I think there are a lot of Cruz supporters who are worried about whether Cruz has the financial support to win this race. If we were voting with our hearts, we would pick Cruz because he is the most conservative. But we don’t want to support someone who will run out of money and fold halfway through the campaign.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign raised $20 million during the final three months of 2015, according to the Cruz campaign. The end of the year fundraising total represents a marked increase compared to his third quarter fundraising sum of $12.2 million.
Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe wrote a memo to campaign staff that details how the campaign hauled in $45 million during the 2015 calendar year. More than 300,000 supporters donated to the Cruz campaign, and the average donation amounted to $67.
“Some campaigns are focused solely on a man, some on a movement. Ours is a hybrid of the two built to win,” Roe wrote. “There’s still plenty of work to be done to make Ted the Republican nominee and the next President, but as 2015 comes to a close, we are exactly where we want to be. Go. Fight. Win. This is OUR time!”
Roe’s memo also notes that the campaign has coordinators in each of the 163 congressional districts in the 24 states with nominating contests scheduled before March 15th. The campaign also boasts its success in recruiting more than 175,000 volunteers, and a donor base residing in two-thirds of all zip codes in the United States.
Cruz ranks first in the Washington Examiner‘s newest GOP presidential power rankings.
Cruz’s rival Marco Rubio is getting a lot of big money from pro-gay-rights donors and pro-amnesty donors. He is the favored candidate of the Republican establishment. He is famous for trying to push through an amnesty deal. Cruz is the outsider, and he doesn’t have the support of billionaire establishment donors. Cruz fought to stop Obama’s executive amnesty, so the establishment Republicans hate him and they are giving him no support. That’s why this donation-related news is so encouraging. Cruz is keeping up with the billionaire-backed candidates like Rubio because he has the support of so many individual conservative donors.
But there is even more good news if you look at the state of the PACs who are supporting Cruz.
In the mid-year reports, Cruz’s super-PACs disclosed nearly $38 million [in] donations, which put him second only to former Florida Gov. Bush in outside support.
But unlike Bush’s super-PAC Right to Rise — which has been spending its $103 million rapidly on TV advertising — Cruz’s super-PACs have been sitting on their cash.
Bush isn’t getting any kind of bump in the polls for all this spending by his PACs. Meanwhile, Cruz is in first or second place in so many states even though Cruz PACs have not been spending much money at all!
Here is the latest poll from Real Clear Politics that just came out on Wednesday:
Latest poll for the Nevada Republican primary
I think for people who would like to vote for Cruz but are worried whether he can go the distance, the answer right now is a resounding YES. He’s in a much better position financially than all of the other GOP candidates.
Ted Cruz picked up the endorsement of the National Organization for Marriage, an organization that opposes gay marriage, on Wednesday.
In a statement, NOM president Brian S. Brown said endorsing Cruz was a difficult decision as so many other “tremendous candidates” remain, including Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Marco Rubio. But the group chose Cruz, Brown wrote, because he is a “proven champion” of marriage.
“We are endorsing Sen. Ted Cruz because of the urgent need for a marriage champion to emerge from the crowded field and capture the nomination,” Brown wrote. “Unless conservatives come together behind a full-spectrum candidate — pro-marriage, pro-life, strong national defense, etc. — there is a real risk that someone like Donald Trump could win the nomination, which would be disastrous. We need a president with a proven track record of matching strong principles with concrete action, someone who will champion the fight for marriage, not walk away from it.”
Brown wrote that Trump “folded like a cheap suit” when it came to the issue of marriage, and that electing a “pro-marriage” president would mean NOM’s supporters would have an excellent chance of reversing the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage nationwide.
What I love about that is that unlike so many pro-life organizations, NOM is aware of these other issues (economics, foreign policy) and how they are all connected. Family Research Council is another organization that really undertstands how different issues are connected – they are not merely social conservatives.
NOM is the organization that is always going to bat for marriage against the Human Rights Campaign, the organization that was linked to convicted domestic terrorist and gay activist Floyd Lee Corkins.
Why would NOM endorse Cruz? Take a look for yourself:
SEN. TED CRUZ: Let me ask a question: Is there something about the left, and I am going to put the media in this category, that is obsessed with sex? Why is it the only question you want to ask concerns homosexuals? Okay, you can ask those questions over and over and over again. I recognize that you’re reading questions from MSNBC…
[…]You’re wincing. You don’t want to talk about foreign policy. I recognize you want to ask another question about gay rights. Well, you know. ISIS is executing homosexuals. You want to talk about gay rights? This week was a very bad week for gay rights because the expansion of ISIS, the expansion of radical, theocratic, Islamic zealots that crucify Christians, that behead children and that murder homosexuals. That ought to be concerning you far more than asking six questions all on the same topic.
