Join The Transient, The Texas Tribune’s every day e-newsletter that retains readers up to the mark on essentially the most important Texas information.
Halfway by means of his stump speech at a current marketing campaign rally, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz did one thing uncommon: He requested the viewers to take out their cell telephones and textual content an automatic quantity that might reply with a hyperlink to obtain his thrice-weekly podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
Cruz had recorded his newest episode at midnight, a number of hours earlier than the Friday morning rally, after Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a speech accepting her social gathering’s presidential nomination. Cruz proudly recited the episode title for the gang: “Kamala’s Speech: Vapid, Radical, Disconnected from Reality and Dangerous as Hell.”
“Now, why do I do the podcast? I do the podcast to equip and arm you, to give you the information you need,” Cruz instructed the handfuls of rallygoers packed right into a bar in downtown Georgetown. “It does not cost a penny, but when you subscribe, it’ll magically appear on your phone about 5 a.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It takes about a half hour to listen to, and it’s designed to give you the information, the facts.”
The marketing campaign path plug was solely the most recent reminder of how Cruz’s fashionable podcast has turn into an integral a part of the Texas junior Republican senator’s life — and a device in his effort to win reelection this fall. The present has helped Cruz attain new audiences and solidify his standing as a number one conservative voice on nationwide points, permitting him to shortly fireplace off takes on the political information of the day, unfiltered by mainstream media, to 1000’s of listeners.
The 30- to 45-minute episodes additionally supply Cruz the time and house, in an informal setting with a pleasant co-host, to disclose his character in a means that’s unusual for high-profile politicians. Although Cruz spends a lot of the present bashing prime Democratic politicians and “the corporate media,” he provides up a wholesome dose of asides and anecdotes marked by self-deprecating humor.
“You and I have talked about the fact that my wife, Heidi, listens regularly to this podcast,” Cruz instructed his co-host, conservative commentator Ben Ferguson, in a current episode. “Now, I’ve been married now 23 years. It’s not easy to get your wife to listen to anything you do. But you know why Heidi says she listens to it? She says she learns things. It’s actually useful and helpful to her on a topic.”
Cruz additionally routinely deploys his deep information of constitutional regulation, honed by means of a authorized profession that included a clerkship with William Rehnquist, the previous conservative Supreme Court docket chief justice, and a stint as Texas Solicitor Common throughout which he argued circumstances earlier than the excessive courtroom. He usually underscores his factors by drawing on decades-old examples from the annals of American politics or invoking detailed polling information — demonstrating what Cruz’s allies say is the political savvy that fueled his upstart 2012 Senate win and deep run within the 2016 presidential major.
The podcast additionally showcases Cruz’s seemingly photographic recall of obscure political happenings. On one other current episode, as he was ridiculing Harris’ proposed federal ban on grocery price-gouging, Cruz recalled a gaffe that then-candidate Barack Obama made at an Iowa rally in 2007, when Obama commented on the inflated value of arugula at Entire Meals, drawing fees of elitism. That confirmed “a fairly amazing level of disconnectedness,” Cruz mentioned, evaluating Obama and Harris.
An important Texas information,
despatched weekday mornings.
Amid his meteoric political rise, Cruz has battled the notion that he’s not “likable.” Former President George W. Bush reportedly as soon as mentioned of Cruz, “I just don’t like the guy,” and former Democratic Sen. Al Franken famously quipped, “I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.” Cruz additionally confronted widespread backlash for touring to Cancún in 2021 as Texas was lashed by a historic winter storm that crashed the state energy grid.
Matt Mackowiak, a Texas Republican strategist who has recognized Cruz for greater than a decade, mentioned the podcast helps Cruz fight the “chatter” about his so-called likeability.
“There is more depth to his personality than what may come across in a Senate floor speech or on a Fox News hit,” Mackowiak mentioned. “He does have, actually, a quite good sense of humor, he is self-deprecating, and he also is, I think, much more culturally current than people might think. I think it does give him a chance to show a different side of himself.”
Offering an “unvarnished message”
The podcast enterprise, distinctive for a sitting senator, started in January 2020 as a means for Cruz to air his every day musings about then-President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. He recorded the primary episode at 2:42 a.m., following the primary day of the trial, and continued to pump out new episodes every night time after.
The podcast vaulted to the highest of the charts, besting the same old leaders like “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “The Daily.” When the present was close to its peak, Cruz claimed it obtained greater than 1,000,000 distinctive month-to-month listeners.
After greater than 500 episodes, “Verdict” now not enjoys the identical chart-topping standing: it’s the forty sixth hottest present in Apple Podcasts’ politics class, and 104th within the information class, in line with the podcast analytics web site Chartable. The evaluations are stuffed with listeners who say they like Cruz and his commentary however assume the present has turn into overly saturated with advertisements since iHeartMedia — the radio distribution and advertising large that syndicates “Verdict”— picked up the present in 2022.
Nonetheless, the podcast stays a well-liked and potent means for Cruz to advertise his model. The episodes are additionally accessible on the favored iHeart app and on YouTube, the place Cruz routinely attracts tens of 1000’s of viewers.
“This is one of only a few podcasts I regularly listen to,” one reviewer wrote lately on Apple Podcasts. “While I agree with others that the ads are starting to get out of hand, I thoroughly enjoy the Senator’s explanation of procedure, internal politics, and the general sausage making in Washington. He’s a good storyteller that makes dull and boring things interesting.”
Mackowiak mentioned he thinks the podcast will help Cruz’s reelection bid, serving as a “highly efficient” means of speaking his message that’s unavailable to his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred. It has additionally helped Cruz construct up a base of followers, “which has immense value in multitudes of ways,” Mackowiak mentioned.
