by Ted Cruz
That video went viral. People liked it. They laughed out loud, and they sent it to their friends. We then ratcheted up that same narrative with a website, DuckingDewhurst.com. Why, we asked, was David Dewhurst ducking the grassroots?
We then purchased a life-size duck suit and would send a young campaign staffer dressed as a duck to Dewhurst campaign events. He would hold a poster board with “DuckingDewhurst.com” written in crayon. It drove the other campaign nuts. They’d have an event with firefighters, hoping for a nice newspaper story about how Dewhurst loves firefighters. But the lead of the story would be, “Today, a man dressed up as a duck greeted Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst. . . .”
The duck suit started driving the narrative that Dewhurst was out of touch. At a number of the candidate forums, the organizers would set up an empty chair with the name David Dewhurst on it. At one of them, a grassroots activist brought a milk carton with Dewhurst’s picture on the side: “Have you seen this man?”
All of it was designed from a grassroots perspective to generate momentum.
For the first phase of the campaign, the Dewhurst camp ignored us entirely. But as we gained steam, they changed course and began to carpet-bomb us. If they couldn’t get the voters to love Dewhurst, they figured they’d make them hate his leading opponent.
Dewhurst zeroed in on a couple of the cases I’d litigated in private practice. One involved a trademark dispute between two commercial tire companies. Both of those companies manufactured their tires in China, though one happened to be headquartered in the United States. Morgan Lewis represented the other company, based in China. I didn’t actually argue the case, but I was part of the appellate team. Not that such distinctions mattered in politics. The opposing litigant was featured in a Dewhurst ad—one that might have been written in 1950—charging me with siding with the “Red Chinese” against American jobs.
The Dewhurst campaign even printed fake Chinese currency with my face on it, altered to make me look Chinese.
Another attack ad involved litigation connected to a tragic scandal in Pennsylvania in which two corrupt state trial judges took bribes from the owner of two juvenile detention centers. Both the judges and the owner were rightfully incarcerated for their part in the terrible ordeal. Also swept up in scandal was the developer who had built the prisons; he was convicted of failing to disclose the real estate finder’s fee he had paid for getting the contract to build the prisons.
Morgan Lewis was retained to litigate the subsequent contract dispute between the real estate developer and his insurance company, and I helped handle the civil appeal.
The Dewhurst camp conflated all of this to assert that I was somehow responsible for the death of children. They ran a heart-wrenching ad with the mother of a wrongfully incarcerated teenage boy who had taken his own life.
The Dewhurst team used their unlimited resources to their advantage. These ads were run to saturation. You couldn’t turn on the television without seeing ads about how I supported the “Red Chinese” in killing American jobs, and judges who wrongfully imprisoned children.
When those ads started running, we faced a decision point. At the time, a prominent national pollster was generously giving me informal advice. I sent him the Chinese tire ad. He watched it. I asked him his thoughts. He said, “This is fatal. If you don’t respond to this immediately, you’re dead.” That kind of comment gets your attention. “Fatal” is not a mild diagnosis.
My chief strategist, Jason Johnson, strongly disagreed. He advocated that we not respond to it, because he didn’t want the whole race to come down to whether or not I was in fact a “Red Chinese communist.” Instead, he advised, we should save our money for communicating our own positive vision. After much thought, I took a deep breath and went with Jason.
One of the data points Jason used to convince me came from nightly tracking polls he suggested we pay for. These are rolling polls taken every single night to see how public opinion is changing in real time. Even though we weren’t in an ideal financial position to pay for these expensive polls, Jason convinced me that they were worth the investment. “If you start hemorrhaging because of Dewhurst’s attacks,” he said, “we’ll get a response on. But let’s not blow our money first, until we actually see that it’s doing real damage.”
I’ll confess, in those first couple of weeks of the attack ads, I felt a little bit like a boxer who walks into the center of the ring, puts his fists straight up, and just lets his heavyweight opponent slug him repeatedly in the ribs while doing nothing to defend himself.
