“The media doesn’t report that”, he continued.
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So said the man who spent yesterday recycling a wildly speculative depiction of a violent criminal created in an article on a right-wing media site, entitled “Colorado Planned Parenthood Shooter NOT Republican, Identifies as Woman”.
Cruz has been working hard ever since the horrific terror attack on Planned Parenthood to redirect accusations that his anti-abortion rhetoric and lies about the Planned Parenthood videos contributed to a climate of hate that led to the murders of three people Friday.
The 2016 Republican presidential candidate used his airtime to not only lambast the media (again), but also to assert his belief that “the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats”.
Cruz said that Democrats are “soft on crime” and want to give convicted felons voting rights because they believe those individuals will vote Democrat. He cited a study showing that most people, after they get out of prison, if they are allowed to return to voting, which is a patchwork of different laws around the country, many of them end up registering as Democrats. Because the Democrats know that convicted felons tend to vote Democrat. And in North Carolina, the split showed 54.6% Democrat, and 10.2% Republican. When I was in college we had a machine in the bathroom, you put 50 cents in and voila!
“Cruz is misinterpreting our research”, Morse told us via email.
But Cruz’s claim that Republicans have never attempted to roll back access to reproductive health care and contraception is undermined by the candidate’s own efforts to do just that.
“Ex-felons” partisan affiliations vary across states and I don’t think there’s enough evidence to claim that the national ex-felon population is “overwhelmingly Democratic, ‘ at least in terms of party registration”, wrote Meredith and Morse in response to a query. “There is more evidence that ex-felons are not very supportive of the Republican Party”.
Pressed on what circumstances he may dispatch a more substantial US ground force, Cruz demurs, saying only that such scenarios exist in situations affecting “vital USA national security interests”. It is true, however, that far more registered ex-felons who committed violent crimes were Democrats than Republicans – but that’s a far cry from the point Cruz made.
When questioned about his remarks, which seem to misrepresent the facts in the study, Cruz doubled down on his statements, telling ABC News that he was “engaging in a process that is called ‘reasonable inference'”. “This paper will show that previous research overestimates the turnout rate of Florida’s ex-felons and underestimates the share of the vote George W. Bush would have won among them”.
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“Five pinocchios”, Durbin told reporters when asked about Cruz’s comments, which came during a Monday evening interview. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, poses for a portrait following an intervie …
