Ted Cruz is warning that the socialist Democrats who just swept his home state will drive gas to $15 a gallon.
He’s blaming everybody from Marxists to grocery prices.
And Ted Cruz left one culprit off his list that Donald Trump already admitted.
Cruz Carried His Sorrow Straight to Sean Hannity’s Couch
US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) woke up after the November 3 election as the last Republican holding statewide office in Texas. Democrats ran the table, from James Talarico’s Senate win to Gina Hinojosa’s ouster of Governor Greg Abbott.
So Cruz went on Hannity and played grief counselor.
He told Sean Hannity he had traveled the state meeting Republicans in shock. He described walking into a Best Buy where three shoppers stood almost in tears over what had happened to their state.
Then came the diagnosis. “At the end of the day, if you’re failing at the kitchen table, you’re not getting the job done,” Cruz said.
No argument there. And he urged every Republican officeholder to “be working to lower gas prices, lower food prices, lower interest rates.”
But Cruz saved his hottest fire for the incoming Democrat majority. “They don’t want gas prices at $4, $5, $6. They want them at $10, $12, $15. They want to ban the gasoline engine,” he said, before warning about “the Marxist and Islamists who are now driving the agenda in the Democrat Party.”
He has a point about where the Left wants to drag the country. The party that just grabbed both chambers of Congress spent the campaign cheering Medicare for All candidates and doubling the Democratic Socialists of America’s House delegation. Those folks never met a gas pump they didn’t want to tax into the ground.
Cruz also promised a comeback. “Texas will be red again, and we are going to turn this country around,” he said.
The Autopsy That Found Room for Spam but Not the War
Cruz didn’t stop at one TV hit. On his podcast and in a long post on X, he laid out his own explanation for the wipeout, and parts of it sound awfully familiar.
“When all the votes were counted, the problem wasn’t turnout. Instead, our voters, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, showed up and voted, and rejected our candidates, voting Democrat instead,” Cruz wrote.
That’s nearly the same case JD Vance made. Cruz just stopped before the punch line.
He piled up numbers. Car repossessions above the 2009 peak. Banks repossessing 42 percent more homes in August than a year earlier. Families putting groceries on buy-now-pay-later plans. And Spam, of all things, flying off the shelves.
“That is nearly as much Spam as was sold during the entirety of World War II,” Cruz wrote.
Think about that for a second. The man reached all the way back to World War II for a comparison and still couldn’t find room for the war Americans watched on the evening news all year long.
He named the voters Republicans lost, too: blue-collar workers, evangelicals, young people, Hispanics, and “farmers and ranchers. Tragically, we alienated rural America.”
Ask a rancher outside Abilene what his diesel bill looked like in October. He won’t bring up canned meat.
Then Cruz scolded candidates for failing to run on Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit. “I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record,” he wrote.
So the losers didn’t brag enough about Ted Cruz’s bills. Good to know.
Texas Voters Already Wrote In the Missing Line
The trouble is that Texas voters filled in the blank Cruz left empty.
NBC News exit polling in the Texas governor’s race found about one in three voters calling the war crucial to their vote for Congress. Hinojosa carried that crowd 68 to 30. Another 40 percent called the war a major factor, and she won them too.
Fifty-eight percent of Texas voters said they felt very concerned about the cost of gasoline and diesel. Hinojosa took roughly two out of three of them.
None of this should have surprised anybody. A CBS News/YouGov survey in October found 91 percent of Texas voters saying the war was pushing oil and gas prices higher. AAA clocked the average Texas gallon at about $3.78 that month, up from around $2.60 a year earlier.
And when UMass Lowell and YouGov asked Texans what drove up their energy bills, 72 percent pointed to the war. Tariffs drew 11 percent.
Nationally, close to two of every three voters told NBC News exit pollsters the US made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran. Democrats walked off with 83 percent of that group. Only 15 percent of them stuck with Republicans.
That’s the kitchen table Cruz keeps talking about. It just has a gas receipt sitting on top of it.
The Senator Who Rode Shotgun on the Eve of the Strikes
There’s a reason Cruz won’t say the word. He helped sell the war.
