Sen. Ted Cruz is spending the closing days of the midterm campaigns in some familiar political territory: battleground states and early presidential primary states.
While Mr. Cruz is campaigning for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the GOP Senate nominee, he’s also crisscrossing the country on behalf of Senate candidates in Iowa, Kansas, Michigan and North Carolina.
The Iowa visit, the Texas Republican’s third in recent months, draws particular attention given the state’s outsized role in presidential politics as the traditional launching pad for the GOP nominating contest.
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Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said the itinerary looks less like a midterm sprint and more like the opening stages of a potential 2028 presidential campaign.
“He would like to run for president, and hence you do this because all eyes are on these battleground races the next few days, and then the second the midterms are over, the 2028 conversation begins,” Mr. O’Connell said. “This is to make sure you are being seen, because we are going to turn, literally 48 hours after the midterms, to the 2028 talk.”
Mr. Cruz’s latest stop was South Carolina, where he campaigned for Sen. Darline Graham, the Republican Senate nominee and sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died on July 11.
“Why am I here in South Carolina tonight? Because the Senate race for Darline Graham is neck-and-neck,” Mr. Cruz told the crowd. “The radical left has put a bull’s-eye on your state for the last 10 days of this election. The stakes are too high to do anything else.”
If Mr. Cruz is laying groundwork for another White House run, he would not be alone. Vice President J.D. Vance, who has been a top surrogate in the midterms, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are possible contenders for the Republican nomination.
Mr. Cruz has also maintained a national profile through his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” which he launched in 2020 with conservative commentator Ben Ferguson. The senator recently devoted an entire episode to arguing that alleged ties between Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood raise red flags.
“If he wins, I believe that poses an unprecedented national security risk,” Mr. Cruz said, warning Mr. El-Sayed could pass on classified information to “terrorists who want to murder us.”
The prospect of another presidential run would mark a return to a stage where Mr. Cruz and President Trump once waged one of the ugliest battles of the 2016 Republican primary.
Mr. Trump mocked Mr. Cruz’s wife’s appearance and falsely suggested the senator’s father had ties to Lee Harvey Oswald. He also branded the Texas Republican “Lying Ted.”
Mr. Cruz, who won the Iowa caucuses that year, responded by calling Mr. Trump a “serial philanderer,” a “pathological liar” and a “narcissist at a level that I don’t think this country has ever seen.” He was booed at the Republican National Convention after refusing to endorse Mr. Trump.
Their relationship has changed dramatically since then.
Mr. Cruz now regularly praises Mr. Trump, crediting him with passing the 2017 tax cuts, reshaping the Supreme Court and helping curb illegal immigration and drug trafficking at the southern border.
Still, Mr. Cruz occasionally breaks with the president and draws distinctions with Mr. Vance, an early favorite in the 2028 GOP lineup.
In January, Axios published a leaked recording in which Mr. Cruz questioned Mr. Vance’s ties to conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who has clashed with Mr. Cruz over support for Israel. In the same recording, Mr. Cruz described warning Mr. Trump that tariffs could hurt the economy and cost Republicans politically.
“You’re going to lose the House. You’re going to lose the Senate. You’re going to spend the next two years being impeached every single week,” Mr. Cruz said.
Before a visit to Iowa earlier this year, Mr. Cruz rejected the idea that Republicans will automatically rally around Mr. Vance in 2028. Mr. Cruz vowed to “certainly be part of the discussion.”
He has framed the next Republican nomination fight as a broader debate over the party’s future, saying it will help determine whether the GOP remains a “small-government, free-market conservative party” or becomes a “big-government, nanny state party.”
“Economically, I think we should be a conservative party, and on foreign policy, we’ve got a debate: Are we an isolationist party that withdraws from the world, or do we believe in American leadership? And I care deeply about both of those issues and who the party is,” he said.
Mr. Vance, for his part, has said he expects Mr. Trump to endorse him if he runs in 2028, and said his attention remains on the midterms — not Mr. Cruz.
“It is really obvious to me that, at this very moment, Ted Cruz is running for president,” he recently said on NBC News. “At this moment, I’m not. I’m trying to help elect Republicans. That’s what I’m going to keep on doing.”
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