Ted Cruz Crashes & Burns During Sunday ‘Meet the Press’ Meltdown

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With Election Day less than a month away, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — who actually isn’t up for re-election this time around — appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press this Sunday to discuss the state of the race. Stunningly, he tried to characterize President Donald Trump as standing for “optimism” and a bright perspective on the future of the United States, which is, quite simply, totally disconnected from the facts. Trump has tried to garner support by, among other things, ranting to his supporters that Democrats will abolish the suburbs. That claim is false, but this nonsensical doom and gloom is what the president presents to his supporters — not some kind of rosy perspective!

Cruz told host Chuck Todd:

‘I think there’s an incredible volatility in politics right now. The delta between possible outcomes is as wide as I’ve ever seen it… I think the outcome really turns on two things. Number one, it turns on optimism. If people are optimistic and hopeful about the future, if they’re going back to work — that will be a factor in a very good election for Republicans. If they’re pessimistic and depressed and hopeless, that will help the Democrats. And number two, turnout… I think this is a turnout election. I think the hard left is showing up no matter what — they hate the president. And the big open question is, does everybody else show up?’

Check out Cruz’s comments below:

It’s consistently amazing when Republicans try and depict Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as of some kind of pawn of the “hard left.” Biden is definitely not — he doesn’t even support Medicare-for-all or the Green New Deal, although he does, of course, have some of his own ambitious and somewhat related policy plans in each of these areas. More broadly — Cruz sounds like he wants to write off essentially the bulk of the Democratic base as “pessimistic” members of the “hard left.” This is how a top Republican thinks of the millions of Americans who don’t see themselves represented in the president’s nonsense.

Notably, Cruz is also simply wrong about the actual state of the current election cycle. Democrats are heavily favored to do well, while Republicans are definitely not. FiveThirtyEight gave Biden an 86 percent chance of winning the presidency on Sunday morning, and their average of national-level polling had Biden up by 10.3 percent at that same point. That’s not some kind of political environment in which Democrats and Republicans have roughly equal chances of pulling through. Cruz seems to be presenting fictions to the American people.