WASHINGTON — At first glance, Senator Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, seems to be just the sort of person the Tea Party supporters who celebrate her husband’s anti-establishment positions love to hate.

A vegetarian with a Harvard M.B.A., Mrs. Cruz is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms that helped set off the populist rage that ushered Mr. Cruz into the Senate in 2012. She works for Goldman in Houston, where she lives with the couple’s two young children, and as her husband’s fame has increased — depending on the audience, he is among the most pilloried or revered members of the Senate — she has maintained a low profile.

“I think it works really well for our family for us both to have careers, and I know what my commitments are to Goldman,” Mrs. Cruz, 41, said in an interview last week in her husband’s Senate office. “I think it’s also really good for our girls to have me at home with them.”

Yet the fallout from her husband’s role in the Congressional fiscal showdown this month did not spare Mrs. Cruz, one half of what she calls “a great team.” And it was the Democrats who seemed to be making her background an issue.