Former Sen. Bob Dole believes that the Republican Party could put its majority in the U.S. Senate in jeopardy if Sen. Ted Cruz receives the party’s presidential nomination this year.
In an interview with The New York Times, Dole warned that GOP could incur “cataclysmic” and “wholesale losses” in the 2016 election if Cruz tops the field, even more than if Donald Trump were to win the nomination.
“If he’s the nominee, we’re going to have wholesale losses in Congress and state offices and governors and legislatures,” said Dole, who won the GOP nomination in 1996, but lost then-President Bill Clinton. “There’ll be wholesale losses if he’s the nominee. Our party is not that far right.”
“I question his allegiance to the party,” Dole said of Cruz. “I don’t know how often you’ve heard him say the word ‘Republican’ — not very often.”
The former Kansas senator said that instead of calling Cruz a “conservative,” the description the Texas senator consistently prefers on the campaign trail, he should be called an “extremist.” Dole has long been vocal in his opposition to Cruz, who has consistently used the former Senate Republican leader as a prop in speeches along with Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as moderates who lost the presidency by alienating conservatives.
“In other words, we weren’t right-wing like he is, and I didn’t like that very much,” Dole told the Times. “It kind of hurt, because we worked hard, we did the best we could. We are conservatives, we are traditional Republican conservatives. And then, of course, he doesn’t have any friends in Congress. He called the leader of the Republicans a liar on the Senate floor.”
“If you want to call somebody a liar in the Senate, you go to their office — you don’t go on the Senate floor and make it public,” Dole said. “I don’t know how he’s going to deal with Congress … Nobody likes him.”
Dole doesn’t believe that Cruz will win the nomination, adding also that Trump might be the only Republican who can beat him.
“I think it’s Trump,” Dole said of who could top Cruz, adding that Trump was “gaining a little” and has “toned down his rhetoric.”
Dole, who has endorsed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is a two-time winner of the Iowa caucuses.
