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With only three weeks left to go before the 2018 midterm elections, a CNN poll showed Republican incumbent Ted Cruz leading Democratic challenger Beto O'Rourke by seven percentage points among likely Texas voters in the race for Cruz's U.S. Senate seat. While the candidates faced off in debates and television ads, social media users shared partisan memes aimed at swaying readers for or against one or the other candidate, according to their preferences. Those memes were often based more on fiction than on fact. One such meme sought to make an issue of Ted Cruz's wealth, asserting that his net worth had increased dramatically during his time in the Senate despite his fixed government salary: As far as we can tell, the only figure the meme states accurately is Cruz's salary. According to the U.S. Senate's website, all sitting senators (excluding leaders) earn $174,000 per year. We were unable to locate any reliable sources reporting that Cruz's current net worth is $4.6 million. According to the most recent estimate we could find (from a 4 October 2018 article in the Texas Tribune), Cruz's financial disclosure forms showed that, as of 2017, he and his wife Heidi (a managing director at the Goldman Sachs investment firm) owned between $2 million and $5 million in assets (including stocks, mutual funds, retirement benefits, and a partially repayable loan to Cruz's 2012 election campaign). They also had liabilities ranging from $1 million to $5.3 million. Subtracting the liabilities from the assets yields an estimated net worth of, at most, $4 million. The actual number could be far less, possibly in the negative. Although the $4.6 million figure cited in the meme isn't implausible, we don't know how it was arrived at, or by whom. Nor were we able to ascertain where the other amount cited -- Cruz's alleged net worth of $500,000 in 2012 -- came from. According to the go-to source for such appraisals, OpenSecrets.org (the website of the Center for Responsible Politics), Cruz was already worth an estimated $3.47 million in 2012. It's important to note that we only have estimates to work with. Candidates are required to disclose assets, liabilities, transactions, gifts, reimbursements, and certain kinds of expenditures on their personal financial disclosure forms, but not their overall net worth. Moreover, they're asked to report these amounts in terms of high and low ranges, not exact figures. This is how OpenSecrets.org arrives at an estimated net worth for each candidate: Here are OpenSecret.org's annual estimates of Ted Cruz's net worth between 2011 and the most recent year for which they analyzed the data, 2015: So, although Cruz's estimated net worth may have increased after he entered the Senate in 2013, it seemingly wasn't as dramatic an increase as portrayed, nor was it a particularly shocking one given that his wife was the family's primary breadwinner most of that time. In fact, Heidi Cruz inadvertently supplied more fodder for partisan attacks on the couple's wealth by suggesting in an October 2018 interview with the Atlantic that they wouldn't be able to afford purchasing a second home any time soon. The subject came up in a discussion about the hardships of being a senator's spouse: Left-leaning commentators attempted to sow class resentment by portraying her as complaining about her husband's six-figure salary, but that's a gambit that cuts both ways. As pointed out in a recent Associated Press analysis, Cruz's challenger, Democrat Beto O'Rourke, had an estimated 2015 net worth of $9 million, more than double that of Cruz. We reached out to Sen. Cruz's reelection campaign for comment, but have not yet received a reply.
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