The tracking polls showed that the attacks were having an effect. My negatives were going up steadily, about a point a night. However, simultaneously, Dewhurst’s negatives were going up, about 1.4 points each night. In other words every time he was punching me, it was hurting him even more than it was hurting me. The tracking polls also showed that even though my negatives were going up, the percentage of people who said, “I’m voting for Cruz,” didn’t dip down.
I thought about these ads later, when I read Senator Marco Rubio’s autobiography about his incredible campaign in Florida. Marco, like me, started out as an impossible underdog against the formerly Republican governor Charlie Crist. He ran an inspired, and inspiring campaign. What I found most interesting about his book, aside from the similarity of the campaigns we waged, was the observation that his opponent’s campaign was convinced he was an arrogant hothead. Rubio’s opponent approached the debates hoping to provoke him into blowing his top.
Marco has become a good friend, and he is many things—but an arrogant hothead is not one of them. His book speculated that his opponent’s error was caused by his campaign’s assumption that as a Cuban-American, Marco was a fiery Latin. Likewise, the Dewhurst campaign proceeded from the assumption that I too must be a fiery hothead, especially because, from their perspective, it was the height of audacity for someone who was not an elected official to dare run for “their” Senate seat instead of waiting for his turn.
The possibility that I simply believed that our country was in crisis and we needed to get back to the free-market principles and constitutional liberties upon which we were founded never occurred to them. Be that as it may, Dewhurst’s effort to prod me into losing my cool proved ineffective.
Under Texas law, if no candidate breaks 50 percent of the vote in a primary contest, the top two candidates go to a head-to-head runoff. In such a situation, the challenger has a significant advantage. When a runoff has been triggered, a majority of voters have already voted against the front-runner. From day one, our strategy was to get to a runoff.
Because voters need to make the time to vote on an unusual election day, runoffs also elevate the importance of intensity, which in our campaign was never in short supply. This intensity began with our campaign staff and was obvious to anyone on Twitter. We paid our staffers about half what the Dewhurst campaign paid their staff, but when the dinner bell rang, Dewhurst’s staffers disappeared.
This led to one of the more amusing tweets of the campaign. One activist tweeted: “It’s past 6 p.m., so all the paid Dewhurst staffers have gone home. Now all that’s left are real grassroots activists, and we’re all with Cruz.” What was striking was how much truth there was in that sentiment.
Our campaign’s strength was that we were blessed with true believers, individual citizens who fought with a passion that was unbridled. If on primary day, David Dewhurst was at 49.99 percent, I was confident we would win a runoff—primarily because of intensity.
But despite all our efforts, to get to a runoff we needed more cash. Two weeks before the primary, I sat down with Heidi and told her, “Sweetheart, I want to put all of our liquid net worth into the campaign.”
Now, I don’t necessarily advise having this conversation with your spouse. Heidi and I, at that point, had been married eleven years. I was fairly confident she would agree, but I assumed it would be only after a difficult conversation of several hours.
Instead, just a f
ew seconds after I raised the question, she looked at me and simply said, “Yes, let’s do it.”
Even after having been married for more than a decade, that she agreed so readily left me flabbergasted. For most of our marriage, I’d been in public service; we were living comfortably, but without deep financial resources. Indeed, when I stepped down as solicitor general, we had limited savings and I still had substantial student loans. My years in private practice enabled me to pay off those loans in 2009, and to accumulate about $1.2 million in savings.
We put all of it into the campaign. Had we not done so, in the final week of the campaign we would have been dark on television.
My dad, like Heidi, was an incredible supporter. A septuagenarian who had survived everything from poverty to Cuba’s prisons, his energy amazed me. Dad was on the road six days a week, driving alone for thousands of miles, preaching at churches and speaking all over the state.
