Liberal Democrats who are well-funded (and therefore serious candidates) always get blowjob interviews from the national media when it's general election season. That has been the nature of politics since the New Deal. Abortion Barbie got blowjob interviews all the time when she was running against The Wheelchair. Furthermore, Abortion Barbie was likable, sometimes good looking), well-spoken, motivated the liberal base, and was reasonably intelligent. She was a lot like Beta but without an ugly criminal record and with more brains. (If you listen to Beta actually talk policy, there isn't very much brains or substance there. That's why he can thrive in blowjob interviews like anybody else would but would get clobbered if he debated Cruz and faced serious questions for the first time in the campaign.)
But even though Abortion Barbie had every advantage that Beta has, The Wheelchair kicked her *** in the end. In fact, if you look at the polls from back then, she never became a serious threat to knock him off. In fact, she did worse than bland, old, weird-looking moderate Bill White did just 4 years earlier.
The critical distinction is between The Wheelchair and Cruz. Yes, the media is pushing the unlikability narrative, but they didn't invent it out of thin air. It resonates some because there's truth to it. I've been saying Ted Cruz was unlikable and aloof (not in reality but on the superficial level) for ten years - long before the national media even knew who the hell he was. It's a real liability for him. It's not a media creation.
Furthermore, he has done two things that have weakened the winning coalition of the Texas GOP at least with respect to his candidacy. First, he ran as a militant anti-establishment candidate and kept that up as a Senator by taking a piss on Mitch McConnell, leading government shutdowns, etc. Well, you may not like those guys (and I often don't), but that's your downtown business crowd and the people who work for them and live in the nearby suburbs. They are part of the GOP coalition in Texas. They don't always need them to win, but they need them to win comfortably. Second, he pulled the "vote your conscience" routine at the Convention, which weakened his standing with many of the same anti-establishment conservative voters to whom he catered just a few years earlier. So if you sum both of those up, it spells diminished support from both somewhat conflicting groups - a feat that's frankly hard to do, and it's making his job harder and makes normally small things like unlikeability a bigger problem.
The Wheelchair has managed to maintain almost universal support from the establishment crowd (since he has been their ***** for 25 years) while keeping reasonably strong support with the grassroots conservatives. He's holding the coalition together, so Abortion Barbie couldn't threaten him, and Lupe Valdez won't either.
Of course, Beta can't threaten Cruz by attracting grassroots conservatives, because he's an open-borders God-hater. But he might siphon off some of the downtown business crowd people. He won't win them, but he doesn't have to. He just has to siphon off enough of them to assemble a winning coalition with the Democratic base coupled with blunted enthusiasm. It takes a perfect storm, but it's doable.
Last edited: Sep 13, 2018