National surveys show Ted Cruz isn't beating Hillary Clinton in poll after poll after poll

A key selling point for Republican presidential candidates is that they're the one who can beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in November.

With the New York primary coming up on Tuesday, April 19, that was part of the pitch Ted Cruz made when interviewed on CNN by Dana Bash.

The Texas senator said five of the 17 original Republican candidates now support him, along with other prominent Republicans, "and what we are seeing, that's the unity it's going take to win the nomination. It's also the unity it's going to take to beat Hillary Clinton. And my focus is on beating Hillary Clinton, and poll after poll after poll shows Donald losing badly to Hillary. And poll after poll after poll shows me beating Hillary."

That's a lot of polls.

We just looked at how Trump does against Clinton after conservative commentator Glenn Beck said on the April 10 edition of Meet the Press that polls show "Hillary Clinton wins every time with Donald Trump." We rated that statement True.

For this check, we wondered if Cruz was accurately portraying his standing in the national surveys.

We went back to  RealClearPolitics.com and found that the Texas senator is off.

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Of the nine surveys released in the last month, Cruz beats Clinton in only one — a Fox News poll where Cruz scores 3 percentage points higher than Clinton. The two were tied in the latest McClatchy/Marist poll and in a CNN/ORC poll. The margins of error were +/- 3 percentage points.

In the other six polls, Clinton beat Cruz. In four of those surveys, Clinton's margin exceeded the margin of error.

Cruz was looking stronger against Clinton in February, where he tied or beat Clinton in five of six surveys. But in only one of those polls was Cruz's margin greater than the margin of error.

If you use the most recent results from the various polling organizations since Feb. 4, Cruz wins in two, ties in two and loses in seven.

We contacted Cruz's spokeswoman to ask about the results but didn't hear back.

So when Cruz says he beats Clinton in poll after poll after poll, he's short a poll or two.

We rate his claim Mostly False.