REPORTER: Do you have a personal animosity against gay Americans?
CRUZ: Do you have a personal animosity against Christians sir? Your line of questioning is highly curious. You seem fixated on a particular subject. Look, I’m a Christian. Scripture commands us to love everybody and what I have been talking about, with respect to same-sex marriage, is the Constitution which is what we should all be focused on. The Constitution gives marriage to elected state legislators. It doesn’t give the power of marriage to a president, or to unelected judges to tear down the decisions enacted by democratically elected state legislatures.
Cruz has pledged to ignore the Supreme Court decision that redefined marriage, and he has written about various ways that conservatives could fight back in National Review. He’s been critical of Obama’s efforts to push gay and transgender issues in the armed forces. Anyone else saying things like that? Bobby Jindal was pretty good on gay marriage, but now the only two who are good on marriage are Cruz and Rubio. Cruz is by far the best, though – he graduated from Harvard Law, clerked for former Chief Justice Rehnquist, and has argued and won many cases at the Supreme Court. It’s easy to see why he was picked as the best person to defend marriage. He has the record of doing it.
Anyway, next up, the social conservatives in Iowa. Who do they like in the GOP primary?
Evangelical leader and powerbroker Bob Vander Plaats gave Ted Cruz’s campaign a boost Thursday morning with an endorsement as the Texas Republican fights Donald Trump for the lead in Iowa.
“The extraordinary leader that we need for these extraordinary times is U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz,” Vander Plaats. the president and CEO of the conservative Family Leader organization, said at a press conference at the Iowa state Capitol.
Vander Plaats is seen as one of the most influential kingmakers in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. His close alignment with political networks and activist followings could help tip the scales in the Iowa caucuses. Vander Plaats endorsed Iowa caucus winner Rick Santorum in 2012.
[…]Vander Plaats evaluated candidates on character, competence, the company that they keep, and an infrastructure “that can go the distance and become the nominee.”
“We will be going all in for Sen. Ted Cruz,” Vander Plaats said. “We have found him as a man of deep character. A man that we can fully trust, who has a consistency of convictions, who loves his god, loves his spouse, and who loves his family. We also see him to be very, very competent. Not always popular, but very competent. He has challenged both sides of the aisle. He understands what it’s going to take to get the country out of the mess that we’re currently in. We believe that he is exceptionally competent and that adds to his extraordinary leadership.”
[…]Cruz has also locked up the endorsement of Rep. Steve King, another influential Iowan among social conservative voters.
Cruz is doing pretty well in the latest national poll, as of Thursday night:
Latest GOP primary poll has Cruz in second place
Now, I think everyone agrees that Bobby Jindal was the best on the pro-life issue and on the pro-marriage issue. Nobody fought harder for the unborn and for natural marriage. But Jindal is out, Cruz is the next best. I get the feeling that he would push to allow states to decide these issues, which would be a good compromise, at this point. At least Cruz is comfortable talking about these issues, which is more than most of the other candidates do.
Investors Business Daily has some good news for us. The Democrat Party of Venezuela has been CRUSHED in a recent election.
Excerpt:
Venezuela’s voters delivered a sledgehammer blow to the country’s ruling Chavista socialists Sunday, winning a likely supermajority in the National Assembly. It’s a great awakening from a 17-year nightmare.
Given the past two decades of near-victories, electoral fraud, chicanery and fractious political opposition mistakes, many Venezuelans are still in disbelief at the scale of the victory in the nation’s legislative elections, which have decisively handed one of Venezuela’s leading governing bodies over to the democratic, pro-free-market opposition.
As this was written, the opposition, known by its Spanish initials MUD, had declared a 112-seat, or two-thirds, supermajority in the National Assembly as a result of Sunday’s vote. The Chavistas won just 46 seats.
It’s total victory in legislative terms and will enable the legislature to throw out politicized Supreme Court justices and appoint honest ones.
The new Congress can also boot corrupt election officials and appoint fair ones. And they will even be able to declare President Nicolas Maduro — the late dictator Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor — mentally unstable and unfit for office, or remove him for incompetence. They can also stop his executive orders dead.
The Congress also will have the power to free the 71 or so political prisoners now rotting in Chavista dungeons without trial, including top opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. And Venezuela’s central bank will stop destroying the country’s money, now nearly worthless.
