Who's Funding All Those Beto O'Rourke Attack Ads? Meet Ted Cruz's Billionaires Club.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/10/whos-funding-all-those-beto-orourke-attack-ads-meet-ted-cruzs-billionaires-club/

Who’s Funding All Those Beto O’Rourke Attack Ads? Meet Ted Cruz’s Billionaires Club.
Bankrolled by megadonors and hard-to-trace LLCs, a group called Texans Are has spent millions targeting Cruz’s rival.
Tim Murphy | October 12, 2018 11:59 AM

In his underdog Texas Senate race, Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke has assembled one of the most prolific small-dollar digital fundraising operations in history. He’s found himself in a single-digit race with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, in part because he’s managed to bring in the kind of money—from coast to coast, but particularly from the Lone Star State—that wouldn’t look out of place in a presidential primary campaign. On Friday, his campaign announced it had raised a stunning $38 million over the previous three months.

O’Rourke’s overflowing war chest has made Cruz supporters nervous. Last August, a group of donors and Republican operatives formed a super-PAC, Texans Are, to counteract the emerging threat posed by O’Rourke. The group has so far spent more than $2.7 million attacking O’Rourke, accusing the El Paso Democrat of supporting “open borders,” “rolling out the red carpet for illegal immigrants,” and voting against body armor for sheriffs. Another Republican super-PAC, Club for Growth Action, has spent more than $1 million targeting O’Rourke over a downtown redevelopment plan he pushed in El Paso.

The Federal Election Commission only publishes the addresses of donors who donate $200 or more, so it’s difficult to determine where every cent given to O’Rourke came from. But prior to the most recent filing, most of the money he has received above that amount came from Texas. Based on the available FEC filings, O’Rourke actually gets a much greater percentage of his money (and nearly twice as much money overall) from Texans than Cruz does. And he’s done this, as he takes pains to point out, without taking any contributions from political action committees.

But that hasn’t stopped Cruz from making an issue of O’Rourke’s out-of-state donors. The senator often brings up O’Rourke’s fundraisers in New York and Southern California for the same reason Republicans flog O’Rourke’s support among celebrities like Eva Longoria and Khalid—to cast him as a tool of the coastal liberal elite. (Longoria is from Corpus Christi; Khalid is from El Paso.)

For instance:

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