Cruz counting on white voters in November
Strategy defies GOP conventional wisdom
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Ted Cruz has mapped out a path to the White House that all but ignores the explosion of minority voters in America.
The Texas senator’s general election strategy depends almost wholly upon maximizing turnout among millions of conservative white voters — mostly evangelical Christians and the white working class — who didn’t participate in the last presidential contest.
At the same time, Cruz’s team is banking on a sharp decline in black and Hispanic support for the 2016 Democratic nominee, whoever it is, returning to voter trends before Barack Obama shook up the electorate as the nation’s first black president and won an overwhelming share of support from nonwhite voters.
It is a strategy that defies the conventional wisdom in the GOP that says the party can win the White House again only if it appeals to political moderates and nonwhite voters who are becoming a greater share of the voting-age population as each day passes.
“I’m an outlier,” said longtime Cruz aide Jason Johnson, the chief architect of the Cruz playbook, which he concedes is not in line with modern-day Republican thinking.
Yet with overwhelming confidence born from a year of studying voter trends, Johnson insists the first-term Texas senator can win the general election by motivating a coalition of his party’s most reliable supporters.
“It is absolutely the case that in 2012, there were a little over 2 million fewer white non-Hispanics that voted compared to 2008,” Johnson said this week in an interview with The Associated Press. “They sat it out.”
Many Washington Republicans warn that Cruz is simply too conservative to appeal to the wide swath of voters that typically decide general elections.
“They are just wrong about this,” said Republican operative Matthew Dowd, who served as the chief political strategist for George W. Bush. “It is about both motivation and persuasion. You can’t motivate your base and at the same time turn off moderates and independents.”
But Cruz this week repeatedly declared that his team assembled a coalition in Iowa that would translate into general election success.
“We saw conservatives and evangelicals and libertarians and Reagan Democrats all coming together,” he said during a town hall-style meeting at a Portsmouth Toyota dealership. “If we’re going to win, if we’re going to win the nomination and we’re going to win the general election, we’ve got to bring that coalition together.”
The Cruz strategy is born of necessity. While his team notes he won 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in his 2012 Senate election in Texas, and Cruz has the potential to become the nation’s first Hispanic president, hard-line conservative rhetoric on illegal immigration has defined his short political career. He has promoted endorsements from far-right conservatives such as Iowa Rep. Steve King, Cruz’s national campaign cochairman who has compared immigrants in the country illegally to drug mules and livestock.
Johnson, Cruz’s top strategist, believes that Cruz can win in November even if he earns only 30 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally — a modest increase from Mitt Romney’s 27 percent four years ago. And among black voters, Johnson envisions Cruz winning over roughly 10 percent, which is in line with the GOP’s performance in 2000 and 2004.