeks since Cruz spoke to Cornyn directly even though they serve the same state and their offices work together frequently. Cruz has not appeared in the Senate since a Feb. 10 vote on North Korea sanctions.
Cruz “wants people to think he’s got his establishment support. But he’s not doing anything on his own,” said one top GOP operative on Capitol Hill.
He briefly considered a trip to Washington in March to speak with colleagues before deciding against it. Lee said that he believes Cruz will soon return to the Capitol to lay out the stakes to his colleagues.
“I’m sure he will at some point,” Lee said.
In the meantime, many Republicans on Capitol Hill are privately growing more comfortable with Cruz than Trump as the nominee. They figure Cruz’s party-line positions are more predictable and less likely to land vulnerable GOP senators in hot water than Trump’s could with controversial pronouncements on abortion and nuclear weapons.
“When people ask me why I did what I did,» Graham said of his decision to get behind Cruz, «I say: ‘It’s important. Clearly Ted was not my first choice by any means but we are in a position now as a party that we’ve got to pick a path.’ The Trump path to me is a disaster.”
Not everyone is buying it yet. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said Lee called him up recently and said the party needs to “rally around” Cruz.
Asked if he was receptive to such an idea, Flake responded: “No, not at this point. I’m not ruling anything out. But I’m under no illusion an [endorsement] means much of anything.”
Poilitico March 6, 2016
