Heidi Cruz says her 7-year-old daughter told her leaving her job at Goldman Sachs during Ted Cruz's presidential campaign was a 'bad deal' because the first lady isn't paid

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October 18, 2018 6:33 PM

"I tried to articulate, you know, 'It's actually for the country, it's a much bigger project than ourselves,'" Heidi Cruz recalled in a recent Atlantic profile.

Ted Cruz's eldest daughter was apparently none-too-pleased that her mother took unpaid leave to help him campaign in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

In a profile of Heidi Cruz in The Atlantic published Thursday, the wife of the Texas senator said her daughter Caroline, who was seven when the campaign started, was confused as to why she would leave her job as a managing director at Goldman Sachs to hit the campaign trail.

"I tried to articulate, you know, 'It's actually for the country, it's a much bigger project than ourselves.'" Cruz told reporter Elaina Plott. "And she wanted to know, if we won, was the first lady paid?"

When Cruz told her that it was not, Caroline allegedly responded: "That's a bad deal for you. We shouldn't do this."

Plott was skeptical Caroline actually said this. "I'm not sure whether this conversation happened word for word with her daughter," Plott wrote. "It may more accurately reflect one Heidi had with herself."

During the primary, Caroline made some headlines of her own, when television cameras caught her recoiling from her dad's kiss, and later teasing him during a CNN town hall about the fact that her school had footage of him in a pink feather boa for a daddy-daughter picnic.

While Cruz won the first primary, in Iowa, he started to drag behind then-Republican candidate Donald Trump, and eventually suspended his campaign in May.

He's currently running for reelection in Texas against Rep. Beto O'Rourke. As of Thursday, Cruz leads O'Rourke by an average of seven points, according to Real Clear Politics.

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