In his podcast, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz reveals his unfiltered side as he strives to expand his base — and his influence

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Midway through his stump speech at a recent campaign rally, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz did something unusual: He asked the audience to take out their cell phones and text an automated number that would respond with a link to download his thrice-weekly podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”

Cruz had recorded his latest episode at midnight, several hours before the Friday morning rally, after Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a speech accepting her party’s presidential nomination. Cruz proudly recited the episode title for the crowd: “Kamala’s Speech: Vapid, Radical, Disconnected from Reality and Dangerous as Hell.”

“Now, why do I do the podcast? I do the podcast to equip and arm you, to give you the information you need,” Cruz told the dozens of rallygoers packed into a bar in downtown Georgetown. “It does not cost a penny, but when you subscribe, it’ll magically appear on your phone about 5 a.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It takes about a half hour to listen to, and it’s designed to give you the information, the facts.”

The campaign trail plug was only the latest reminder of how Cruz’s popular podcast has become an integral part of the Texas junior Republican senator’s life — and a tool in his effort to win reelection this fall. The show has helped Cruz reach new audiences and solidify his status as a leading conservative voice on national issues, allowing him to quickly fire off takes on the political news of the day, unfiltered by mainstream media, to thousands of listeners.

The 30- to 45-minute episodes also offer Cruz the time and space, in a casual setting with a friendly co-host, to reveal his personality in a way that is uncommon for high-profile politicians. Though Cruz spends much of the show bashing top Democratic politicians and “the corporate media,” he offers up a healthy dose of asides and anecdotes marked by self-deprecating humor.

“You and I have talked about the fact that my wife, Heidi, listens regularly to this podcast,” Cruz told his co-host, conservative commentator Ben Ferguson, in a recent episode. “Now, I’ve been married now 23 years. It’s not easy to get your wife to listen to anything you do. But you know why Heidi says she listens to it? She says she learns things. It’s actually useful and helpful to her on a topic.”

Cruz also routinely deploys his deep knowledge of constitutional law, honed through a legal career that included a clerkship with William Rehnquist, the former conservative Supreme Court chief justice, and a stint as Texas Solicitor General during which he argued cases before the high court. He often underscores his points by drawing on decades-old examples from the annals of American politics or invoking detailed polling data — demonstrating what Cruz’s allies say is the political savvy that fueled his upstart 2012 Senate win and deep run in the 2016 presidential primary.

The podcast also showcases Cruz’s seemingly photographic recall of obscure political happenings. On another recent episode, as he was ridiculing Harris’ proposed federal ban on grocery price-gouging, Cruz recalled a gaffe that then-candidate Barack Obama made at an Iowa rally in 2007, when Obama commented on the inflated cost of arugula at Whole Foods, drawing charges of elitism. That showed “a fairly amazing level of disconnectedness,” Cruz said, comparing Obama and Harris.

Amid his meteoric political rise, Cruz has battled the perception that he is not “likable.” Former President George W. Bush reportedly once said of Cruz, “I just don’t like the guy,” and former Democratic Sen. Al Franken famously quipped, “I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.” Cruz also faced widespread backlash for traveling to Cancún in 2021 as Texas was lashed by a historic winter storm that crashed the state power grid.

Matt Mackowiak, a Texas Republican strategist who has known Cruz for more than a decade, said the podcast helps Cruz combat the “chatter” about his so-called likeability.

“There is more depth to his personality than what may come across in a Senate floor speech or on a Fox News hit,” Mackowiak said. “He does have, actually, a quite good sense of humor, he is self-deprecating, and he also is, I think, much more culturally current than people might think. I think it does give him a chance to show a different side of himself.”

Providing an “unvarnished message”

The podcast venture, unique for a sitting senator, began in January 2020 as a way for Cruz to air his daily musings about then-President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. He recorded the first episode at 2:42 a.m., following the first day of the trial, and continued to pump out new episodes each night after.

The podcast vaulted to the top of the charts, besting the usual leaders like “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “The Daily.” When the show was near its peak, Cruz claimed it received more than a million unique monthly listeners.

After more than 500 episodes, “Verdict” no longer enjoys the same chart-topping status: it is the 46th most popular show in Apple Podcasts’ politics category, and 104th in the news category, according to the podcast analytics site Chartable. The reviews are filled with listeners who say they like Cruz and his commentary but think the show has become overly saturated with ads since iHeartMedia — the radio distribution and marketing giant that syndicates “Verdict”— picked up the show in 2022.

Still, the podcast remains a popular and potent way for Cruz to promote his brand. The episodes are also available on the popular iHeart app and on YouTube, where Cruz routinely attracts tens of thousands of viewers.

“This is one of only a few podcasts I regularly listen to,” one reviewer wrote recently on Apple Podcasts. “While I agree with others that the ads are starting to get out of hand, I thoroughly enjoy the Senator’s explanation of procedure, internal politics, and the general sausage making in Washington. He’s a good storyteller that makes dull and boring things interesting.”

Mackowiak said he thinks the podcast can help Cruz’s reelection bid, serving as a “highly efficient” way of communicating his message that is unavailable to his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred. It has also helped Cruz build up a base of followers, “which has immense value in multitudes of ways,” Mackowiak said.

