POCAHONTAS, IA, January 8, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Ted Cruz said Thursday that Hillary Clinton's support for unbridled abortion-on-demand will prove costly with an electoral demographic that the Democratic Party has largely taken for granted: Hispanics.
At a campaign stop in Pocahontas, Iowa, Cruz said conservatives can win the general election by taking a traditional stance on moral and social issues.
“You know who doesn’t think abortion is a winning issue for Democrats?” he asked. “Democrats.”
The junior senator from Texas pointed to a fellow fixture of Lone Star State politics as his example: Wendy Davis.
Both she and Cruz made widely reported filibusters in 2013. As a state senator she famous filibustered the Texas law restricting abortion to the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, while Ted Cruz held a 21-hour filibuster against ObamaCare on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
“Unlike Wendy Davis, I didn’t wear pink tennis shoes while I was doing it,” Cruz quipped at the Pizza Ranch in Pocahontas.
When Davis ran for the Democratic nomination in the Texas governor's race, she lost 20 counties – including seven in deeply poverty-stricken Rio Grande Valley – to an unknown Democratic primary challenger named Reynaldo “Ray” Madrigal, who described his views as pro-life.
Madrigal said in February 2014 that Davis' abortion extremism was rejected by a wide swath of the electorate. “It’s just not Catholics. It is Baptists and people of other religions. They don’t support abortion,” he said, “and Wendy Davis is an abortion candidate.”
While Davis prevailed, Republican Greg Abbott won the general election with nearly every demographic in the state – including Hispanic men (by one percentage point).
Since her electoral humbling, Davis has reemerged as a champion of feminist values – and a campaign surrogate for Hillary Clinton.
Davis told The Texas Tribune that Cruz's pro-life convictions amount to “extremism” that is “out of sync with American voters.”
Ted Cruz, and the polls, beg to differ.
“Hillary Clinton supports unlimited abortion on demand up to the moment of birth with taxpayer funding,” Cruz said, stating that only nine percent of the American people held to such a view.
A 2014 Pew Research Center poll found, “On the issue of abortion, Hispanics overall have long been more likely to say it should be illegal in all or most cases.”
The Texas senator believes those numbers will lead to a Republican landslide, if the nominee is staunchly pro-life.
He also brushed aside concerns that he would launch a war on contraception, saying, “Heidi and I have two little girls. I’m very glad we don’t have 17.”
Cruz, whose father came to the United States from Cuba, is one of two Hispanics in the Republican presidential primaries, with Florida Senator Marco Rubio.
All the Democratic presidential hopefuls are non-Hispanic whites.