WASHINGTON, D.C. - It was vintage Ted Cruz.

With bipartisan majorities in Congress poised to avert a government shutdown and pass a massive $1.3 trillion spending bill, the Texas Republican issued a dissent worthy of his insurgent 2016 presidential campaign, when he ran against the “Washington cabal.”

Now, the same bill President Donald Trump reluctantly would sign was, to Cruz, a “disastrous” hodge-podge of wasteful spending “drafted by the Swamp in the dark of night.”

While some Republicans may fret about Trump’s shaky approval ratings or their party’s brand among disappointed conservatives, Cruz seems to occupy his own space in the political firmament. Launching his 2018 reelection campaign in Houston on Monday, he can fall back on his own tried-and-true persona: an unreconstructed conservative born of the party’s grass-roots base.

It is an identity that also could serve in some degree as a bulwark against the anti-Trump wave that has propelled his Democratic challenger, El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who launched his long-shot campaign a year ago Saturday.

Whatever the president’s fortunes in a tumultuous and often chaotic White House, Cruz, once Trump’s fiercest GOP critic, appears ready to stand on his own.

“He’s certainly not a Trump Republican,” University of Texas government scholar Sean Theriault said. “He’s a Cruz Republican, and I mean Cruz in all caps. He definitely marches to the beat of his own drummer.”

As the Senate campaign heats up, Texas voters seem almost evenly split on Cruz, according to a February University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll.

While his favorability rating stood at 40 percent, 42 percent viewed him unfavorably in the poll.

O’Rourke, on the other hand, got a 29 percent favorability rating, more than double his unfavorable score of 14 percent. His problem, however, is that nearly 60 percent of the poll respondents had never heard of him or knew too little to have an opinion, making him, essentially, a blank slate for the two sides to fill.

Cruz, for better or worse, is a known quantity.

“I can’t imagine that very many people are going to change their opinion of Ted Cruz,” Theriault said.

While Cruz’s presidential campaign successfully branded him as a “proven conservative” in the 2016 Republican primaries, that did not necessarily translate into personal likeability, a metric Democratic strategists hope to exploit in the coming race.

“Ted Cruz does have a high enough profile to separate himself, but whether that’s a good thing or bad thing for him is not entirely clear,” said Tom Jensen, a director at Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm that had Cruz leading O’Rourke 45-37 percent in January.

That was a smaller margin than the 18-point lead Cruz’s internal polling showed earlier.

Although Trump’s approval ratings have been climbing in March, he only won deep-red Texas by nine-points in 2016, and the turbulence that has surrounded his presidency has energized Democrats across the nation.

Looking at recent GOP defeats in Virginia, Alabama and Pennsylvania, Republican strategists across the country have been taking stock of the Trump effect.

In the February Texas poll, Trump approval and disapproval was evenly split at 46 percent of voters on either side. It remains an open question whether he would be an asset or a liability for GOP lawmakers running in competitive districts, like U.S. Reps. John Culberson in Houston and Pete Sessions in Dallas.

“The Pete Sessions’ and John Culbersons of this world probably are, more than Ted Cruz, going to have their fate determined by whether people like Trump or not, because they don’t have as high a profile,” Jensen said. “Cruz is his own man to a greater extent than most Republicans who are going to be running this year.”

Although Cruz has smoothed over his differences with Trump since their bitter 2016 GOP primary rivalry, it always has been clear that Cruz represents a much more orthodox strain of conservatism.

From Cruz’s perspective, Trump’s decisive advantage was his cross-over celebrity appeal, an unforeseen X-factor that may or may not still drive voters to the polls.

“The percentage that Trump has that like him, they’re not political people,” said GOP strategist Rick Tyler, who worked on Cruz’s presidential campaign. “They’re not going to show up for other Republicans, and never have. So, the idea that Trump is going to drive people to the polls in Texas is not there. But I don’t think Cruz relies on those people.”

Indeed, all the early signs point to a familiar Cruz strategy of focusing on his conservative base and it die-hard tea party and evangelical activists.

The first shot of his campaign was a jingle to define O’Rourke as a “liberal man;” the second was a quip on Twitter this week speculating that his opponent would be a “lock to win a Senate seat in Massachusetts” - a jibe at U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy’s presence in Houston this weekend to campaign with O’Rourke.

Some analysts do see Trump playing a role in the Texas Senate race as a catalyst for driving Democratic turnout in November.

“That’s where it could have a pretty big consequence,” Theriault said. “Especially for those last couple of percentage points Beto would need to get over the threshold.”

Analysts will be watching closely to see if Trump campaigns for Cruz in Texas as he has for candidates in other states. Given Cruz’s overwhelming advantage in the state, it would appear like an unnecessary risk.

“Regardless, Cruz is never going to have his arms draped around Donald Trump,” Theriault said, “and he’s never going to push him away as much as he did at the Republican National Convention.”

Ultimately, Cruz’s ace in the hole is Texas, a state with active constituencies pushing so far to the right that Tyler jokingly refers to the tea party champion as a “moderate.”

To some analysts it means that whatever Trump’s pull or push might be in November, Cruz’s brand as a conservative is all that matters.

“The overall Republican lean of the state suggests that even if there is a decrease (in Republican turnout), it’s not likely to fundamentally change the race,” said Craig Goodman, a political scientist at the University of Houston-Victoria.

For Cruz, the March 23 vote against the 2018 spending bill provided a certain measure of insurance, confirming his bona fides as a fiscal hawk. It also provided the side benefit of establishing a modicum of independence from Trump, who complained publicly, but ultimately signed the bill.

“It was an opportunity to go back to his grass-roots foundations and denounce the ‘Washington cabal,’ ‘the swamp,’ and everything else, without actually shutting down the government,” Goodman said.

In fact, with a filibuster-proof 65 senators prepared to approve the spending plan, there was no danger of turning out the lights in Washington like there had been in 2013, when Cruz went to the government shutdown mat in an attempt to defund Obamacare.

Not that a federal government shutdown would have played poorly with Cruz’s base in Texas.

“The truth is,” Goodman said, “if Senator Cruz had shut down the government over this, I’m not sure that he would have necessarily been any worse off.”