Ted Cruz has been a prolific social media user for years, regularly claiming whatever made-up award is given annually for most posts made to X, formerly Twitter, by a member of the U.S. Senate.
And though a good portion of Cruz’s many, many tweets are the usual political mumbo jumbo — clips of cable news appearances and publicly congratulating colleagues on various appointments — or advertisements for his podcast, every so often a gem sneaks through that makes it clear how ridiculous this man really is.
Like the time he started a Twitter beef with Big Bird, of Sesame Street. Or the time he started a Twitter beef with Elmo, also of Sesame Street.
In 2024, Cruz hit “post” on 33% more tweets than he did in 2023, climbing the rankings to become the second overall postingest member of Congress for the year. For the second year in a row, Republican Congressman Chip Roy was X’s most active legislator, a report by Quorum, a D.C.-based public affairs company, recently found. Roy represents parts of Austin, San Antonio and Fredericksburg in the U.S. House.
Although Cruz hasn’t achieved the crown of top overall poster, no one in the Senate is coming close to claiming his chamber’s title. In 2024, Cruz averaged 27 tweets a day with 9,056 posts; in second place, Rick Scott of Florida posted just over 5,600 times. In fourth place, Texas Sen. John Cornyn hit the post button 3,841 times.
“Considering it was an election year, it makes sense that lawmakers were more vocal on social media compared to the start of a legislative session,” the report states. “Republicans dominated the conversation, authoring 54.4% of all posts. This is a major shift from last year when Democrats accounted for 50.8% of posts.”
As the two top tweeting legislators overall and the leaders in their respective chambers for X postage, Roy and Cruz recorded nearly 20,000 posts to X between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30. These are important people doing important things, y’all! The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recognizes social media influencing as an important cornerstone of our country’s economy!
Not to beat a dead, frozen solid horse corpse over here, but in 2024 Cruz continued using social media to make light of what probably should have been the deciding faux pas of his tenure: the Senator’s 2021 trip to Cancun during a brutal winter storm that knocked out the state’s power grid.
We can’t understand how a senator ditching his state during a winter storm that killed 250 Texans wasn’t enough for him to lose reelection, but hey, that’s democracy, folks. Still, are we the only ones left with a sour taste in our mouths each time Cruz continues to joke about the trip?
As a cold front descended upon our state this past January, Cruz coyly posted his tips for winter weather preparation, including the advice, “If it gets too damn cold, join me in Cancun!”
How many times do we have to say this? People died, Ted.
Still, it does make our Grinch hearts grow three sizes to see Cruz get the occasional taste of his own medicine. He chimed in on September’s right-wing backed conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants were eating residents’ pets in Springfield, Ohio, with a meme of 2012-like formatting: two wide-eyed, embracing kittens urging voters to choose Trump at the polls so their lives would be spared.
One commenter responded to the meme with a reminder that Cruz doesn’t have a perfect record when it comes to animal welfare. After all, while he was defrosting in Cancun, his pet dog — aptly named Snowball — was stuck in the Lone Star State freezing with the rest of us.
The Observer could conduct our own inquiry to find out how many times Cruz recalled his Cancun trip on social media over the past year, but we worry the answer would be too much even for our cynical asses.
In the 2023 Congress on X report, Quorum predicted Democrats would retreat from the platform — a trend that seemed to be aided by the rising popularity of the social media app Bluesky.
Bluesky’s concept is reminiscent of X’s: the Bluesky app allows users to post short messages, images and videos to a newsfeed, which can then be responded to, reposted and liked by other users. In the weeks following the election, millions of users flocked to the Bluesky app as X endured an exodus of users.
Data shows that even the Democrats who have historically been most inclined to take to Twitter for political dialogue are scaling back their posting habits. Last year’s postingest Democrat was Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania; in 2024, he decreased his posting by 66%, Quorum found. President Joe Biden has remained relatively silent online since Vice President Kamala Harris’ November election loss.
Democrats’ retreat from X could be contributing to an increasingly conservative culture on the app. Quorum found topics like “Bidenomics” — a term first coined by the Biden Administration to promote the Presidents’ economic policies before it was commandeered by Republicans — and “Biden border crisis” trended among Republican lawmakers’ posts.
Those conservative posts likely received a boost from new algorithm that X put into place in mid-summer and which some studies suggest has turned the app into a conservative echo chamber. Still, some Democrats warn that turning away from the app may actually benefit X owner and Trump crony Elon Musk.
“If we leave X, it will help Elon with his goal of making the platform void of any progressive ideology or the way we think about the world,” Maxwell Frost, a 27-year-old member of Congress from Florida, told Politico last month.