“That’s a base of people that can become small dollar donors in the future, people for whom you can collect email addresses, people that you can mobilize for different things,” he mentioned. “It’s a clever use of a very modern tool.”
Hoping to broaden his enchantment on the polls this fall, Cruz has solid himself as a lawmaker who appears to be like for alternatives to succeed in throughout the aisle. In his podcast, although, that aspect takes a transparent backseat to the a part of Cruz that fueled his rise: his standing as a partisan bomb-thrower and conservative stalwart who revels in contentious debate.
On the present, Cruz has expressed hope that Trump’s authorized staff may flip the outcomes of the 2020 election and derided the decide overseeing Trump’s Manhattan felony trial as a “rabid partisan.” He has also floated a number of unsubstantiated claims, asserting that Obama was secretly running the Biden administration and suggesting that efforts to diversify the Secret Service — what Cruz termed “an obsessive focus on bean counting, on quotas, on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] at the expense of the mission” — performed a job within the Trump assassination try in July.
That very same month, after Biden dropped his reelection bid, Cruz and Ferguson delighted in replaying a clip of Jen Psaki, the White Home press secretary-turned-MSNBC host, painfully studying Biden’s withdrawal assertion on air.
“I’d encourage you, go to YouTube and watch it on video, because to watch Jen Psaki’s face, you cannot fully appreciate the agony without watching it, as she’s reading these words, and as we’re watching the Democrat Party light itself on fire,” Cruz mentioned.
Jon Taylor, a political science professor on the College of Texas at San Antonio, mentioned {that a} main a part of the podcast platform’s enchantment for Cruz is that it permits him to “provide an unvarnished message, one that actually he can control.”
He mentioned Cruz is named an efficient communicator, and it’s no shock that he’s utilizing the podcast largely to throw purple meat to his core supporters.
“He’s kind of had this meteoric rise as a spokesperson for, let’s be honest, the hard right of the Republican Party — which plays well in Texas with the Republican base,” Taylor mentioned.
Donations to PAC spark marketing campaign finance complaints
Cruz’s podcast has additionally opened him to criticism from Allred and different detractors who say he spends an excessive amount of time podcasting, to the purpose that it detracts from his capability to legislate. Allred has solid Cruz’s prolificness behind the mic, together with the senator’s maligned Cancún journey, as proof that Cruz is overly targeted on self-promotion and his personal pursuits.
“We have a senator in Ted Cruz who’s not been doing the job, who’s not interested in you, who’s only focused on himself,” Allred mentioned earlier this yr. “That’s why he’s podcasting three to five times a week. That’s why he can abandon us when 30 million Texans are freezing in the dark.”
The podcast has additionally sparked ethics complaints from marketing campaign finance watchdog teams, who’ve questioned the legality of an association wherein iHeartMedia, the podcast’s syndicator, has donated practically $1 million to an excellent PAC backing Cruz’s reelection bid.
A proper criticism filed earlier this yr by two teams, Finish Residents United and the Marketing campaign Authorized Middle, asserts that Cruz may have violated marketing campaign finance legal guidelines if he performed any position in iHeartMedia’s contributions to the tremendous PAC. Beneath federal regulation, candidates can solely direct or solicit as much as $5,000 in donations to tremendous PACs, which may in any other case increase limitless sums to assist candidates.
A spokesperson for an iHeartMedia subsidiary has mentioned the funds to the pro-Cruz tremendous PAC, Fact and Braveness PAC, are related to the income it receives from promoting advertisements on Cruz’s podcast, for which Cruz himself just isn’t paid. Although such an association doesn’t seem to violate marketing campaign finance regulation by itself, the watchdog teams argued of their criticism that the “most reasonable and logical inference to be drawn from these circumstances” is that Cruz “requested or directed” iHeartMedia to donate to the tremendous PAC “either directly or through his agents.”
A Cruz marketing campaign spokesperson declined remark. A spokesperson for the senator’s marketing campaign beforehand solid off the complaints as “lazy attacks during an election year.”
“Senator Cruz appears on ‘Verdict’ three times a week for free,” Cruz’s marketing campaign mentioned in an announcement, in line with the Houston Chronicle. “He does this to pull back the veil on the corrupt inner workings of Washington — none of which ever get fairly covered. How convenient that the mainstream media and the cogs in the machine of the Biden-Pelosi Democrat Party want this to stop.”
Taylor mentioned the contributions may very well be thought-about examples of an “honorarium,” which the Senate guidelines outline as “a payment for any appearance, speech, or article.” Senators are banned from accepting honoraria.
Nonetheless, Taylor famous, the novelty of Cruz’s podcast association “poses a unique challenge” as a result of the Senate guidelines don’t explicitly handle whether or not such circumstances are above board.
“This is one of these examples where technology — what we have now on the internet and everything else — tends to outpace the ability of law and regulatory mechanisms to keep up with it,” Taylor mentioned.
Cruz has rejected the concept he spends an excessive amount of time podcasting, saying it’s “integral to my job as senator,” because it helps get his message to constituents.
He has additionally mentioned it helps him attain a broader viewers — together with youthful listeners — who’re unlikely to catch his TV hits and even on-line advertisements.
“If I’m walking through an airport and a woman in her 70s comes up and says, ‘Hey I loved you on TV,’ you know many of the demographic that are watching TV interviews are of an older generation,” Cruz instructed The Hill. “On the other hand, if I’ve got another guy with a ponytail and tattoos comes up and says, ‘Hey, I love what you’re doing,’ I know what the next words he’s going to say. He’s going to mention the podcast.”
Disclosure: Apple and the College of Texas at San Antonio have been monetary supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan information group that’s funded partly by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Monetary supporters play no position within the Tribune’s journalism. Discover a full record of them right here.
