Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas on Wednesday called his party’s midterm election losses “a blue tsunami” and “a Watergate-level repudiation,” blaming voter anger over the cost of living for a night in which Democrats won control of Congress and Republicans, he said, lost every statewide race in Texas.
“2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami,” Cruz said on his podcast. “It was an a** kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation.”
Cruz, who was not on the ballot this year and won a third term in 2024, spoke a day after Democrat James Talarico defeated Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton for the Senate seat held by Republican Sen. John Cornyn. Paxton ousted Cornyn in a May primary runoff.
Talarico, 37, is a former teacher and Presbyterian seminarian who ran on fighting corruption and lowering costs. He is the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race in Texas since 1988. In the governor’s race, Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
Nationally, Democrats won majorities in both the House and the Senate.
“History was made last night,” Cruz said. “For months, we were saying that 2026 was the most consequential midterm election of our lifetimes. Unfortunately, we were right. Sometimes history is to be celebrated; other times, it is to be mourned. Always, it must be reckoned with.”
“What happened, and why?” he asked. “What are the consequences, and where on earth do we go from here?”
Cruz said turnout was not to blame. “When all the votes were counted, the problem wasn’t turnout,” he said. “Instead, our voters, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, showed up and voted, and rejected our candidates, voting Democrat instead.”
“We’ve lost the House. We’ve lost the Senate,” Cruz said. “When all is said and done, we will have lost eight to 10 Senate seats.”
He said Republicans lost ground well beyond the usual battlegrounds. “We lost in historically red states, like South Carolina and North Carolina, Kansas and Iowa,” he said. “We lost in purple states, like Michigan, and New Hampshire, and Georgia. And we just barely won by just a single point in bright red states like Florida and Louisiana, and then there’s Texas.”
“Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas,” Cruz said. “In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election.”
He said he had warned his listeners for weeks. “For weeks, I had been publicly warning on this podcast that we were in very real danger of losing everything in Texas,” he said. “Far too few believed that was possible. I am very, very sorry that it came to pass.”
“Texas has not had a Democrat governor since 1994. We haven’t had a Democrat senator since 1993. Now we’ll have both,” Cruz said.
“Why were the results so overwhelming?” Cruz asked. “Pundits and analysts will break down the results for weeks or months or even years to come, but several things are already evident today.”
He credited his wife, Heidi Cruz, with the best political advice he had received. “Years ago, the very best political advice I ever got was from Heidi. She said, ‘It’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s about their kids, their families, their hopes, their dreams, their futures,'” Cruz said. “Too many politicians forget that.”
He pointed to Kansas as an example. “Take the state of Kansas, for example, a state that has not elected a Democrat senator since 1932. It just did,” he said.
“Here’s what exit polling showed were the top issues in Kansas. Number one, cost of living, energy, and groceries. That was listed as number one by 30.6% of voters,” Cruz said.
He continued: “Corruption. Number two, 18.5%. The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%. The candidates are terrible, 7.9%. The Canada trade war, 7.6%. The GOP didn’t do enough to support Trump, 6.6%. Republicans didn’t pass the Save America Act, 5.6%. Trump’s focus on monuments, 5.5%, and data centers and AI, 3.8%.”
Cruz did not say which organization conducted the exit poll.
“The top issue, cost of living, is very real,” Cruz said. “Too many in politics dismissed it. They didn’t understand.”
He said Republicans leaned too heavily on broad economic measures. “They pointed to the macro numbers showing the stock markets soaring, median income at record highs, and poverty at record lows,” he said. “Those data are true, but they don’t tell all of the story.”
“Here are some stats that are a lot more real and personal,” Cruz said. “Spam, Hormel’s processed meat substitute, broke record sales, selling 113 million cans last year. That is nearly as much Spam as was sold during the entirety of World War II.”
He said “29% of Americans have used buy now, pay later for groceries this year,” adding, “That’s double the share just two years ago.”
“In August, banks repossessed 42% more homes than they did last year,” Cruz said. “In 2024, car repossessions topped 2.3 million, above the 2009 peak in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis. In 2025, 6% of 401(k) holders took hardship withdrawals, paying penalties. That is a record, and triple the norm.”
“And here’s one that’s really stunning,” he said. “Americans made more than 75 million paid plasma donations in 2026. That’s another record. That means 200,000 Americans every single day, with a needle in their arm, just to pay for groceries.”
“That is very real pain from real Americans, and too many Republican politicians seem like they didn’t understand or they didn’t care,” Cruz said. “Food is too high, gas is too high, diesel is too high, insurance is too high, life is too high.”
He also faulted tariffs and the war with Iran. “Tariffs have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long,” Cruz said. “It should have been brief, decisive, and over. It needs to end, and we should never, under any circumstances, give the Ayatollah billions of dollars.”
“There’s a very real economic disconnect,” Cruz said. “Our K-shaped economy is a yawning divide.”
“Last year, we saw the world’s very first trillionaire, a modern-day Thomas Edison, at the very same time that millions were struggling to feed their families,” he said. “Data centers being constructed were turning billionaires into centibillionaires, while simultaneously the average American’s electricity bill went up 30% in the last five years.”
