Donald Trump’s days as the undisputed Republican front-runner may be numbered. Though he won New Hampshire by a convincing margin and is leading in South Carolina, the momentum seems to be behind his bitterest of rivals, Texas senator Ted Cruz. A new national poll from NBC put out Febraury 17th found Trump two points behind the senator, a staggering reversal from Trump’s dominant position only two weeks ago. For the first time since the race began, Cruz leads the Republican field.
Cruz pulled off his upset win in Iowa largely because of the demographics of the primary electorate; with conservative evangelical voters making up a significant portion of the state’s voter base, Iowa was, simply put, made for Ted Cruz. The son of a fundamentalist pastor, Cruz uses the rhetorical flourishes and emotional appeals that are the trademarks of evangelical sermons. His invocations of God and calls for the defense of Christianity from secular and governmental incursions square perfectly with the values of the evangelicals whose votes he has courted. He even went the extra step of holding his first campaign rally at Liberty University, the brainchild of fundamentalist pastor Jerry Falwell. So far the strategy has worked.
But for Cruz the upward climb has only just begun. It’s a long way to the Republican National Convention in July, and the next hurdle after South Carolina—the Super Tuesday primaries—will make or break his campaign. The Cruz campaign has reason to be hopeful, though, because the Super Tuesday states are considerably more conservative than the electorate as a whole. A strong showing in South Carolina would increase the likelihood of a big Super Tuesday win, but it isn’t necessary; Cruz could come in second place to Trump and still enter Super Tuesday with reason to be confident.
Then there’s the possibility of a brokered convention. A recent report from Politico described the existence of a ‘shadow primary’ in which campaigns are vying for access to delegates, often employing sophisticated monitoring technologies—all in the expectation that the party won’t have the votes to nominate a candidate on the first ballot. This scenario would be most threatening to Trump, whose campaign is anathema to the Republican establishment, but it could also be devastating to Cruz. Through his Senate floor speeches and harsh criticisms of former House Speaker John Boehner, Cruz has earned the enmity of the Republican leadership and has alienated himself from his colleagues. None of them want to see Ted as the nominee.
Still, a brokered convention could work in Cruz’s favor. If the option is squarely between Trump and Cruz, the party elite will have to hold its nose and pick Cruz. But even if someone like Marco Rubio or John Kasich pull through and makes it to the convention, creating a three-way race, Cruz has a distinct advantage; because delegates are selected from the states, the process favors those who have sophisticated ground campaigns and large grassroots followings that are able to get their people certified as delegates. Cruz’s campaign has done just that. His grassroots outreach won him Iowa, and, if combined with millions of dollars of Super PAC money, could win him delegates on a national scale.
But let’s assume that, on July 22nd, 2016, Cruz is the nominee. Now an even more interesting question is raised. What would a national campaign look like from Cruz? He has been a conservative ideological partisan since his teenage years, maintaining orthodox positions throughout his legal and governmental career, and has proven himself unwilling (or unable) to moderate his views for a broader audience. He has portrayed his campaign in firmly regional terms–going so far as to decry Donald Trump’s ‘New York values,’ and, after the Senate let out last term, said he was glad to leave D.C. and “be back in America.” His overt religiosity may be off-putting to a national electorate that does not share the same confessional values as his primary base. But beyond this, in his highly aggressive debate performances and campaign tactics, such as in Iowa, where his campaign intimidated voters into caucusing for him, Cruz displays a callousness that stands out even in a Republican field that seems to relish ideological purism and hard-heartedness. He’s despised for a reason.
And yet these character traits did not stop Cruz from impressing his Harvard Law professors. It did not stop him from getting a clerkship at the Supreme Court, a clerkship with Chief Justice Rehnquist no less. And it didn’t get in the way of his meteoric rise in Texas state politics, from private practice lawyer to state solicitor general and now senator. He can only hope they don’t get in the way now.