Ted Cruz Supporters Running Anti-Trump Ad in Battleground States
On March 3, during a Republican presidential debate hosted by FOX News Channel, moderator Bret Baier asked U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) if he would support Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.
“Yes, because I gave my word I would,” he responded. “And what I have endeavored to do every day in the senate is do what I said I would do.”
When the Republican National Convention took place last month in Cleveland, and Cruz failed to follow through on his pledge, he was booed off the stage by delegates, longtime supporters slammed doors in his face, and some of his most loyal supporters in his home state suggested perhaps he needed to be replaced when he comes up for re-election in 2018. But that hasn’t deterred a small faction of his former supporters who are still fighting to stop Trump from being the Republican candidate on the Nov. 8 general election ballot.
The group, led by Colorado tea party activist Regina Thomson, is now running an ad in several battleground states in another poorly funded effort to convince Donald Trump to drop out of the race. According to Politico, the 30-second ad, titled “Keep Your Word,” has a “five-figure” financial backing to run on broadcast networks in suburban Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan.
The ad centers around a comment Trump made last October during the Republican presidential primary, in which he said he would drop out of the race if there was no way he could win—the nomination. That last little bit of context, of course, is left out of the ad.
It then flashes up three different polls that show Trump is going to lose in a landslide, suggesting that it’s Trump who isn’t keeping his word. None of those polls, however, are the “respected polling firms” the ad implies.
The ad instead makes the suggestion that “no respected polling firm says Trump has a chance.” But even the mainstream media’s own polling shows the gap closing by as much as a point or two a week; at that rate, Trump will lead by October.
And, the following battleground states are all within the margin of error: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio. Trump is closing the gap in both Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well.
That, of course, is based on the reported polling numbers. As has been widely reported, the methodology of many of these polls has been called into question for “oversampling” certain demographic groups in order to skew the results.
But even with potential media bias, the resulting polls are all trending in Trump’s direction, which is exactly the opposite of what the anti-Trump ad is telling viewers.
