Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) – the first Republican hopeful to put his name forward – has long maintained that only by mobilizing the conservative grassroots can the GOP hope to reclaim the White House in 2016. He has explicitly said that primary-goers looking for a candidate that will toe the party line, and buckle to the whims of the establishment, should look elsewhere. As a result, he has pledged not to fund his campaign with funds obtained from lobbyists or crony capitalists, and therefore must tap into the generosity and support of ordinary Americans to get his campaign off the ground.
And his strategy appears to be working. Wow:
Ted Cruz’s presidential effort is getting into the shock-and-awe fundraising business.An associate of the Texas senator, a recently announced presidential candidate, tells Bloomberg that a cluster of affiliated super-political action committees was formed only this week, and among them they are expected to have $31 million in the bank by Friday.
To put those figures into perspective:
Although super-PACs have radically changed the pace at which committees backing presidential candidates can raise money, the Cruz haul is remarkable. There are no known cases in which an operation backing a White House hopeful has collected this much money in less than a week.
There’s much more to winning elections than raising money, of course. But such an impressive fundraising haul in such a short period of time, combined with Cruz’s mastery of the issues and near double-digit support already, puts him in a very strong position to fight this battle to the end.
We'll see how he does.