The campaign of freshman Senator Ted Cruz has announced that it made an impressive donations haul since he announced that he was running for president. Touting his connection to grassroots voters, the senator also downplayed the role that big money donors have played in funding his campaign. Overall, the campaign has received $14 million in three months, a sum that gives his campaign enough money to go up against fundraising juggernaut and front runner Jeb Bush.
Ted Cruz was the first Republican to announce he was running for president, so he has had more time than the rest to fundraise and garner support. He has been outdone by Bush and others, but he has something they do not have: the support of regular people. According to the first quarter filings, the average donation to the Cruz campaign was $81 and the total number of donors was 175,000 according to CNN’s reporting. These facts are being spun as evidence that Cruz, unlike others, has the support of regular voters, not the millionaires who so often fund candidates’ campaigns.
“The grassroots energy and support we are seeing is overwhelming,” reads a statement from Cruz according to ABC News. USA Today also reported on the way that Cruz is interpreting these fundraising filings. “The Washington money isn’t with us,” he said, making the implicit connection between the other candidates who are part of the establishment and the donations from millionaires. “If you run a grassroots campaign, — our campaign for the Senate, we were opposed by all of the money, all of the donors, all of the establishment. It came from the people,” he emphasized on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Cruz is quite obviously making the appeal that his campaign is the true campaign for the common people. This can be seen as an attack on front runner Jeb Bush, who is expected to announce record breaking fundraising totals in the next quarter. Bush is the candidate backed by the establishment, another thing that Cruz is crowing about not having. If Ted Cruz gets his way, then people will be seeing him as the grassroots, Tea Party David going up against the establishment, billionaire-backed Goliath of Jeb Bush.
But is Ted Cruz’s assertion that he is the “grassroots” candidate truly accurate? Announcing his campaign’s fundraising gains is slightly misleading because it does not take into account the PACs and super PACs that are also fundraising on his behalf. Overall, the aggregate amount of money backing Ted Cruz is estimated to be about $51 million, a large portion of that coming, not from grassroots donors, but big money donors giving to the super PACs that support him. According to CNN, “A leader of those groups told CNN in June that it had raised more than $37 million thanks to a few big moneymen.”
Due to the nature of campaign finance, Cruz can technically say that he is the grassroots candidate, but the facts show just how misleading that statement is. Actually, Cruz is backed by just as much big money donors as Jeb Bush is. His “giant killer” story looks a lot more like a fish story now.
Opinion by Charlie Carlisle
Photo by Michael Vadon – Creative Commons License