At one candidate forum in West Texas, my dad appeared as a surrogate for me after driving five hours to get there; he drove all the way back home that same night. When I called to ask how it had gone, he said, “Well, one of the other candidates sent a surrogate as well. At the end of the forum, the surrogate for the other candidate came up and said, ‘Can I have a Cruz yard sign?’ ”
Dad’s encounter was a good sign, but outside of our campaign, few people expected the election returns that came in on primary day. To the shock of the political world that had months ago predicted a Dewhurst landslide, David Dewhurst was only at 44 percent. I was at 34 percent. The runoff was on.
In many ways, the runoff was far easier than the campaign had been. Our greatest impediment had been the perception that winning was impossible. The argument made endlessly in the country clubs and Chambers of Commerce across Texas was that Dewhurst was inevitable. In one instant, when the election results came in and we were in a runoff, that argument was shattered. But not with everyone.
As usual, Washington types were the last to get what was happening. The influential online site Politico reported after the primary result that “Dewhurst remains the favorite in the run-off. Backed by Gov. Rick Perry and much of his political operation, he will still hold a sizable financial advantage and will be able to tap his own deep pockets at a moment’s notice.”
Within days of the primary, we were back in the field with another poll to assess where the race was. Our first poll showed us instantly with a double-digit lead over Dewhurst.
It’s worth noting how fast those numbers changed. On primary day, we were 10 points down; just a couple of days later we were 15 points up. That’s a 25-point swing, in a matter of hours. That’s a pretty good measure of the impact of the establishment’s “electability” argument; inevitably, they argue that only the most moderate candidate can win. The facts often don’t back them up. When their “electability” claim is disproven (as getting to the runoff did in our race), voters often prefer a real conservative and the numbers move dramatically.
Later that week, when Heidi and I were driving to church, she said, “Okay, great. You’re in the runoff. We’re going to win.”
I said, “Yes, that’s true. But we’ve still got to raise another three million dollars in the next three weeks.” She nearly had a heart attack.
After she recovered from the shock, however, Heidi stepped up and took the lead, along with Chad Sweet, one of our closest friends, who was volunteering as our finance director. They led our sixty-member finance team in putting together the “60 by 60” project: sixty people raising $60,000 apiece so we could go back up on the air. We told people we were “all in” and that we needed their help.
When I was in Lubbock, Texas, I had an encounter with a voter that was a powerful illustration of the grassroots campaign and the sense that many others were “all in,” too. An older gentleman came up to me and grabbed me by the shoulder. He said, “Ted, I’m seventy-three years old. I’m retired. In the primary, I gave you twenty-five hundred dollars out of my retirement savings.” Then he told me he was giving me another $2,500 in the runoff, “because if we don’t turn this country around, my retirement savings is going away.”
It is breathtaking and humbling to look in the eyes of a man who is asking you to help turn this country around, and the fact that it happened repeatedly never detracted from its power. Over and over again, hundreds of times, men and women looked me in the eyes, squeezed my hand as hard they could, and said, “Ted, please, don’t go to Washington and become one of them.”
Another time, down in the heavily Hispanic and largely Democratic Rio Grande Valley, we had a Saturday night rally with about three hundred people. The chairman of the county Republican Party introduced me by saying, “Most politicians come to the Valley and do a thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser at the country club. Ted is different. This is not a fund-raiser. Ted is here to listen to you, to hear your concerns, and to have conversation.”
I got up and said, “Javier, thank you for your hospitality and that very kind introduction. I have to disagree, however, with one thing you said. You said ‘this is not a fund-raiser.’ Everything we do is a fund-raiser. If you can max out and give five thousand dollars, we desperately need the funds. But every one of you can give ten, or twenty-five, or fifty dollars. And we need your help. I cannot win this race. But you can. Together, we can win.”
