Ted Cruz: Voter turnout dispels media myth of a blue Texas

Cruz, who is up for Senate re-election, won the Republican Texas primary with over 1.3 million votes out of more than 1.5 million GOP votes cast. The Democratic front-runner, Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, won his party’s primary with only 641,052 votes, out of just over 1 million votes cast for Democrats.

Before the vote, many in the media said Republicans were getting worried that this would be the year Texas would turn blue. But Cruz said he was never worried about that.

“That doesn’t quite fit the narrative that a lot of folks in the media want to tell, because every two years, every four years, Texas is always fixin’ to turn blue, but the nice value of it is, in Texas at least, there are a lot more conservatives than there are liberals,” Cruz told CNN.

When asked about the higher turnout in both parties, Cruz said he was happy with how it turned out on the Republican side.

“In Texas last night we had a strong turnout for conservatives, it was really encouraging,” Cruz said. “The early vote numbers were quite good for Democrats, but at the end of the night, I was very gratified to win over 85 percent of the vote, to win 1.3 million votes, which is more than double what my Democratic opponent got.”