[…]Most important, the leftist government’s mismanagement of the economy — through currency controls that prevented imports of spare parts, created shortages of basics such as toilet paper and devastated the health care system — and the central bank’s infamous money-printing spree, which has pushed Venezuelan inflation to near 700%, made ordinary life for Venezuelans hellish. There also was corruption, with as much as 1 trillion dollars in oil earnings stolen or misappropriated over the years by high-living Chavista elites, whose lavish lifestyles mocked ordinary, poor Venezuelans.
Top it with the monstrous infiltration of the country by the drug lords, and the likelihood of an electoral housecleaning was perfectly clear.
Still, an element of disbelief remains, given how dirty the Chavista rulers have played their democracy game.
They have broken election rules, violated ballot secrecy, shut voters out and banned popular candidates from running. Many of those dirty tricks were evident in this election, too — the Chavistas illegally extended voting hours and campaigned at polling stations, to cite just a couple of examples.
But the opposition won anyway — with turnout so high, at 74.5%, and margins of victory so wide that the election was impossible to steal.
It helped that the the opposition had the wind at its back with the disastrous result of socialism. But it also helped that MUD had improved its electoral game over the years, learning from each near-miss election.
It also helped that MUD had strong leaders such as Maria Corina Machado and put out strong candidates with a clear, unified message — often summed up as “Down with the left.” And with all the pain of 17 years, it helped most of all that they never lost heart.
There is literally no different between the socialists of Venezuela and the Democrat Party in the United States. They are in lock step on every issue. Should the Democrat Party continue to hold power in America, we can look forward to a reckoning like this one in the future.
Two socialists shake hands: Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez
The Wall Street Journal says that the whole country is basically in the grip of ignorant socialists at every level, so there is lots to do.
Excerpt:
Pulling out of that death spiral, economists say, will require a series of painful and unpopular adjustments, rolling back more than a decade of populist and statist policies. Among the measures needed is raising the price of the world’s cheapest gasoline—which goes for less than one U.S. penny a gallon—overhauling a cumbersome and inefficient foreign-exchange system, and cutting generous social programs on which Venezuela’s poor depend.
[…]The government still controls more than 20 governorships, hundreds of mayors, the judiciary, much of the press and all auditing agencies. It will be up to Mr. Maduro whether to take steps to stabilize the economy, like loosening currency or price controls.
It’s not just Venezuela that has hit bottom under socialism. Recently, the people of Argentina also threw out their socialists after years and years of disastrous leftist policies.
The Chicago Tribune reports on last month’s election in Argentina.
Excerpt:
Under the current president, Cristina Fernandez, Argentina has become an international financial pariah. The country defaulted on debt last year in a long-running feud with hedge funds — remarkably, that was the eighth default in Argentina’s history.
Fernandez refused to settle. That’s left the country to squeak by in isolation, using protectionism and capital controls in a quixotic battle with globalism. The economy is stagnant, foreign currency reserves are dwindling and the inflation rate is around 30 percent. Last week, American Airlines said it stopped accepting pesos for ticket sales because it was tired of collecting revenue it couldn’t convert to dollars.
At times Argentina has embraced trade and economic openness, only to slip back into bad habits thanks to populist Peronistas like Fernandez. Macri, a conservative, wants to re-establish free market principles, but there are a lot of details he didn’t fully explain before his November victory because they will require some short-term pain, and he wanted to win the election.
Everything Macri is talking about makes sense. He says he will lift the capital controls that have wrecked the peso’s credibility. Like other backwaters it shouldn’t resemble, Argentina has a thriving black market because the government insists the peso is worth a lot more than its actual value. Freeing the currency would devalue it, a first step toward making Argentina more competitive.
The next big step would be to negotiate a settlement with the hedge funds that bought up Argentina’s debt after its previous default in 2002 and demand repayment. Fernandez got political mileage from attacking the “vultures,” but Macri seems to understand Argentina can’t get unstuck when it’s essentially shut out of international capital markets. He sounds like he wants to do a deal.
Macri’s got a tremendous balancing act to pull off: He’ll need to cut spending and reduce taxes without destroying the country’s big social safety net, while walking the country through a devaluation.
This is how countries that are ruled for a prolonged period by the political left eventually end up. I know so many of you lose heart and think that there is no hope, but there is hope. Even in countries where the left is running everything from the universities, to the judiciaries, to the mainstream media, there is hope.
Over the last 7 years, Obama added $10 trillion to the national debt. And although few of his Democrat low-information voters know about that, they will be able to tell the difference between prosperity and poverty when the United States reaches the Venezuela / Argentina tipping point. There comes a time when there are no more bailouts for the economics deniers. Reality wins in the end.
WINTERY KNIGHT 