By the end of the runoff, astonishingly, we had actually outraised David Dewhurst. With the support of every lobbyist and just about every major donor, he had raised $9 million. We had raised $9.5 million. His came from 3,000 donors; ours came from more than 34,000 donors. Republican women, young people, Hispanics, those men and women at that Rio Grande rally. (Of course, Dewhurst also wrote his own check for more than $25 million on top of what he raised, which is why we got outspent 3 to 1.)
Sometimes people ask me, “When you have a room full of Republican senators yelling at you to back down and compromise your principles, why don’t you just give in?” The answer is simple. I just remember all those men and women who pleaded with me, “Don’t become one of them.” I’m not willing to disappoint them.
By the time of the runoff, Dewhurst’s negative campaign was becoming a liability for him. But instead of shifting gears, he doubled down. And because he had so much money, his anti-Cruz flyers flooded mailboxes all over Texas.
I believe strongly in Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t disagree on policy—campaigns are supposed to focus on records and policy differences—but it does mean that personal and character attacks have no place in politics. And, despite the pounding we took, I deliberately chose not to reciprocate; indeed, to the contrary, I made a point to praise Dewhurst’s character and integrity.
And so when one of his flyers went to the wrong address, I asked Dewhurst about it during a debate on live television:
“You know, I think you can tell a lot about a candidate by how they conduct their campaigns. From day one, my campaign has kept the focus on the issues. What we’re talking about tonight are amnesty and payroll tax and the lieutenant governor’s record and my record. That’s what Texans want. Unfortunately the lieutenant governor has not reciprocated in that. He has spent over ten million dollars of his vast personal fortune flooding the airwaves with false personal attack ads, maligning my character.
“You know my dad fled Cuba as a teenager. He was imprisoned and tortured in Cuba and he came here seeking the American dream. Just this week, my father received at his home a mailer from Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst that has the picture of the lieutenant governor on the front of a flag, and an American flag, and then on the back, it has a picture of me in front of a Chinese flag. One of the worst things you can say in politics is to malign someone’s patriotism. What the lieutenant governor sent to my father was a mailer that said, ‘Ted Cruz worked against our country and lied about it.’ ”
I turned to the lieutenant governor, who was standing a few feet away. He
was visibly uncomfortable. “You know, I have to say, Mr. Lieutenant Governor, you’re better than this. This is not what politics is supposed to be about. This is why people are disgusted with the nasty personal attack ads. What I would ask you standing here today is, do you stand by this? Do you stand by maligning my patriotism?”
At first Dewhurst tried to tap-dance around the mailer, but eventually he began wielding those charges directly at me—accusing me of trying to kill American jobs and supporting the wrongful imprisonment of kids. He was interrupted by boos in the crowd. At that point, it was clear to almost everyone that the campaign was effectively over.
On July 31, the day of the runoff, Texas experienced a record turnout. Even though it was 106 degrees outside, more than 1.1 million voters showed up to vote. And when the votes were tallied, we didn’t just squeak by; we won by 14 points.
Indeed, we received more raw votes in the runoff than Dewhurst had received sixty days earlier, when the turnout had been 1.4 million. We were thrilled and somewhat surprised when the Associated Press called the race less than an hour after the polls closed.
Surprised—but not as surprised as David Dewhurst was. That evening, when the lieutenant governor called me to concede, it was clear he was stunned. He had woken up that morning to the news that, according to his pollster, he was up by 5 points. That pollster was off by 19 points.
In fact, Dewhurst had been told every day of the election that he was going to win, by a team that frankly did not serve his interests. In politics, there are far too many mercenaries who treat campaigns like salesmen selling bars of soap. Their perfect candidate is a candidate with unlimited financial resources, who can afford to keep writing check after check after check. David Dewhurst personally put more than $25 million of his own money into the race. Yet his team did not tell him the truth about the state of the race, presumably because they wanted him to keep writing checks.
The team robbed him blind, not just figuratively, but in fact literally. Months after the election, it became public that Dewhurst’s campaign manager had embezzled more than $1 million from the campaign. He was sentenced to 7 years in prison.
