Ted Cruz has defeated David Dewhurst in Texas, securing the GOP nomination for US Senate; he is virtually certain to win in November. This was a significant reversal from the first round of primary voting in May; while Dewhurst failed to meet the 50% threshold needed to avoid today’s runoff, he did beat Cruz by eleven points. Katrina Trinko examines the result:
So why did Cruz win? Well, one significant change: the percentage of tea-party voters he was attracting. A late May PPP poll, taken before the first round of the primary, showed that 38 percent of Tea Partiers backed Cruz, while 39 percent backed Dewhurst. But in PPP’s poll from this past weekend, that dynamic had changed significantly, with Cruz now getting 75 percent of tea partiers and Dewhurst winning only 22 percent.
So much for the headline on an ABC story from Friday: “Tea Party Candidates Losing Steam in 2012” (hat-tip: Sean Higgins).
