The one thing everyone missed in the Heidi Cruz interview about Ted Cruz
By now you’ve either slogged through the Atlantic’s painfully tone deaf and almost inexplicable new puff piece about Heidi Cruz and her life with Ted Cruz, or you’ve decided you’re better off not reading it. If you’re the former, I won’t force you to relive it, and if you’re the latter, I won’t burden you with the gory details. I do, however, want to point out the one key thing that everyone seemed to miss.
No, it’s not the “Yeah, we’re seven years into this, and we’re not buying a second home anytime soon” quote from Heidi Cruz, which speaks for itself. And no, it’s not the part where she saw that Ted Cruz looks like a “1950s movie star.” Okay, I said I wouldn’t burden you with this garbage, so I’ll get to the point: it’s that she had to do the interview at all, right now, at this particular time.
Most publicly available polls say that Ted Cruz is on his way to winning reelection in three weeks by an average of perhaps five points in the Texas Senate race against upstart Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. But if Ted and Heidi Cruz believed that Ted’s reelection was a lock, she wouldn’t be out there doing her first interview since 2016. She obviously doesn’t want to be doing press these days, she’s avoided interviews this entire election cycle – and yet suddenly here she is, trying to prop up her husband, who is supposedly running away with this race.
This stupid Heidi Cruz puff piece of an interview might give some Texas conservatives an excuse to hold their nose and vote for Ted Cruz even if they think he’s as creepy as the rest of us do. But the backlash from it might also motivate some non-conservatives in Texas to go vote against Cruz. It’s not the kind of risk you take if you think your reelection is already in the bag. What everyone missed here is that Ted Cruz just gave away that his internal numbers must be at least a little worse than publicly available polling numbers.
