Sen. Ted Cruz said he believes Republicans should not dismiss the threat Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders poses to President Trump in the upcoming election.
The Texas Republican appeared as a guest contributor on the Daily Wire’s podcast Backstage on Wednesday and was questioned by co-host and author Andrew Klavan about Trump’s chances in the general election.
“Is he in the kind of trouble the polls show him to be in, where they show Biden so far ahead, or is that really just pre-election nonsense?” Klavan asked.
“Right now, if the election were held today, I think Trump would win,” Cruz said, adding that the country’s volatility makes it difficult to predict.
“I do think a lot of Republicans are sort of prematurely jubilant,” he continued on the upcoming election. “Listen 2016, if 100,000 votes flipped, Hillary Clinton would have been president. This is an amazingly divided country. I think it is entirely possible a Democrat wins. It’s entirely possible that this country could elect a wild-eyed socialist like Bernie Sanders. That terrifies me.”
He added, “The way we stop it from happening is every conservative has to realize this is a real possibility.”
Cruz is far from the only conservative to warn against a Sanders presidency. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, told student activists last week to get “deathly serious” about the Vermont socialist, who is running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, because he could win the election.
“I push back when people say, ‘Well, there’s no way that Bernie Sanders could become president of the United States.’ No, he could win,” he said. “I want every conservative activist to get your laughs out of the way and your mockery out of the way and get deathly serious. Because we should not do what the left did in 2016 and dismiss an outsider populist candidate.”