“That’s a base of people that can become small dollar donors in the future, people for whom you can collect email addresses, people that you can mobilize for different things,” he said. “It’s a clever use of a very modern tool.”

Hoping to expand his appeal at the polls this fall, Cruz has cast himself as a lawmaker who looks for opportunities to reach across the aisle. In his podcast, though, that side takes a clear backseat to the part of Cruz that fueled his rise: his status as a partisan bomb-thrower and conservative stalwart who revels in contentious debate.

On the show, Cruz has expressed hope that Trump’s legal team could flip the results of the 2020 election and derided the judge overseeing Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial as a “rabid partisan.” He has also floated a number of unsubstantiated claims, asserting that Obama was secretly running the Biden administration and suggesting that efforts to diversify the Secret Service — what Cruz termed “an obsessive focus on bean counting, on quotas, on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] at the expense of the mission” — played a role in the Trump assassination attempt in July.

That same month, after Biden dropped his reelection bid, Cruz and Ferguson delighted in replaying a clip of Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary-turned-MSNBC host, painfully reading Biden’s withdrawal statement on air.

“I’d encourage you, go to YouTube and watch it on video, because to watch Jen Psaki’s face, you cannot fully appreciate the agony without watching it, as she’s reading these words, and as we’re watching the Democrat Party light itself on fire,” Cruz said.

Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said that a major part of the podcast platform’s appeal for Cruz is that it allows him to “provide an unvarnished message, one that actually he can control.”

He said Cruz is known as an effective communicator, and it’s no surprise that he is using the podcast largely to throw red meat to his core supporters.

“He’s kind of had this meteoric rise as a spokesperson for, let’s be honest, the hard right of the Republican Party — which plays well in Texas with the Republican base,” Taylor said.

Donations to PAC spark campaign finance complaints

Cruz’s podcast has also opened him to criticism from Allred and other detractors who say he spends too much time podcasting, to the point that it detracts from his ability to legislate. Allred has cast Cruz’s prolificness behind the mic, along with the senator’s maligned Cancún trip, as evidence that Cruz is overly focused on self-promotion and his own interests.

“We have a senator in Ted Cruz who’s not been doing the job, who’s not interested in you, who’s only focused on himself,” Allred said earlier this year. “That’s why he’s podcasting three to five times a week. That’s why he can abandon us when 30 million Texans are freezing in the dark.”

The podcast has also sparked ethics complaints from campaign finance watchdog groups, who have questioned the legality of an arrangement in which iHeartMedia, the podcast’s syndicator, has donated nearly $1 million to a super PAC backing Cruz’s reelection bid.

A formal complaint filed earlier this year by two groups, End Citizens United and the Campaign Legal Center, asserts that Cruz could have violated campaign finance laws if he played any role in iHeartMedia’s contributions to the super PAC. Under federal law, candidates can only direct or solicit up to $5,000 in donations to super PACs, which can otherwise raise unlimited sums to support candidates.

A spokesperson for an iHeartMedia subsidiary has said the payments to the pro-Cruz super PAC, Truth and Courage PAC, are associated with the revenue it receives from selling ads on Cruz’s podcast, for which Cruz himself is not paid. Though such an arrangement does not appear to violate campaign finance law by itself, the watchdog groups argued in their complaint that the “most reasonable and logical inference to be drawn from these circumstances” is that Cruz “requested or directed” iHeartMedia to donate to the super PAC “either directly or through his agents.”

A Cruz campaign spokesperson declined comment. A spokesperson for the senator’s campaign previously cast off the complaints as “lazy attacks during an election year.”

“Senator Cruz appears on ‘Verdict’ three times a week for free,” Cruz’s campaign said in a statement, according to the Houston Chronicle. “He does this to pull back the veil on the corrupt inner workings of Washington — none of which ever get fairly covered. How convenient that the mainstream media and the cogs in the machine of the Biden-Pelosi Democrat Party want this to stop.”

Taylor said the contributions could be considered examples of an “honorarium,” which the Senate rules define as “a payment for any appearance, speech, or article.” Senators are banned from accepting honoraria.

However, Taylor noted, the novelty of Cruz’s podcast arrangement “poses a unique challenge” because the Senate rules do not explicitly address whether such cases are above board.

“This is one of these examples where technology — what we have now on the internet and everything else — tends to outpace the ability of law and regulatory mechanisms to keep up with it,” Taylor said.

Cruz has rejected the idea that he spends too much time podcasting, saying it is “integral to my job as senator,” as it helps get his message to constituents.

He has also said it helps him reach a broader audience — including younger listeners — who are unlikely to catch his TV hits or even online ads.

“If I’m walking through an airport and a woman in her 70s comes up and says, ‘Hey I loved you on TV,’ you know many of the demographic that are watching TV interviews are of an older generation,” Cruz told The Hill. “On the other hand, if I’ve got another guy with a ponytail and tattoos comes up and says, ‘Hey, I love what you’re doing,’ I know what the next words he’s going to say. He’s going to mention the podcast.”

Disclosure: Apple and the University of Texas at San Antonio have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.