Sad Ted Cruz Phone-Banking Will Brighten Your Day

I may disagree with almost everything he stands for, but it’s hard for me not to feel a little sympathy for Sen. Ted Cruz. After watching the video released Thursday of Cruz phone-banking for Trump — and the Twitter roast that followed — my pity for the senator is real, even if I am laughing at him.

After attempting (and failing) to save his party and nation from the peril of a Donald Trump presidency, briefly taking a bold stand for sanity at the Republican National Convention, Cruz crumpled and endorsed Trump in late September. Cruz’s resting mourn-face only accentuated the harsh reality of having backed the man who insulted your wife’s looks and suggested your father had a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and his sadness was on full display in the somewhat bizarre video from the Dallas Morning News.

“Hi, this is Ted Cruz calling,” he began, leaving a voicemail and seemingly defeating the benefit of making individual phone calls by sounding as much like a pre-recorded call as possible. “This election is critical for the direction of our country, and I urge you to come out and support freedom, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

The Trump calls are strange for many reasons, not the least of which is that Cruz avoids mentioning the candidate’s name. The image of the one-time White House hopeful having seemingly ceded all of his high ground to shill for the lowest of the low should be just sad. However, since we’re talking about the man who was willing to grind the government to a halt by filibustering the funding of Obamacare, the Twitter-Left was naturally going to have a bit of fun with it.

Honestly, it’s kind of hard to understand exactly why Cruz decided to back Trump after the lengths he’d gone to to avoid it. If he’d been able to maintain his non-endorsement of Trump, if Trump lost, Cruz would have earned “I told you so” bragging rights to start seeding a 2020 run. If Trump won, well, it’s possible that Cruz might have had to pay a political price for his non-support, but it seems unlikely that a Trump administration could afford to lose a vote in a super-majority-less Senate.

And there’s an eerie kind of logic to having someone like Cruz phone bank for Trump without using Trump’s name in a state like Texas. Although FiveThirtyEight gives Trump an 87.5 percent chance of winning the Lone Star State, he only leads by 7.3 percent in their polling average (compared with the 16 points Romney won the state by in 2012).

The likelihood of Texas going blue for the first time since Jimmy Carter won the state in 1976 is pretty slim, but in this election, where anything seems likely to happen, maybe the Republicans can’t be too careful.