New Poll Offers Encouraging News for Senator Ted Cruz’s Reelection Efforts

The mid-term election season is upon us (in case you’ve missed the onslaught of commercial airtime, touting candidates A, B, or C in your state).

One of the more closely watched races is taking place in the state of Texas, as incumbent Senator Ted Cruz seeks to fight off his Democrat challenger, Beto O’Rourke.

For starters, you would think this would be a cake walk for Ted Cruz.

Cruz was the runner-up in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, battling Donald Trump in what turned out to be a particularly nasty race to the nomination.

The 2016 primary season saw Trump and his goons make disparaging references to Ted Cruz’s wife’s appearance, as well as her mental well-being.

Trump’s pal, David Pecker, boss of the supermarket tabloid, the National Enquirer, ran a front page story implying that Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, was somehow involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Then there were the rumors of numerous Ted Cruz affairs – pretty rich, coming from the Trump camp, given his multiple and well-documented extramarital infidelities.

All of this made for an epic battle between the constitutional conservative and the barely-coherent reality TV star.

Unfortunately, GOP voters chose the short-fingered vulgarian.

That’s Trump, for those who still haven’t caught on.

The subsequent struggle on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio back in July 2016 was Ground Zero for the “NeverTrump” movement, as Cruz loyalists pushed against the GOP establishment to have another shot at replacing Trump as the candidate.

Now, with that recap done, fast forward to the present, and to the current race for that Senate seat.

It’s important because Texas has been a reliably red state and Ted Cruz is generally well-thought of in Republican circles. That being said, he rubbed some the wrong way when he didn’t immediately endorse Donald Trump’s candidacy while appearing at the 2016 convention.

Rather than endorse Trump outright, he told voters “Vote your conscience.”

Something about that made Trump’s supporters go absolutely APE!

Strange that a call to vote their conscience could elicit such a violent reaction from them.

Ultimately, Cruz said he would vote for the nominee, but some Trump loyalists have never forgiven him for that.

Now, his race against O’Rourke is being seen as a test of Trump’s performance as much as it is a test of Cruz’s continued popularity.

If a state like Texas can let key races go blue… There’s a problem.

Recent polls have shown a tight race between Cruz and O’Rourke, causing some concern among Republican politicos.

Today, however, a poll from JMC Analytics may provide some cause for relief.

If the election for the Senate seat were held today, 47 percent said they would support Cruz, compared to 40 percent who indicated support for O’Rourke, the JMC Analytics survey found. Seven percent were undecided.

The latest numbers show a wider gap for Cruz than a survey released last month by Quinnipiac University that said the race was “too close to call “with Cruz just 3 points ahead.

It may still seem like a tight number, and it is. Still, the divide is moving in the right direction for Republicans in the Senate.

O’Rourke’s stumbling block may be name recognition. Surely, more know him now than knew him when he first entered the race. Still, he’s enjoying a slightly better favorability rating than that of Senator Cruz.

For O’Rourke, 35 percent of survey respondents have a favorable opinion of him. That’s in comparison to 20 percent who have an unfavorable opinion. Another 39 percent say, “Beto who?”

For Senator Cruz, he rates 42 percent favorability among survey respondents. Forty-four percent, however, view him unfavorably. Eleven percent have no opinion.

Cruz is also trailing O’Rourke in fundraising, as the Democrat machine is expected to churn particularly hard in states like Texas. That may not matter, however, given that he still hasn’t managed to get that name recognition factor in play.

Cruz also has a reliable fundraising team in his corner, with several PACS: a Republican leadership PAC and the Jobs, Freedom, and Security PAC.

During the Texas primary, Republican voters turned out, outnumbering Democrat voters by around a half-million. That matters in the wider scheme, as well. Who can get those voters to the polls?

To be clear, the JMC Analytics survey is a small sampling, with 575 registered voters being polled. Because of that small sampling, the margin of error is 4.1 percent. It was conducted from May 19 to May 21.