“He’s running like Bernie Sanders,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) of his 2018 U.S. Senate Democrat opponent, Rep. Beto O’Rourke. He offered his remarks during a Tuesday interview with SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Breitbart News Tonight.

Pollak asked Cruz about a recently published Quinnipiac poll of approximately 1000 Texans showing Cruz leading O’Rourke by three points; within the poll’s margin of error of 3.6 percentage points.

Cruz replied, “I think that poll has been widely debunked as seriously oversampling Democrats and it doesn’t paint an accurate picture of where Texas is at, at all. That being said, the entire country is in a perilous position, right now, and it’s perilous because the hard left are energized. They’re angry. They hate the president, and I think it’s clear that we’re going to see Democrats turn out in November in historic numbers in Texas and across the country.”

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Cruz described O’Rourke as “hard-left” in the vein of “democratic socialist” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). He said, “My opponent is a Democratic congressman from El Paso, Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who’s running hard-left. Normally Democrats in Texas at least pretend to go to the center; pretend to run a moderates. He’s not doing that. He’s running like Bernie Sanders. He’s running in support of socialized medicine and higher taxes and higher regulations. He’s running in support of open borders. He’s running in support of aggressive gun control.”

Cruz said O’Rourke’s “hard-left” positioning is fueling fundraising. He added, “Indeed he is, I believe, the only Democratic Senate candidate who’s come out publicly and said he would support impeaching Donald Trump, and the consequence of his running hard-left is he is raising a mountain of money. He raised nearly seven million dollars last quarter, which is the most of any Democrat in the country, and that illustrates just how dangerous this cycle is, and the need to make sure conservatives turn up and vote this November, and the need to make sure that we have the resources to make sure we turn conservatives out.”

CNN recently described O’Rourke’s fundraising as “eye-popping,” raising nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2018. Top contributors to his campaign committee include Facebook, Google, J Street, Time Warner, and the University of Texas.

Pollak asked Cruz how the Texas senator might gain political momentum.

Cruz responded, “To be sure, the media is giving him all sorts of breathless coverage, because he’s been driving through a bunch of counties, and he’s tended to do sort of quick drive-by photo ops. I will note the issues he’s campaigning on don’t reflect the values of Texans. A couple of months ago he tweeted out how proud he was of having an F-rating from the NRA — not a D-minus, not a C, an F — and I promptly retweeted him, because those are the values of Hollywood [and] the far left, but they don’t represent the common sense conservative values of Texans.”

Cruz described his base of support as grassroots. He stated, “When I ran initially in 2012, my campaign was supported by the grassroots. We took on the entire establishment and to the shock of the Texas political establishment, the grassroots, we won a victory from the people. That remained my base, is the grassroots. In response to the anger and hatred from the left towards the president, what we’re seeing is Texans and conservatives across the country are going to tedcruz.org, are signing up or supporting or contributing or speaking out. That’s what it’s going to take to counteract the anger and energy on the left that we’re seeing all across the country.”

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.