The first day of voting for the primary presidential election, Ted Cruz came out the clear winner in Iowa. This is mainly because of the large amount of voters who are evangelicals and Cruz is a Christian candidate that consistently uses religion as a means of appealing to voters. But, there is another candidate who does this as well, Ben Carson. With the exception of political experience, not much separates Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. So, how did Cruz end up with so much of evangelical’s votes? Ted Cruz admitted that his campaign called and left messages for supporters that Ben Carson would be dropping out of the race. The Carson campaign was able to release the audio of the message where it is clear what is being said, “Hello, this is the Cruz campaign with breaking news. Dr. Ben Carson will be suspending campaigning following tonight’s success.” Volunteers for the campaign instructed voters to “not waste a vote for Ben Carson and vote for Ted Cruz.” As evident today, Carson is still in the race.
In the most recent Republican debate, Cruz claimed he got the information that Carson would be dropping out of the race from CNN’s broadcast. CNN responded saying, “What Senator Cruz said tonight in the debate is categorically false.” So, after Cruz was caught in yet another lie he came out with an apology, sort of. Cruz stated that he is not sorry for keeping voters updated but that he should have clarified that Carson was “indeed staying in the race when that came out. That was a mistake from our end, and for that I apologize to Dr. Carson.”
Cruz’s actions and statements have been deemed “categorically false” and “knowingly misstated” by CNN which can reasonably be translated to a lie. While Ted Cruz touts his campaign slogan, “TrusTed” his actions suggest otherwise. The actions by Cruz’s campaign that night were deceitful and, as Iowa state Representative Rob Taylor put it, “horsesh-t.”