Sorry, CQ, Everybody (Is Still Gonna) Hate Ted

From his first year in office on, stories have circulated here in DC about just how widely loathed Ted Cruz is. Now, following his first place finish in Iowa, the rest of the country has been brought up to speed with a host of press outlets covering quotes like this:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who recently endorsed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush after ending his presidential bid in December, was asked whether he preferred Trump or Cruz as the nominee during a news conference on Capitol Hill.

“It’s like being shot or poisoned,” Graham told reporters Thursday in response. “What does it really matter?”

And this:

When ["Face The Nation" host John] Dickerson asked whether Cruz was a one of the "false prophets" to whom Boehner had referred, the speaker smiled and referred to comments he made at a fundraiser in Colorado earlier this summer. There, he reportedly dismissed Cruz as a "jackass."

 And my personal favorite:

Senator Mike Lee, the Tea Party-supported Utahn, who’s emerged as one of the most passionate conservative advocates for reform. Lee is also Cruz’s best friend——maybe his only friend——in the Senate. ...

Lee’s communications director, Conn Carroll, confirmed to me that Lee and his staff had no advance warning that Cruz was planning to brutally attack—and, in Lee’s view, misrepresent—his friend’s bill. “Going into that hearing, we definitely thought it was in the realm of possibility he would come out against it, just not with that kind of colorful language,” Carroll told me. The bill made it out of committee that day, but now it appears to be in trouble, with several other Republican senators taking Cruz’s line against it at a Senate lunch last week.

Today, Lee has conspicuously joined every other sitting senator in declining to endorse Cruz’s presidential run.

So it's probably not surprising that an outlet would come along and tell us "Why GOP Lawmakers Could Embrace Ted Cruz" as Shawn Zeller did in a cover story for CQ Roll Call this week (paywall):

But here’s a prediction: If Cruz’s come-from-behind win in Iowa leads to victories in the primaries and caucuses this month — or on Super Tuesday on March 1 — and renders him the main alternative to businessman Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers will fall in line. They’ll be joining a strong contingent of House members who see Cruz as positioned to run an anti-establishment “outsider” campaign that adheres to long-standing GOP positions. ...

Cruz’s House allies expect senators to come around too. They may have to swallow their pride in doing so, but they won’t have to compromise their principles. Cruz could emerge for them as the better choice versus the unpredictable Trump. At least his differences with his colleagues — as evidenced in the Ex-Im vote, in which both he and McConnell voted against reauthorization — are mainly over strategy, tactics and demeanor. On the issues, they agree. CQ’s annual vote studies, elsewhere in this issue, make the similarities plain. ...

Rubio will have to start winning some primaries eventually or [his supporters in the Senate] will be forced to jump ship. As [former Senate Republican leader from Mississippi Trent] Lott says, it won’t be the end of the world: Their differences with Cruz are mainly rhetorical, not philosophical. They can be overcome. ... “We’ll have to wait and see,” says Lott, acknowledging that Republicans who dislike Cruz — himself included — may have to adjust. “One of the lessons of life is: Don’t dwell on past offenses.”

It's true that divisions highlighted during primaries get smoothed over during generals because "the other guy" almost always seems so awful in comparison that people rally behind their party's nominee in the fall even if they didn't vote for him/her in the spring. The Berniebros and Hillarygals feuding and unfollowing each other on social media today will come together in November, united in their shared hatred of Donald Trump's megalomania or Marco Rubio's war lust or John Kasich's attack on women's health or Chris Christie's abuse of power or Ted Cruz's, well, everything...

And certainly the same is true on the Republican side. A number of Republican senators actually liked working with Senator Hillary Clinton and had positive things to say about her just a few short years ago, but you can still expect them to passionately hate her during the heat of the campaign and should she become president.

As an aside, for those Sanders supporters who earnestly believe he'll be able to work with Congress better than Clinton because Clinton is so vilified on the Right and Sanders isn't (yet), I would like to draw your attention to the example of a charismatic, centrist senator from Illinois who had a great working relationship with his Republican colleagues and who bent over backward to woo them as president. "Obama, Barack H." is pretty much Exhibit A when it comes to proving that American politics is no better than a sports rivalry.

