Trump upended Cruz’s strategy
Mogul usurped Texan’s role of political outsider
WASHINGTON — For Ted Cruz, it all came to a head outside The Mill restaurant in Marion, Ind., site of a final campaign stop on the eve of the Hoosier State primary that would end his bid for the White House.
As the junior senator from Texas headed for a waiting car, he spotted a half-dozen protesters across the street. Some were holding up signs for front-runner Donald Trump.
With news cameras in tow, Cruz, a Harvardtrained lawyer, walked over to talk.
“What do you like about Donald Trump?” he asked.
“Everything,” said a man in sunglasses.
Further efforts to engage were met with insults and jeers.
“Indiana don’t want you,” said the man in the
shades. “Vote Trump!” he yelled as Cruz turned to leave. “Everybody, vote Trump!”
For Cruz backers, that moment on national television encapsulates everything their candidate was up against in a Republican primary that would become shaded by all things Trump.
“It was emblematic,” said former national spokesman Rick Tyler, who had worked closely with the campaign since its rollout 13 months ago at Liberty University, the Virginia evangelical college founded by the late televangelist Jerry Falwell.
“This was Ted Cruz trying to reason with a voter, like he would normally do. But this guy was not reasonable,” Tyler said. “He didn’t want to hear anything Cruz had to say.”
Some Trump fans, Cruz found out, would not respond to political messages in the same way as supporters for more conventional politicians. There was something in the air. ‘Bold colors’
WhenCruzlaunched his campaign for president, in just his second year in the Senate, he asked his supporters to imagine a conservative tableau painted in “bold colors, not pale pastels.”
As the first major candidate to announce, Cruz sensed voters’ appetite for a political outsider. He devised a strategy to go hard right, tea party, libertarian and, most of all, evangelical.
“Today, roughly half of born-again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home,” Cruz told the students at Liberty. “Imagine, instead, millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.”
Nurtured from the same soil as Texas’ grass-roots tea party base, Cruz would truck downthe outside lane to Washington. He would be at the head of a convoy of values voters, and he would crush an insider “cartel” of corrupt politicians and lobbyists.
Then, on June 16, to Neil Young’s tune “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Donald Trump and his wife Melania rode down an escalator in New York’s Trump Tower, where the flamboyant real estate mogul announced his candidacy. “This is beyond anybody’s expectations,” Trump said.
Month after month, poll after poll, those words proved to be prescient. The endgame Cruz envisioned — a showdown with an establishment conservative out of touch with the GOP’s angry base — would never materialize.
Instead, he got a bighaired rival with a turbocharged street-talk sensibility that ultimately trumped Cruz’s prim career as a government lawyer and senator, albeit as a movement conservative. Cruz also faced a reality TV star with almost universal name recognition — the gold standard of politics.
“What we ended up with was a celebrity, and celebrities have fans,” Tyler said. “They don’t have supporters. And fans don’t behave the way political supporters do.” ‘Prone to error’
Cruz had to recalibrate, and he did. Others in the growing GOP field — notably Jeb Bush, Rick Perry and Marco Rubio — impaled themselves in a variety of attacks on the new alpha male of the Republican primaries.
Cruz,instead,madeatrip to the Trump Tower in July to strike a deal with the authorof“TheArtoftheDeal.” He not only wouldn’t go afterTrump,hewoulddefend Trump’scontroversial statements on immigration.
The conventional wisdomwasthatTrumpwould fall under the weight of his own outsized ego and out- spoken pronouncements on women, minorities, even war veterans like Sen. John McCain, a former Vietnam POW.
“He is prone to error,” said Katie Packer, the head of Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump group that still had hopes of blocking Trump right up until his last rival, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, quit the race on Wednesday, a day after Cruz.
As the primaries neared and Cruz’s poll numbers went up, he made no secret of his desire to sweep up Trump’s diehard fans. He saw no need to offend them needlessly.
“You wouldn’t get Taylor Swift fans to get off Taylor Swift by criticizing her,” Tyler said of the country and pop music star.
The budding “bromance,” however, fizzled in December when Cruz was caught on tape at a private New York fundraiser questioning Trump’s preparedness to be president. He also confessed what everyone knew to be his strategy to overtake Trump and then co-front-runner Ben Carson: “Smother them with love.”
Trump readied to counterattack. “He will fall like all others,” he tweeted.
Cruz played down the incident, and his patience seemed to pay off in February when he won the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. It was largely on the strength of a matchless ground operation fueled by the state’s strong network of evangelicals, home-schoolers and social conservatives.
Some also would credit Trump’s decision to boycott the GOP debate in Des Moines over a snit with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. ‘Lyin’ Ted’
For one cold, stark moment, Trump looked vulnerable, and Cruz’s plan seemed to be working. Then, nine days later in New Hampshire, Trump bounced back. The news got worse for Cruz later in February when Trump dominated the field in South Carolina. That upended Cruz’s hopes for the much-hyped “SEC Primary” — the early-voting states of college sports’ Southeastern Conference.
Texas, as expected, was good to Cruz, providing a needed boost in the delegate race. Elsewhere, Cruz’s Southern “firewall” was crumbling, and, worse, he was losing the critical evangelical demographic to Trump.
To some outside the campaign, it looked like the Cruz strategy might have been too rigid.