In January, Cruz told CNBC he urged the President to “not miss this opportunity.” He recounted telling Trump, “Listen, the regime has never been weaker,” and predicted that “in the next six months we could realistically see the regimes in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba all fall.”
In March, Cruz told Fox News Digital he “spent the entire day” with Trump on the eve of the strikes as the President traveled to Texas. He used that time to argue against more diplomacy. “What I told him at the time is, I said, I don’t think there’s anything to negotiate,” Cruz recalled.
A month into the fighting, he declared America “unquestionably winning the war.” By August, he was on Fox News lobbying to arm Iranian protesters and the Kurds.
The regime in Tehran is still standing. It’s still sending nuclear proposals through Qatar. The Republican Party in Texas is the outfit that fell.
Cruz hardly worked alone. The neoconservative pundit class, from cable green rooms to Washington think tanks, spent the winter promising a quick and tidy fight. Cruz simply had the best seat in the house when it counted.
Trump, Vance, and Don Jr Already Settled the Question
Vice President JD Vance didn’t dress it up after the returns came in. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote on X.
Donald Trump Jr reposted it with a simple verdict: “Every word of this is,” followed by three 100 emojis.
And President Trump, asked about Vance’s post, agreed. “I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term,” Trump said, while standing by the decision itself.
The President. The Vice President. The President’s oldest son. All three landed on the same answer within a day.
Maybe Cruz figures the President already owned it and piling on helps nobody. That would be a decent instinct for a loyal soldier. But Cruz’s record doesn’t read like a loyal soldier’s.
He was the last Never Trump holdout of 2016, the man who stood on the Cleveland convention stage and told delegates to vote their conscience. Since then he has fought the President’s tariffs, mocked the proposed $5,000 rebate checks as a Bernie Sanders-style giveaway, griped about the Iran talks, and, according to leaked donor recordings reported by Axios, taken swipes at Vance behind closed doors.
So the one Trump decision Cruz cheered loudest is the one he now refuses to name. Funny how that works.
The War Lobby Wants a Clean Slate for 2028
Every one of those breaks lines up with the wish list of the donor class that misses the pre-Trump Republican Party, the crowd that brought the country amnesty pushes, job-shipping trade deals, and Iraq. Cruz is courting that crowd for 2028, and the neoconservative lane can’t afford an honest postmortem.
Blame the candidates. Blame sleepy evangelicals. Blame Spam. Anything but the war, because the war points straight back at the people who sold it.
That’s why JD Vance, the America First heir apparent, makes the hawks so nervous. He keeps saying out loud what the exit polls already showed, and that undercuts every comeback pitch built on pretending the gas bill fell from the sky.
Cruz is right about one thing. Democrats will overreach. A socialist-tinged majority with subpoena power and a Senate gavel can’t help itself.
But no rebuilding plan works if it skips the biggest line on the bill.
Sources: Breitbart News, “Ted Cruz: ‘Texas Will Be Red Again’”; Townhall, “Ted Cruz: ‘We Will Bring Back Texas’”; Mediaite, “‘It Was an A*-Kicking’: Dejected Ted Cruz Declares, ‘Texas Is Blue’”; NBC News, Texas Governor and Senate 2026 exit polls; The Hill, “91 percent in Texas poll say Iran war raising oil and gas prices”; UMass Lowell, “Texas poll: Paxton, Talarico tied in U.S. Senate race”; The Hill/Fox44, “Cruz says ‘limited’ strikes in Iran likely soon”; Fox News, “Cruz says Trump’s move to strike Iran ‘most consequential decision’ of his presidency”; Breitbart News, “Cruz: We Should Arm Kurds to ‘Collapse’ Iran’s Regime”; Mediaite, “Miller Reportedly Told Trump to Wind Down Iran War In Pitch For Chief of Staff Job”; Arab News, “Trump says ‘largely true’ Iran war caused midterms loss, after Vance comments”; The Daily Beast, “Trump Delivers Jaw-Dropping Response After Vance Turns on Him”*