by Rod D. Martin
July 25, 2015

Most important political fact of the week: Ted Cruz has over 120,000 individual donors, vs. just over 12,000 for Jeb Bush.

For comparison, the entire Republican field combined had just about 71,000 donors in July of 2007.

Trump is sweeping the polls, but Ted is sweeping the people. It’s certainly adding up on the money side: Ted raised $52 million in 90 days; Jeb — with two ex-Presidents in the family and an air of inevitability — took six months to raise his $103 million. And in hard money — actual contributions to his campaign rather than mega-checks to a Super PAC — Ted beat Jeb $14 million to $11 million in half the time.

The rest of the field isn’t even close. Except for Rubio ($41 million), the next best performance came from Rick Perry: a paltry $18M. Rand Paul managed $7M. Rick Santorum got $600,000: barely enough to cover his sweater vest bill. And interestingly enough, our “inevitable” future President Hillary Clinton only managed $10M more than Ted.

The establishment hates Ted Cruz even more than it hates Donald Trump. And like Donald Trump, the biggest single reason is that he could actually win. He will certainly have all the cash he needs to outspend most of the Republican field put together. And while Trump can certainly fill a stadium, Cruz’s stadiums also fill his coffers: they are putting their money where their mouths are. And that’s a very big deal indeed.

None of this matches the official narrative. And that’s no small part of why it’s the most important political fact of the day.

Second most important political fact of the week: Donald Trump sweeps the field after the “scandal” over his comments regarding John McCain. It turns out no one especially likes John McCain (who knew?). Or to put it in the words of the story, “Trump’s comments ignited a firestorm of criticism from politicians and presidential candidates”.

Yeah, exactly.

Trump is at 28%, second place goes to a Scott Walker/Jeb Bush statistical tie at just half that. Everyone else is in single digits. Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham may not make the cut to be in the first debate.

The YouGov poll is here.