That's not a site ad, it's a screen cap of when Obama still believed in hope and change.

As a second aside, when Zeller references polls showing that a Clinton vs. Cruz match-up could be favorable to Cruz and that therefore Republicans are likely to fall in line, 

Still, Republicans, by and large, see Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton as eminently beatable, maybe even by Cruz. It’s a theory, frankly, that even many of Cruz’s critics take as a given. The fact that Cruz and Trump are polling well against Clinton “speaks volumes about the weakness of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” says Dent, the Pennsylvania Republican moderate who vigorously opposed the 2013 shutdown and is no fan of Cruz. “I’m not saying they can’t win." In recent polls that have asked about a hypothetical matchup, Cruz holds a slight lead over Clinton, according to a RealClearPolitics analysis.

he and they are demonstrating the same naivete as the most baby-faced Sanders supporter. Most people have no idea who Ted Cruz is or what he stands for (other than being the insideriest "Washington outsider" ever). Meanwhile, they (think they) know a lot about Clinton. In the heat of a general election campaign, when Democrats stop propping up Cruz as they are now in the hopes of facing him in a general (much as Republicans are doing with Sanders) and start attacking him, that's going to shift fast. There's simply no big issue where Cruz is in line with the mainstream.

But here's my own prediction to counter Zeller's: whatever their public stance, Republican senators are going to withhold their support in all the ways that matter for winning a national election (money, volunteers, joint rallies and fundraisers, help working the press) because while politics is no longer local, it is personal.

Look no further for proof of that maxim than the Pennsylvania Senate race this year in which the state and national parties have thrown their weight behind the unelectable Katie McGinty in the primaries at the expense of Joe Sestak, even though Sestak won election twice in a conservative House seat (now occupied by Republican Patrick Meehan) and held Pat Toomey to 2 percentage points in their Senate race during the Republican wave year of 2010. (The same year and the same electorate that gave Tom Corbett a 9-point lead in the governor's race over his Democratic opponent!) As a House member, Sestak was a reliable vote for leadership's agenda so the party's opposition doesn't make any sense... until one considers that Sestak defied and infuriated party leaders like former Gov. Ed Rendell and former DSCC head Sen. Chuck Schumer by running against Arlen Specter after his johnny-come-lately party switch. Then all of the pieces begin to fall into place. Nose meet knife.

So when Zeller urges us to "Forget Cruz’s prickly personality for a moment and look only at the numbers," my mind immediately goes to Sestak's well-documented prickly personality and his 96% party unity score. The former matters a lot more to the Pennsylvania Democratic establishment than the latter. Zeller goes on:

Cruz is right in step with his fellow Republican senators both in backing the party on controversial votes and in fighting Obama. He voted against the president’s position on 58 percent of Senate votes in which Obama had expressed a view in 2015. The median opposition score for  Republican senators was 44 percent. The support numbers were padded by 30 votes on executive and judicial nominees, many of them uncontroversial.

On votes that split the parties, Cruz was with the Republicans 90 percent of the time, while the median GOP score was 94 percent.

Taking the broad view provides one angle, so consider another: only the most important votes. CQ each year puts together a list of key votes.

In 2015, Cruz was unusually disruptive. He split with most Republicans, but was by no means alone among them, in voting against most of his colleagues’ wishes on the fix to the Medicare payment formula, the highway bill, the new education law and the fiscal 2016 omnibus spending law.

But combining the key votes for 2013 and 2014, Cruz parted with the majority of his fellow Republicans on only four of 26 votes. That’s pretty loyal. Then drill down and see that, in each case where Cruz went the other way, he had good company.

In December 2014, Cruz voted against the fiscal 2015 omnibus spending bill, which many Republicans derided because it failed to block Obama’s action legalizing millions of illegal immigrants and because it was seen as a dereliction of Congress’ duty to enact 12 appropriations bills funding the government agencies. Rubio also voted no.

