Ted Cruz has had several high-profile successes in the last few weeks, destroying Donald Trump in Wisconsin’s recent primary and sweeping the delegate count in Colorado over the weekend.
But while the momentum is solidly with Ted Cruz, several major Republican donors have been slow to put their financial backing behind the Texas Senator and, it seems, the lack of big-name support is beginning to irk the Cruz campaign.
In the past, top donors like Nevada casino mogul Sheldon Adelson would have been pouring money into a front-running Republican campaign, clearing the way for a potential GOP nominee to begin the process of competing against a Democrat on the national level. But according to POLITICO, Adelson—as well as the left’s perennial bogeymen, the Koch brothers—have mostly stayed on the sidelines in the Trump-Cruz match up. Among major GOP donors, meeting in secret last week, there were no immediate volunteers to raise money for either Trump or Cruz, should either become the Republican nominee.
Adelson, who owns Sands Corp., which owns and manages the Venetian and Palazzo hotel-casinos in Las Vegas, spent close to a $100 million backing Mitt Romney (and, to everyone’s dismay, Newt Gingrich) in 2012. Adelson was rumored, some months ago, to be tossing his support to Marco Rubio, but Rubio dropped out of contention after a dramatic loss in the Florida primary, but otherwise the multi-billionaire’s bank account has been quiet. He’s managed only a $2,700 donation to Ted Cruz, and that was back in November.
The Koch brothers have held back, too, preferring to make donations to key public affairs and policy campaigns instead of political ones.
But while the billionaires hole up in mansions and dissect what went wrong with the Republican nomination process—many of them favored Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, more “Establishment candidates”—Ted Cruz and Donald Trump seem no worse for wear. Trump is “self-lending,” making up-front donations to his campaign with the promise of being paid back later by donors, and Cruz pulled in $12 million in February and, reportedly, $12.5 million in March.
And money doesn’t necessarily buy success. The biggest recipient of mega-donor cash, Jeb Bush, who spent an astounding $2,888 per vote in Iowa and $1,200 per vote in New Hampshire, is currently sitting at home, trying to figure out how he spent a whopping $130 million on a campaign with absolutely nothing to show for it, except, probably, a series of night terrors in which he faces down a blathering Donald Trump again and again on a debate stage.
The biggest fear for the Republican frontrunners—and especially for Cruz, who is looking to defeatTrump on the delegate trail—is that these Republican megadonors aren’t so much “sitting out” the 2016 contest as they are waiting for Cruz to force the convention to a second vote. Cruz has an advantage, snapping up loyalists at the state level, stealing delegates in Trump’s states, and reassuring himself of support if Trump fails to get the 1237 delegates necessary to secure the Republican nomination and the convention becomes brokered.
But it’s possible, as the Cruz campaign quietly expressed this weekend, that Establishment Republicans see Cruz as a stalking horse, and while they’re happy to see Cruz put an end to Trump’s reign of terror, they don’t intend on clearing a path for Cruz to snag the nomination. Cruz has few friends among Washington’s Republican elite, and he knows what fair-weather support he’s picked up could vanish in a second in Cleveland.
