WASHINGTON -- By the time President Donald Trump landed in Houston for a rally on Oct. 22 with Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texan had already fought his way back from a summer slump.

Public polls showed a comfortable lead in the high single digits. Nationally, Democrats were openly fretting that Rep. Beto O'Rourke had blown it. But within hours of the rally with Trump, Cruz's support began to crumble and 15 days later, he limped to victory with a 2.6-percentage point margin, the worst in decades for a Republican senator from Texas.

On Wednesday, Trump boasted that he'd put Cruz over the top.

"If you look at Ted Cruz, and you look at some of the people that won, they wouldn't have won without my helping them," Trump told the Daily Caller, a conservative website founded by Tucker Carlson.

Did Trump really pull Cruz across the finish line -- or was his embrace an anvil that nearly sunk the incumbent?

Internal campaign polling showed that Cruz's support dropped almost immediately after the event, from roughly 12 percentage points -- even better than the most optimistic public polls -- to 7, and in short order, to 5.

The causality was clear. In tracking polls after the rally, voters would mention Trump's "Lyin' Ted" epithet when asked open-ended questions about their views on the election -- something they'd never done before.

It's impossible to know how much damage Trump's embrace inflicted or how Cruz would have fared if the president stayed out of Texas.

Cruz's poll numbers rose shortly after the president announced Aug. 31 that he would campaign for him in Texas. And Trump's involvement may have boosted turnout on both sides.

The rally was a raucous, classically Trumpian performance. He and Cruz embraced. Trump called himself a "nationalist" -- setting off days of controversy as fellow Republicans wrestled with a term associated with fascists.

Cruz kept arm's length from the nationalist label, with its connotations of white supremacy that many saw as a dog whistle by Trump to the extreme right wing.

The senator acknowledged on Aug. 6 that he had spoken with Trump about campaigning for him, telling the Houston Chronicle: "I would certainly welcome his support, and I hope to see him in Texas."

Crowd size

Apart from his claim that he'd staved off defeat for Cruz, Trump also boasted that the crowd in Houston was even larger than he or aides had previously claimed.

"In the history of politics nobody's ever gotten crowds like that or close because you were in those stadiums and those arenas, but outside you had many more times -- you know, in Houston we had 109,000 people sign up for 22,000 seats. We actually took ads saying, 'please don't come' and that helped Ted Cruz a lot," he told the Daily Caller.

No such ads ever appeared on TV, in print publications or online.

The Toyota Center's seating capacity is 18,000, but the mezzanines were closed and empty throughout the event.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who had secretly flown to Washington in July to implore Trump to come to Texas on a rescue mission for Cruz, claimed the attendance was 16,000, with thousands more outside.

The Trump campaign claimed it received "requests for tickets exceeding over 100,000 online." Onstage, Trump claimed there were 50,000 people outside watching on big screen TVs.

Houston Police chief Art Acevedo's estimate was far more modest: up to 19,000 inside plus 3,000 outside.

Rally going smoothly. 18 - 19 thousand inside @ToyotaCenter for rally. @houstonpolice airship providing overwatch, approximate about 3,000 folks outside enjoying rally. Thank you all participants & protestors for your peaceful & orderly participation. #RelationalPolicing pic.twitter.com/LDGnetxdwZ — Chief Art Acevedo (@ArtAcevedo) October 22, 2018

However many people were there, the rally gave Cruz the chance to bask in the blessing of a president revered by much of the Texas electorate. Trump's base largely overlaps his, and for ardent Trump fans, the rally provided a jolt of excitement and enthusiasm.

Rivalry reminder

It also provided a reminder of their bitter rivalry for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. The fact that Cruz was so eager for the public embrace of a man who'd labeled him "Lyin' Ted" put off some voters, who found it a particularly craven exercise in political pragmatism.

News outlets that covered the rally dug out golden oldies from 2016 -- the times Cruz called the future president a "sniveling coward" or a "narcissist" or too volatile to entrust with the nuclear codes, and refused to endorse him at the GOP convention. The times that Trump labeled him a "maniac," mocked him for being shunned by fellow senators, and asserted that his dad conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate John F. Kennedy.

As Trump was leaving the White House the day of the rally in Houston, reporters asked him about all that.

"I don't regret anything," he said. "It all worked out nicely."

As for the nickname, he said: "He's not `Lyin' Ted' anymore. He's Beautiful Ted. I call him Texas Ted."

Until the Houston rally, respondents in Cruz campaign polls never mentioned "Lyin' Ted" or the JFK conspiracy theory. Afterward and immediately, voters routinely mentioned those when survey-takers invited an open-ended description of the contest.

The day after Election Day, Trump claimed "very close to complete victory" at a news conference now best remembered for a tussle between CNN's Jim Acosta and a White House intern who tried to snatch away a microphone, and the White House's subsequent decision to ban Acosta from the White House.

That, despite the fact that Democrats took control of the House. Among their conquests: the ouster of two senior Texas Republicans, Dallas Rep. Pete Sessions, a member of the party's House leadership, and Houston Rep. John Culberson.

Both represented districts that Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Trump job approval

Half of Texas voters approve of the job Trump is doing -- higher than his national average. But 58 percent say he lacks the temperament to serve effectively, according to exit polling by the Associated Press.

Trump is less popular in Culberson's district, where Republicans tend to be establishment types. His visit may have boosted Democrat Lizzie Pannill Fletcher. She won by 12,000 votes out of 243,000, a 5-point margin.

The president held 44 "Make America Great Again" rallies in 2018. The one in Houston was part of a final month-long flurry, mostly on behalf of Senate and gubernatorial nominees.

The effort, Trump asserted last week, "stopped the blue wave that they talked about... And the history really will see what a good job we did in the final couple of weeks in terms of getting some tremendous people over the finish line."

In an election post-mortem interview last week, Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe shrugged off Trump backlash -- or popularity -- as a major factor in the race.

Both Cruz and Trump, he noted, are "universally known."

"If people are sending Trump a message one way or the other, it's probably a secondary reason. Everybody knew what's at stake in this election," for Texas and for control of the Senate and direction of the nation. "There's a lot of ways to send Trump a message and this race probably isn't the one that you do it."