Ted Cruz has a media strategy. It’s called Breitbart.com.

The Texas senator is firmly ensconced in the middle of the Republican presidential primary pack. But you wouldn’t be able to tell from Breitbart.com.


From reader polls and the conservative website’s near cheerleading coverage of the Texas Senator, to donor connections behind the scenes, Cruz likely has the Republican presidential field’s deepest relationship with the Breitbart machine — a relationship he’s seeking to parlay into more energized grassroots support.

Breitbart.com, which boasts of having 18.7 million unique users per month — almost all of them conservative firebrands — is funded in part by New York hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, whose family is bankrolling a pro-Cruz super PAC as well as a political data company called Cambridge Analytica that is working with Cruz’s presidential campaign.

Breitbart.com insists it’s independent, though proudly conservative, and attributes its often-favorable assessments of Cruz to the fact that his independent brand of conservatism is appealing to its readers.

But no one disputes the site’s enthusiasm for Cruz.

The night before his campaign announcement, Cruz invited a Breitbart reporter to spend one-on-one time with him and his family — an item deemed an “exclusive” with photos of the “potential first family” as they got ready for bed.

A recent story about an AP photo that appeared to position a gun at the senator’s head stated that while a Democrat would be incredibly offended by the image, Cruz’s “feelings won’t get hurt. He’s a big boy.”

And another blasted former President George W. Bush’s senior aide Karl Rove for what the site characterized as “lying” over an exchange Cruz and Rove had during Cruz’s run for Texas Attorney General.

“Karl Rove should probably read what he wrote in his own emails before he attacks the integrity of a U.S. Senator and presidential candidate again,” the story’s lead sentence reads.

The site, founded in 2007 by the now-iconic conservative journalist and activist Andrew Breitbart, can be an important starting ground for driving the conversation on the right — even if its reporting is not always on entirely solid ground. (The site has been known to misquote officials and misidentify others.)

In June, the site’s editors said their 18.7 million unique users represented a 56 percent increase over the year before. And nearly all of the Republican presidential candidates regularly post op-eds and grant the site interviews or certain “exclusives,” which can range from interviews to excerpts of their forthcoming books.

Cruz’s distaste for the mainstream media is well known. Last week, the Texas senator told conservative host Glenn Beck that he once rebuked a young staffer for calling one member of the mainstream media “nice,” telling the staffer all the media want to do is “filet” him across the front page. He once told a New York Times reporter he was going to kick around the publication and never give the reporter access.

But conservative media is a different story. He has long used that avenue as a tool to engage conservative audiences. He even broke the news, in 2011, that he was planning to run for Senate in a conference call with conservative bloggers. Just weeks after Andrew Breitbart died at the age of 43 in 2012, a story on Breitbart.com said “The late Andrew Breitbart saw in Sen. Ted Cruz the future of the conservative movement,” alongside a photo of Breitbart holding a Ted Cruz for Senate sticker.

And Cruz has gone to bat for Breitbart.com in the Senate. Cruz sent a letter to the IRS commissioner on Breitbart’s behalf about the “highly questionable” audit of the company the agency was undertaking last September.

Meanwhile, he has offered toasts and remembrances to Andrew Breitbart and is a frequent guest at Breitbart.com events.

He nodded to Andrew Breitbart’s legacy again when he endorsed Mike Flynn, a former editor at Breitbart.com who was running in a GOP congressional primary in Illinois (a race he lost on Tuesday), prompting puzzlement among observers for the spending of political capital on a candidate that was far from viable.

“When Andrew Breitbart launched BigGovernment.com to expose ACORN and fight back against the institutional left and the political class, he chose Mike Flynn as his lieutenant,” Cruz said in a statement. “For six years, Flynn helped expose the media’s lies and led many fights against the Obama administration.”

Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said that the senator considers Breitbart.com a source of “fair” coverage, its “center-right” perspective a corrective for the mainstream media’s “center-left” bias.

“While most of the media covers the news from a center-left perspective, they cover from a center-right perspective, and their readers have been very supportive of Cruz,” Tyler said of Breitbart.com. “It can be a vehicle to get covered fairly from a center-right perspective, to an audience that enjoys hearing from Sen. Cruz.”

The love runs both ways. For the first time, the site is hosting its own regular online poll of its readers, and Cruz is far and away the favorite candidate. Of the approximately 55,000 responses from June, Breitbart said 33 percent voted in favor of Cruz, putting him in first place ahead of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who garnered 23 percent, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul who brought in 10 percent. It’s hardly a scientific poll — anyone can vote as often as they’d like — but the results match up with the site’s favorable coverage of particular candidates.

“I don’t think this is a surprise, the result that we have, based on sort of the voice of our site. It tends to favor the tea party grassroots type of conservatives, the independent-minded conservatives, people who don’t identify with the Republican establishment,” Alex Marlow, the site’s editor-in-chief, said in an interview.

Behind the scenes there is perhaps an even more important connection between Cruz and Breitbart.

Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon has worked with Mercer on political projects including Cambridge Analytica, according to conservative finance operatives. They describe Bannon as something of a gatekeeper for Mercer, a New York hedge fund magnate who keeps a close circle of associates and has not publicly advocated for Cruz. According to the New York Times, Mercer is the main donor behind a network of four super PACs supporting Cruz’s bid for president. Mercer’s daughter Rebekah Mercer, who has helped steer the family’s increasingly public investment in conservative politics, was an early Cruz supporter, hosting a fundraiser in April for the Texas Senator.

A spokesman for the Mercers decline to comment on their involvement in Breitbart.com or whether they have sought to shape the outlet’s coverage of Cruz. Breitbart editors refused to comment on the Mercer connection saying they’re a “private company and we don’t comment on who our investors or backers are.”

“Breitbart is perfectly content letting these nameless/faceless ‘multiple places’ as you put it speculate, gossip and exhaust their imaginations telling reporters tales of what they think they know,” a Breitbart spokesperson said in a statement.

And Tyler, Cruz’s spokesman, said that Mercer’s involvement in Breitbart also had no effect on the Cruz campaign’s dealings with the outlet.

“I answered the phone for you just like I would answer for Breitbart,” he told a POLITICO reporter. “I don’t stop and look at who POLITICO’s investors are. I think we have open access to all the media outlets except the ones that have an agenda,” which aren’t real outlets, he said.

Marlow said Cruz’s views often align well with those of the site’s editors and readers, but that Breitbart.com been critical of him in the past.

“[Cruz] tends to have a lot of ideas that are supported by a lot of our readers … but we’ve been critical of him in the past particularly when he went down to the border with Glenn Beck and brought soccer balls — we were pretty brutal there,” Marlow said.

Breitbart has published articles about how Cruz is “poorly matched to defeat Hillary.” The site also hammered Cruz over his initial support for fast-track authority on the trade deal, a position he later reversed — through an op-ed posted at Breitbart.com. And, to be sure, Breitbart has also showered favorable coverage on the likes of Walker, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and, in the past couple of weeks, Donald Trump.

For Breitbart, the attention from candidates like Cruz is nothing but positive.

“There’s a huge field in terms of Republican candidates who are vying to become the nominee and this huge field has generated an intensity of interest,” Breitbart News CEO Larry Solov said in an interview. “I think a lot of candidates realize our audience is the one that they will have to be capture in order to win the nomination. That’s why they’re paying attention.”