The super PACs backing Sen. Ted Cruz’s Presidential run have yet to reserve any TV time in the early primary states, or anywhere else, despite a combined $38 million war chest.
The total absence of ads has created confusion and growing consternation inside the Cruz campaign, which cannot legally communicate with its allied super PACs and has had to watch as its rivals lock in tens of millions of dollars in ads before prices spike, as they typically do as elections near.
While most 2016 candidates have one main super PAC backing them, the Cruz super PACS are a decentralized alliance of four independent but interconnected operations, each called some version of “Keep the Promise.” People familiar with the groups say they were designed that way to cater to the different big donors funding them.
Hedge fund manager Robert Mercer gave $11 million to one. Energy investor Toby Neugebauer gave $10 million to another. And the families of Dan and Farris Wilks, brothers who became billionaires in the Texas fracking boom, gave $15 million to a third.
An internal document from the Cruz super PACs suggests they did not originally intend to wait so long to go on air. A PowerPoint presentation appealing to donors, posted on the group’s website over the summer and since taken offline, said that Keep the Promise would roll “out a positive campaign in key primary states around the first debate.”
That never happened.
The same presentation warned that “television rates start to skyrocket in December making it impossible for candidates to define themselves and their views so therefore are defined by the Media.”
Cruz’s campaign has tried to send signals to the super PACs in the hopes that they would air ads to introduce Cruz to the electorate. Over the summer, the campaign posted on YouTube hours of unedited, glowing testimonials from Cruz’s family telling soft-focus stories about a senator known mostly for his stridency. It amounted to a public plea for the super PACs to use the footage. Yet no such ads have aired.
Cruz himself was hands-off about his outside support. “I can genuinely answer I have no idea what the super PAC is going to do or what their strategy is,” Cruz told POLITICO a week ago. “That is the nature of this idiotic system we have under federal law.”
As for his own campaign spending plans, Cruz likened it to a scene in a Mel Gibson movie “where the other army is advancing and they keep saying ‘Hold, hold, hold.’ We are saving our resources very deliberately to use where they have the maximum impact.”
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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