“Understandably, people were p***** off, and elected Republicans didn’t do enough to address their very real pain,” Cruz said.
“So, what do we do now?” Cruz asked. “We need to listen and respond. We need to champion economic policies that make a real difference in working people’s lives, and we need to deal with the consequences.”
“Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue,” he said. “As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas. That’s not something I ever thought I would say.”
Cruz predicted Democrats would overreach in Austin and in Washington. “We can be certain that the Democrats in Austin and in Washington will overshoot,” he said. “In Texas, they will try to raise taxes dramatically. They may even try to adopt a state income tax, or even a California wealth tax.”
“They will try to shut down the energy industry, destroying jobs across our state,” he said. “They will embrace the radical transgender agenda. They will persecute those they perceive to be enemies, especially Elon Musk.”
“And in Washington, they will attack Trump every single day, constantly,” Cruz said. “Impeachment hearings, subpoenas, his family, cabinet members, business leaders, open persecution, and nonstop retaliation.”
“Make no mistake. Nationally, the radicals are in charge,” he said. “The communists and the Islamists who have taken over the Democrat Party have now taken over the United States Congress. They will be unleashed. Sadly, that means many Americans will be hurt. Texans will be hurt.”
“Their assault on business will make Texas a much less attractive place to start or grow a small business,” Cruz said. “Texas will become more like California if they succeed in halting all new investment into AI. The economic results will be dramatic.”
“Over $700 billion in new projects are scheduled to start in the next year,” he said. “If the Democrats shut them all down, our country will very likely go into a recession. That will suit the Democrats just fine. They’ll just blame it all on Donald Trump.”
Cruz laid out two goals for Republicans over the next two years. “In the next two years, we need to do two things. One, fight the madness,” he said. “I will work with Democrats when they’re willing to be reasonable.”
He said he called Talarico on election night. “Last night, I called James Talarico. I congratulated him on his very impressive victory,” Cruz said. “It was a pleasant conversation, and I told him that I looked forward to working with him to try to benefit Texas.”
“So, if there are things like flood relief for the Hill Country, or trying to get the space academy to Texas, he and I will work together,” he said.
“But if the newly elected radicals push policies that hurt Texas, raising taxes, destroying jobs, opening the border, releasing violent criminals, threatening our children, undermining our constitutional rights, I will fight with all of my strength to defend Texas and to defend the Constitution,” Cruz said.
The second goal, he said, is rebuilding the party’s coalition. “And number two, we need to rebuild, getting behind policies that directly benefit the constituents we lost,” Cruz said.
“There’s a complicated story, no doubt, of what happened on Election Day, but as I see it, the key constituencies we lost were blue-collar voters, what had rightly become the core base of our party, Evangelical Christians, who didn’t show up with the same numbers and fervor as prior elections, farmers and ranchers,” he said.
“Tragically, we alienated rural America,” Cruz said. “Young people, who excitedly had voted Republican in 2024, and who shifted hard blue this cycle. And of course, Hispanics.”
“For Hispanics, there’s a strong overlap with young people and blue-collar workers,” he said. “In 2024, just two years ago, I was proud to carry Hispanics statewide in Texas by six points, and we swung the Rio Grande Valley red for the first time in a century.”
“It can be done, but in this election, those Hispanic voters overwhelmingly went back Democrat,” Cruz said. “We have got to turn that around.”
“And for young people, we need to be the party of the future,” he said. “We need to champion policies that expand their future.”
Cruz pointed to two measures he wrote, Trump Accounts and a school choice tax credit. “Our two single biggest legislative accomplishments of the past two years, Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit, which will unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for kids, are generationally powerful,” he said.
“I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record,” Cruz said. “Too few voters were even aware of what we’d accomplished for their kids and their future.”
“But we need to build,” he said. “We need to expand to continue creating a new investor class for hundreds of millions of Americans, help everyone, every American, become an owner, to have real skin in the game, to create new generations of capitalists ready to reject socialism.”
Cruz argued that Democratic policies would worsen the costs that drove voters away from Republicans. “People voted as they did because they were angry,” he said. “Ironically, the Democrats that they elected are going to advance policies that will make affordability worse.”
“The Democrats want gas prices higher. They want to ban gasoline engines altogether,” Cruz said. “Their extreme environmental mandates will drive up food prices and the prices of everything else.”
He ended on a hopeful note. “But hear me now: we will bring Texas back. I am filled with hope and optimism. Texas will be red again,” Cruz said.
“We have not suddenly become a bunch of tofu-eating, gun-banning, tutu-wearing pinko commie liberals. That ain’t us. Texas is still Texas,” he said.
“We will rebuild as a true blue-collar party, not by embracing socialism, but by being real free-market conservatives,” Cruz said. “The way we built the Texas economic miracle in the first place, and we will build and rebuild America as well.”
“When the zealots overreach, and they will, we will stand ready to lead in the direction of freedom, of prosperity, of safety, and security, and common sense,” he said. “We will return to a new dawn of freedom in America.”
“It is dark right now, but it is always darkest before the dawn, and morning is coming,” Cruz said. “That is my fervent prayer, and that is my commitment to you.”
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