Cruz shifts attack points
Senator’s focus turns to Midwest, delegate count
WASHINGTON — Anxious to turn the GOP race back onto friendlier ground in the Midwest, Ted Cruz telegraphed the importance of Indiana last Thursday at the state’s annual Republican spring dinner.
“The state of Indiana is going to play a pivotal role in this election,” Cruz said. “The entire country, their eyes are on the state of Indiana, the men and women in this room.”
While the public face of the campaign still dwells on winning rural states like Indiana, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota, strategists behind the scenes talk of an unpredictable war of attrition for delegates.
“The media is laserfocused on states, and we are laser-focused on delegates,” said Katie Packer, a Republican strategist and founder of Our Principles PAC, which has spent more than $4.4 million since January to thwart GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.
Cruz also has been campaigning in five Northeastern states that go to the polls on Tuesday. One is Pennsylvania, with a bonanza of 71 delegates. With Trump favored to dominate all five, however, Cruz is jumping ahead this week to Indiana.
Cruz acknowledges there are not enough states or delegates left for him to win the GOP nomination outright. The overriding campaign strategy, instead, has turned to making sure Trump cannot reach the 1,237 delegate majority to clinch it either — forcing a contested convention in which the Texas senator will have the upper hand with longtime party activists.
“We are headed to a contested convention,” Cruz said Wednesday, making his strategy explicit in a radio interview in Philadelphia. “At this point, nobody
is getting 1,237. Donald is going to talk all the time about other folks not getting to 1,237; he’s not getting there, either. None of us are getting to 1,237.”
There is little margin for error on either side.
Trump, riding a wave of momentum after his overwhelming win in NewYork, is looking ahead at the upcoming raft of favorable Mid-Atlantic state primaries, including Pennsylvania with a trove of unbound delegates who run separately from the candidates.
The morning after Trump’s New York victory, his campaign released a memo asserting he is on a path to winning 1,400 delegates before the national convention in July.
Some outside analysts also handicap the race for Trump, noting that Cruz’s dismal third-place showing in New York exposed a glaring weakness outside of his conservative base of tea party activists and evangelicals.
“Cruz really is perceived as a real conservative and cannot make any traction even among more moderate Republican conservatives,” said Duke University political scientist John Aldrich.
That also could apply to California, the biggest prize of all, which looms large on June 7, the last day of primary voting. Trump is favored there, as well. ‘Ways to stop’ Trump
In a response to the Trump delegate claim, Packer’s group put out a memo Thursday calculating that the billionaire’s 1,400 delegates boast would entail winning 82 percent of the remaining pledged delegates. Until now, Trump has been averaging about 47 percent of the delegate haul.
To get to the magic number of 1,237, Trump needs to win about 60 percent of the delegates between now and June 7.
“Trump has to sweep everything, pretty much,” said Rick Shaftan, a GOP strategist who runs the pro-Cruz Courageous Conservatives PAC.
Even if Trump could win the vast majority of the upcoming 15 primaries, proportional rules that assign delegates by congressional districts — including Indiana — allow Cruz to cherry-pick pockets of strength and deny Trump delegates.
“Even if Trump wins Indiana, there are still ways to stop him after that,” said Our Principles PAC adviser Tim Miller, a former spokesman for the Jeb Bush campaign.
Indiana rates as one of the only toss-up states left on the GOP-primary schedule.
“A Wisconsin-style win for Cruz would finalize that Trump can’t get to 1,237,” Miller said.
While the popular vote wins and state victories create welcome headlines, Cruz strategists emphasize that it is the actual delegate counts that tell the real story.
With demographics similar to Wisconsin — the state Cruz called a “turning point” — Indiana’s 57 delegates represent a prime opportunity to significantly erode Trump’s margin of victory, no matter which way the state as a whole tilts on May 3.
“It looks like very strong territory for us, seeing the parallels between Indiana and other states where we have done well, like Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas,” said Laura Barnett, a spokeswoman for two Keep the Promise PACS that support Cruz. “You see the connection he has with voters in those states.” Hoosier winner?
Like Wisconsin, Indiana gets a primary date to itself, meaning the state will be the focus of the campaigns’ attention for an entire week, following Tuesday’s primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania — states where strategists say Cruz needs only to finish respectably.
Good showings by Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who remains in the race, also could deny Trump needed delegates on the Eastern Seaboard.
Cruz has made clear he is devoting significant resources to the Hoosier State, where a network of volunteers already is on the ground. He stopped at an Indianapolis delicatessen Thursday, then met with uncommitted Republican Gov. Mike Pence, a diehard conservative who had met with Trump the day before.
At the state GOP dinner in Indianapolis, Cruz promised to become part of the furniture in Indiana: “Heidi and I are going to spend a lot of time here in Indiana working to earn your votes, barnstorming the state, holding town halls, holding rallies, asking for your support.”
Cruz can expect to get some help in Indiana, both from the #NeverTrump groups and the Club for Growth, a free-market group run by former Indiana congressman David McIntosh.
Back on rural, conservative turf, Cruz also found a target of opportunity this week in Trump’s remarks dismissing North Carolina’s new law requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that match their birth gender.
At a town hall on NBC’s “Today” show, Trump said the law was unnecessary.
“There have been very few complaints the way it is,” Trump said. “People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble.”
In a reprise of the fight over Houston’s failed gay rights ordinance, Cruz released a Web video Friday suggesting that Trump would let grown men use bathrooms with little girls, accusing him of caving in to the “PC police.”
The bathroom issue highlights Cruz’s effort to reposition himself as the only “true” conservative in the race, harkening back to his campaign’s original template for winning the GOP nomination.
“If conservatives continue to unite around our campaign in the weeks and months ahead, Donald Trump will never earn the majority of support required to become the nominee,” Cruz spokeswoman Alice Stewart wrote in an email to supporters Thursday. Then there was Lincoln
While Cruz focuses on denying Trump a clear majority in advance of the convention in Cleveland, Trump has continued to complain of a “rigged” system that could see him winning the most votes and delegates, only to be outmaneuvered by Cruz’s insider delegate operation.
Most Republican delegates become unbound if no candidate wins a majority on the first or second ballot. Cruz has been working assiduously state-by-state to ensure that the people selected as delegates are his loyalists — regardless of how their states voted.
“They’re party regulars; they’re activists,” Miller said. “And by and large, they don’t like Donald Trump.”
The danger facing Cruz could be a wave of popular revulsion if Trump can make the case that the candidate with the most votes deserves to win — even if he does not get a full majority of the delegates.
Anticipating the potential fallout, Republican Party leaders meeting in Florida last week laid the groundwork in a public relations battle. Addressing the party on Friday, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus recalled the contested convention of another century: “It took Abraham Lincoln three ballots to get a majority in 1860.”