The walls are closing in around Ted Cruz, and the Republican senator is lashing out.
Cruz, who has served two terms as Texas junior senator, is facing a tough reelection challenge from former NFL player and current U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who won Texas’ Democratic Senate primary in a landslide victory last month.
On Wednesday, Cruz begged for donation on Fox News while complaining that Allred is out fundraising his 2018 challenger, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, by leaps and bounds.
“The Democrats are coming after me, they are gonna spend more than $100 million this year, George Soros is already spending millions of dollars in the state of Texas,” Cruz told Sean Hannity. “My opponent a liberal Democrat named Colin Allred, is out raising Beto O’Rourke, my last opponent, 3 to 1. They are flooding millions of dollars into Texas — and the reason is simple. You remember my last reelection, it was a 3-point race. I won by 2.6 percent.”
Cruz’s fundraising concerns may explain a very shady financial arrangement the senator has with iHeartMedia, the hosting platform of his podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz. Last week, The Houston Chronicle reported that the radio network paid out $630,850 to a Cruz-affiliated super Pac, Truth and Courage. According to FEC data reviewed by the Chronicle, the six-figure sum represents about a third of the PAC’s fundraising haul since 2023. The LoseCruz PAC, a political action committee challenging the senator’s reelection, first reported a $214,752.98 transfer from iHeartMedia to Truth and Courage in March.
A Cruz campaign spokesperson told the Chronicle that the senator “appears on ‘Verdict’ three times a week for free.” A representative from the company said the funds were the proceeds of sales for the podcast’s advertising inventory, and that Cruz “volunteers his time to host this podcast and isn’t compensated for it.” But if iHeartMedia is sending massive checks to a PAC affiliated with his reelection campaign, is there really no benefit to Cruz?
According to Shanna Ports, a senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center who was interviewed by the Chronicle, the payments raise questions of “whether this is an unlawful contribution,” as federal officeholders are barred from soliciting contributions over $5,000 to PACs.
When asked about the payments by ABC 13 on Wednesday, Cruz was visibly annoyed.
“It really is sad what’s happening to the media,” Cruz said when asked how he could reconcile the payments with his claims he isn’t compensated for the podcast. “The media exists right now seemingly to parrot left-wing Democrat attacks.”
Cruz then deflected to a 2022 complaint filed by the Campaign Legal Center with the Senate Ethics Committee. “The group that brought that attack is a left-wing Democrat attack group. And by the way, you know what you didn’t mention in your question? The fact that they filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee raising these same issues. You know what the Senate Ethics Committee did? They threw it out.”
The senator, unsurprisingly, was not being entirely truthful. While the Campaign Legal Center did raise an ethics complaint that was ultimately fruitless, the complaint had nothing to do with the payments that have come to light in recent weeks and focused on the legality of the podcast deal given iHeartMedia’s status as a registered government lobbyist.
Cruz barely managed to eke out a win against O’Rourke in 2018, and the Republican Party at large is showing their concern that Texas — once a reliable red state — is quickly becoming a purple battleground. Cruz is prominently featured on the website for “Deploy Your Vote,” a Texas get-out-the-vote encouraging Republicans to vote early despite the GOP’s widespread villainization of early voting initiatives in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 election loss.
“When you vote early, Democrats can’t engage in last-minute games like running out of paper ballots,” Cruz says in a promotional video for the website. “When you vote early, they can’t cheat. When we all vote early, they can’t win.”
