Mimi Swartz’s NYT Op-ed Ignores Voting Results, Polling Data, and the Basics of Texas Politics c. 2016
by Jim Henson
The public record of people who have known Ted Cruz’s not liking him has generated a meme that has surpassed even his extreme conservatism and anti-Washington rhetoric as a go-to theme of insider-y coverage of the 2016 presidential nomination race. With everyone from college roommates to co-workers in the campaign and administration of George W. Bush, up to and including Bush 43 himself, willing to talk in often harsh terms about how much they don’t like him, the press has been unable to resist concluding that candidate Cruz has a likeability problem.
The evidence that many people who have worked with and around Cruz don’t like him seems pretty incontrovertible at this point, but extrapolating the limits of Cruz’s candidacy from largely speculative and anecdotal accounts isn’t supported by much of the available data on voters’ views of Cruz.
The deployment of the implicit premise that Cruz’s HR problems at work provide a sample that’s relevant to his electoral prospects sunk to a new low this week in a piece by Texas writer Mimi Swartz on the New York Times op-ed page. Turns out the Texas Monthly executive editor and knower-of-all-things Houston has apparently talked to some Houstonians who don’t like Ted Cruz, especially (shockingly enough) among those who think fondly of the Bush family.
Swartz and the Times op-ed page seem oddly unconcerned with considering what actual voters in Houston might think, or even what light the extensive collection of polling data on Cruz might tell us about what people other than a few individuals and vaguely defined “crazy rich Houstonians” view Cruz.
This looks a little differently if one recalls that Cruz lost narrowly to David Dewhurst in Harris County in the first round of voting in the 2012 primary for the U. S. Senate, in an election in which Cruz received more than 69,000 votes in the county while finishing second in a crowded field. In the runoff six weeks later, Cruz crushed Dewhurst in Harris County, amassing 86,285 votes to Dewhurst’s 48,996. In the fall election, about 4.4 million Texans voted for him, and he won narrowly in Harris county — while Mitt Romney lost the county to Barack Obama. The friends of the Bush family in Houston may not have thrown a parade for Cruz, but it hardly seems that Houston was rejecting him because he wasn’t part of the Bush extended family.
Since his election, Cruz’s favorability and job approval ratings among Texas voters have not been remarkable, but they have been far from anti-hero territory. In a rough approximation of poll respondents from the Houston area in the November 2015 University of Texas / Texas Tribune Poll, his job approval was 43 percent, versus 36 percent who disapproved. (You can find those numbers here, but be warned, it’s a big .pdf file. ) Breaking down the poll numbers by party and region creates too large a margin of error to look at Houston-area Republicans in the UT/TT poll, but Cruz remains a very well-liked figure in the Texas GOP electorate: His favorability numbers among Republicans are 56 points net positive (71/15), and his job approval numbers among Republicans are also positively lopsided.
Election results and poll numbers in Texas provide highlights the limited application of a reading of Cruz’s position in Texas based on Schwartz’s “sampling” of attitudes among the Bush fans in Houston. Robert Draper’s piece in another silo of The New York Times the same day points out that the Ted Cruz unlikeability meme is one actively fostered by his presidential rival Donald Trump. Though Draper didn’t go into it, it’s also one that former Bush administration folks are actively promoting in the service of Jeb Bush’s tepid candidacy. Draper also makes the useful point that the preoccupation with the trail of dislike Cruz has apparently left behind him is not exactly rare in the world of presidential politics, including the 2016 campaign:
Cruz has no exclusive claim on unattractive demeanor among those still fighting for the G.O.P. nomination. Trump’s schoolyard invective puts himself in a class of his own, of course. Christie and Kasich can be foul-tempered to subordinates, political colleagues and the public alike. Bush is not known for his warmth. Rubio, for all his seeming charm, has been far less accessible to campaign audiences and the media than Cruz. Even the affable Carson has prompted a few smirks with the oversize entourage that buffers him as he moves from one event to the next. Still, Cruz remains dogged by the “nobody likes Ted” label that Trump affixed to him.
By now, we can stipulate that Ted Cruz has left a negative impression on people in professional politics, and on many other people in his past. But intimating that this dislike is also evident among the electorate, or that its prevalence among the political class significantly matters to GOP primary voters, at the scale of either Houston or the country, leaves a mistaken impression of what is happening in the Republican primary and, by extension, the GOP writ large. While it’s perhaps useful to know that elements in Houston who are fond of the Bush family oppose and even don’t like Cruz, reporting this is nothing new. In the case of the Swartz piece, then, one might hope for something more substantive and accurate than intimations of a significance that a more diligent and comprehensive look at the evidence doesn’t support. That such an incomplete account is unfair to Ted Cruz doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that it misleads anyone who reads it thinking they’ve been given a reliable account of politics in Texas.
Much needed edits for style and clarity added 2/10/2016 at 11:07 AM. H/t Joshua Blank.
