Sen. Ted Cruz admitted late Monday he regrets going the independent route and storming into action in the first couple years of his senate term.
The junior senator from Texas told Fox News host Megyn Kelly his “passionate” personality corroded his judgment during the fight to repeal Obamacare and pushed some Republicans lawmakers away.
“I wish in hindsight that I’d done a better job of reaching out to a lot of key thought leaders and looping people in on our strategy on building a broader coalition,” Cruz said. “I thought what we were trying to do was evident and it wasn’t nearly as evident to people who I thought should have been our allies, but weren’t.”
This self-criticism, though rarely heard on the campaign trail, was first penned in the presidential candidate’s 2015 autobiography, A Time for Truth.
Cruz, who has partnered with Utah Sen. Mike Lee as two of the most conservative members of the Senate, said admitting he would do things differently was part of improving as a politician.
“Listen, any rational person — you look at battles and think ‘how could we have fought this better,'” Cruz told Kelly.