Go down the list. The month before, Cruz was one of only four Republican senators to vote to end the National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ phone records. ... But Cruz is less vulnerable on the issue than he would have been in 2014. When the issue came up again in June last year, and Congress enacted the new law requiring government intelligence agents to request phone data from the phone companies instead of collecting it themselves, 22 Senate Republicans joined Cruz in support. He was still in the minority of Senate Republicans, but not by much. And the same bill had the overwhelming backing of the House GOP.

Meanwhile, there was only one key vote in 2013 in which Cruz broke with his party, but it was a big one: the October vote to lift the government shutdown, even though the bill did not strip funding for the health care law. It is, in the view of many Cruz critics, his albatross. Cruz led the effort to force a shutdown. It did not succeed in undermining the health care law, and the polls showed at the time that it was hurting Republicans’ image.

It was the first shutdown since those of 1995 and 1996, when then-Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia sparred with President Bill Clinton over funding levels. Those shutdowns, and their aftermath — Clinton recovered from a tough year and won an easy re-election — buttress the conventional wisdom that shutting down the government isn’t good politics and that it’s a no-win move for Republicans.

But Cruz wasn’t alone among senators in voting to keep the government closed. There were 17 others who voted against the bill, including Rubio. In the House, the pro-shutdown vote was more lopsided, and there are plenty of Republicans who point to their party’s big wins in the 2014 election to dispute the conventional wisdom that shutdowns hurt the party.

One can get so lost in the trees as to miss the forest, and Zeller never acknowledges that all of this misses the point that in many of these cases, these were shitty votes that most Republicans didn't want to have to take in the first place. Cruz forced them to. Andrew Prokop writing for Vox makes this clear in his excellent piece on Cruz's book.

The issue at hand was the debt ceiling, which needed to be raised. So, according to Cruz, GOP Senate leaders announced that they planned to do two things. First, they'd offer a "clean" bill increasing the debt ceiling, rather than trying to play hardball with Obama and the Democrats by advancing conservative policy priorities. And second, they asked Republicans to consent to let this bill pass with a pure up-or-down vote — which would let Democrats, who controlled 55 seats, pay the political price for the increase. ...

Cruz argued that instead, Senate Republicans should use this "leverage" and demand policy concessions from Obama in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. After that, he writes, "the yelling began." The other senators were furious that he had the "temerity" to screw up their "brilliant maneuver to increase our debt without any fingerprints." They argued that because of his objection, at least five Republicans would have to vote to increase the debt ceiling, and one senator asked him, "Why do you want to throw five Republicans under the bus?" Cruz refused to drop his objection, and 12 Republicans ended up voting with Democrats to advance the bill.

In Zeller's numbers, this episode gets tallied as a time when Cruz's vote was in line with the majority of his colleagues. But it obviously wasn't. And this is what Zeller really misses but that Prokop nails:

[A]t heart, Ted Cruz is so loathed by Republicans because he's not a team player. And not only is he not a team player, but he instead constantly positions himself as working against the Republican team in general and his Senate colleagues in particular. ...

[Clinton, Bush, and Obama] didn't pick gratuitous fights with their major partisan allies, and they certainly didn't portray their parties' leading electoral officials as corrupt sellouts trying to hoodwink their own voters.

Cruz has done just the opposite. For the past three years, he has been engaged in a very specific, pointed, and personal attempt aimed at painting practically every Republican in Washington as a corrupt phony and himself as the only honest man in the city. And his fellow Republicans don't like this one bit.

The animus against Cruz isn't just about tactics or style, it's personal. They really, really loathe him, not (just) because he's creepy or an insufferable prick but because as a senator and colleague he has thrown them under the bus at each and every opportunity.

And so my prediction: if Ted Cruz ends up as the nominee and his poll numbers show even the hint of vulnerability, most Republicans will pay him the necessary lip service while providing almost no tangible support, and a handful of senators up for reelection in blue and purple states like Illinois, New Hampshire, and Ohio will run like hell away from him.