“They have this idea that everybody is in a ‘lane,’ ” said Steve Munisteri, a former Texas GOP chairman who worked on the Rand Paul campaign. “They have a libertarian lane, conservative late, etc. The problem is that voters are much more complex. … They’re not nearly as ideological. People look at personality, leadership, appearance.”
With a succession of Trump victories in February and March, the GOP race started to take on the feel of a contest for secondplace, with Cruz and Rubio vying for the slot. Their growing rivalry focused mostly on their differences over immigration reform. For some Cruz partisans, it became heated to the point of distraction.
Distraught at Trump’s runaway success, some Cruz backers started to question his strategy, including his reluctance to focus more directly on Trump. Chief among them was Iowa radio host Steve Deace, a Cruz surrogate, who argued on the air that it was time to heed the message sent by voters in South Carolina: “That message is that they want him to go back to being that alpha male conservative leader that people fell in love with.”
Trump helped end what was left of the unspoken truce in a series of jabs at Cruz. He got some traction resurrecting questions about Cruz’s Canadian birth. He also jumped on allegations that the Texan’s campaign had falsely told Iowa caucus-goers that Carson was leaving the race.
Thus was born Trump’s oft-repeated moniker for Cruz: “Lyin’ Ted.”
Cruz denied the accusation, but his campaign was buffeted by a troubling news narrative of missteps and internal turmoil, capped by Cruz’s decision to fire Tyler after he posted a video falsely purporting to show Rubio denigrating the Bible. ‘Turning point’
Cruz got back on track in Wisconsin, this time with a huge assist from Trump. Cruz’s victory, which he called a “turning point,” came as Trump was on the defensive about retweeting an unflattering picture of Cruz’s wife, Heidi. It was an act that seemed to underscore a broader national narrative of Trump’s alleged coarseness and disrespect toward women.
Cruz also accused the Manhattan mogul of being behind an out-of-the-blue National Enquirer story accusing Cruz of multiple affairs.
The Wisconsin victory buoyed Cruz just as he was capturing a bounty of delegates in local conventions in states such as Colorado and Wyoming that did not hold presidential preference elections.
To Trump, the behindthe-scenes delegate losses to Cruz were a clear threat to his prospects of reaching the 1,237-delegate majority needed to lock down the GOP nomination. He complained bitterly about a “rigged” system driven by party insiders.
From Cruz’s perspective, it represented his central advantage over Trump.
“I don’t think it’s debatable that Ted Cruz had the best ground campaign,” said JoAnn Fleming, the Texas Tea Party chairwoman for Cruz. “It was patterned after our 2012 Senate campaign.”
Ground organization, combined with a methodical, data-driven outreach operation, advanced a fundraising apparatus that raked in 1.5 million contributions averaging $60 each.
While Cruz had been considered a long shot in the early days of the campaign, he became one of the best-financed candidates in a crowded GOP field.
“His ability to fundraise, frankly, surprised the GOP establishment and others who were writing his obituary from the very beginning,” Fleming said.
Cruz’s ground game, however, was no match for Trump media hype and his advantage in free or “earned” coverage, which has been estimated to exceed $2 billion.
“He was able to stay on TV all the time,” Fleming said. “It became the Trump show, particularly on Fox. It was hard to compete with that.”
It also was hard to compete with Trump in his native New York and much of the rest of the East Coast, where Cruz suffered a string of devastating defeats. Having campaigned against “New York values” in Iowa, Cruz had to live down the attack line in places like the Bronx and in Brooklyn, where he tried in vain to salvage a few Republican delegates. Untimely pivot
Mathematically eliminated from reaching the 1,237 threshold, Cruz was forced into a rear-guard action to stop Trump from getting the needed delegates, as well. A once-hazy strategy now was taking form: Force a contested convention in Cleveland, where Cruz organizers could poach Trump delegates who would not be committed to the billionaire after the first round of balloting.
For a growing #NeverTrump movement of conservative Republicans, this was the only hope. For Cruz, it may have been the kiss of death.
Cruz — the unpopular Senate rebel who wrought a government shutdown — now was cast as the “establishment” candidate fending off a hostile takeover of the party by the maverick billionaire.
“In retrospect, Cruz’s pivot to being the face of the establishment was a mistake,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “Cruz ceded the outsider mantle to Trump at the very same time the Republican base’s desire for an outsider grew.”
As Trump closed in on the delegate threshold, it became clear that the race would come down to Indiana, back in Cruz’s Midwestern comfort zone. Going all out for a final stand, Cruz cut a deal with Kasich to bow out of the Hoosier State, then called in ex-rival Carly Fiorina as his running mate.
Both moves proved controversial. Neither seemed to help.
The last day of the long journey would not end with a whimper. Trump struck first with a television interview giving credence to another National Enquirer story, this one suggesting a link between Cruz’s father, Cuban emigré Rafael Cruz, and the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Hours before the polls closed on Tuesday, the 45-year-old senator stood before a gaggle of reporters and unleashed one final, blistering attack: “I’m gonna tell you what I really think of Donald Trump,” he said. He went on to call the presumptive GOP nominee a “pathological liar,” a “serial philanderer,” and a “narcissist.”
In his concession speech later that night, Cruz made no mention of either Trump or the Republican Party. Instead, he spoke of a movement, which now sees him as its leader.
“Our movement,” Cruz said, “will continue.”