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While Donald Trump continues to get a polling boost with each outrageous and/or idiotic thing he says, he's not the only one rising in the polls. Ben Carson has been in a freefall for the past month, and Marco Rubio's brief rise as the establishment candidate appears to be tapering off. But Ted Cruz has been quietly but certainly making his move as the anyone-but-Trump candidate. In Iowa, Cruz has drawn even with Trump. No surprise there - Cruz's sweet spot is with evangelicals, who increasingly dominate the Iowa GOP. Though Iowa certainly isn't everything, absent a consolidation of the establishment vote Ted Cruz is arguably better positioned than anyone else in the GOP field to wrest the nomination away from Trump. So let's have a look at what we know about Ted Cruz's ability to win general election votes.
Cruz has run for office once, when he was elected as a United States Senator from the state of Texas. Interestingly, this provides two useful points of comparison. The first is Mitt Romney, who was also running a statewide campaign in Texas in 2012. The second is President Obama who, like Cruz, was first elected to the Senate four years before running for President.
Let's look at Ted Cruz's 2012 Senate race. Cruz won 56.5% of the vote, a margin of 16.1% over his Democratic opponent. In and of itself, a solid victory.
Now let's look at Mitt Romney's 2012 Texas campaign. There, Romney won 57.2% of the vote, with a margin of 16.2% over President Obama. While the margin of Romney's victory is essentially the same as Cruz's - remember, in the same election cycle with the votes being cast by the same voters - Romney did a better job of consolidating the right-of-center vote. There was a Libertarian candidate in each race, but whereas Romney bled off 1% of all votes to Gary Johnson, former Governor of New Mexico, Cruz bled off 2% of votes to libertarian John Jay Myers, a restaurant owner.
But the fact that Cruz couldn't simply match Romney's totals isn't all that's so surprising - it's that he trailed Romney even though he should have been a much better fit for Texas. Mitt Romney is a wooden, prep-school Yankee patrician, a Mormon, and of dubious conservative credentials. He enacted ObamaCare, and had to flip-flop away from former stances such as supporting gun control and vowing to be more pro-LGBT than Ted Kennedy. For all this, he was routinely derided by conservatives as a weak RINO of a nominee. In contrast, Cruz is anything but stiff. He interacts easily with voters and is a Hispanic in a state with the second-most Hispanics in the nation.
Yet even in bright red Texas, Cruz couldn't match the performance of milquetoast Romney. And it's not like he had some stiff competition. The best the state Democratic Party could scrape up to run for the seat was Paul Sadler, an ex-state legislator who had been out of office for a decade. Cruz outspent Salder 28-1 in the campaign.
Now remember, as I mentioned earlier we have another counterpoint in Barack Obama. Like Cruz, he first ran for President four years before seeking the Presidency. Like Cruz ran for the United States Senate in the deep red state of Texas, Obama ran in the deep blue state of Ilinois. And both ran for the Senate during a Presidential election cycle which saw the incumbent President of the other party reelected. So how did Senate candidate Obama do in 2004? He won 70.0% of the vote, crushing his opponent Alan Keyes by 43% margin. Unlike Cruz, who lagged behind the top of his ticket, Obama far outpaced the head of the Democratic ticket in 2004, John Kerry, who got only 54.8% of the vote in Illinois. Also bear in mind that in 2004, John Kerry was a stronger national opponent than Mitt Romney was in 2012 - Kerry got a larger share of the popular vote and of the Electoral College than did Romney. I could not find another example of a candidate getting as much as Obama's 70% of the vote in an Illinois Senate election. But there are other Republicans who have outpaced Ted Cruz in Texas Senate elections - Kay Bailey Hutchison twice topped 60% of the vote, once even during the Democratic wave year of 2006. Of course, even if Ted Cruz is the Republican nominee he won't be facing Barack Obama in 2016. But the point is that Presidential candidate Obama's success was presaged by his exceptional performance in his 2004 election to the Senate. Cruz? There was nothing at all special about his not-even-as-good-as-Romney performance in his Senate election.
Here's another tidbit of data - while there is no exit polling of the 2012 Texas Senate race by race/ethnicity, a granular look at regional votes suggests that Cruz did do somewhat better than other Republicans (such as Romney) with Hispanics - which means, since he trailed Romney overall, that he lagged behind Romney in the non-Hispanic white vote by an even greater margin than that he got from Hispanics. That's not going to help in the general election, especially since Hillary Clinton is likely to do better with white voters than did Barack Obama, as well as the fact that the Republican Party's standing with Hispanics has sunk even lower in the years since the last Presidential elecgtion.
To sum up, there are reasons that the Republican Party is almost as upset over a prospective Cruz nomination as they are over the idea of nominee Trump - and that the Clinton campaign is almost as happy with the notion of facing Cruz as of Trump being their opponent. And there's a reason that as the Republican nomination increasingly looks like it will end up with either Trump or Cruz as the nomination, the betting markets are increasingly expecting a Democratic victory.
Maybe the GOP need a crushing defeat in the Presidential election as that might motivate them to get rid of the religious nuts, no-hopers, narcissistic self publicists, clowns and comedians that routinely contest their primaries and start moving back to being the center-right party that most Americans could support.
Maybe the GOP need a crushing defeat in the Presidential election as that might motivate them to get rid of the religious nuts, no-hopers, narcissistic self publicists, clowns and comedians that routinely contest their primaries and start moving back to being the center-right party that most Americans could support.
IMHO:
It's NOT the GOP in the presidential that needs a crushing defeat as we need a change of the current.
It's most in the GOP Congress who have double crossed their constituents over and over again who deserve to be defeated out of office when their time comes.
To sum up, there are reasons that the Republican Party is almost as upset over a prospective Cruz nomination as they are over the idea of nominee Trump
You haven't said anything that hasn't been said already. The GOP establishment wants either JEB or Rubio. Someone that has been bought & paid for by the 1% and completely controlled by them.
Instead of focusing so much on a party that you have no intention in voting for, you ought to go and look at your own bought & paid for Candidate. King Hillary. And that race has been rigged to the point where Hilllary doesn't even need to campaign.
Well no matter. Cruz will not be nominated, and Trump will easily beat King Hillary in the general.
Pretty sure it's gonna be Trump.
It's an anti establishment backlash election.
I honestly believe there are closet Trump supporters who in public say they would never vote for him but come election day behind the curtain...
Trump and Cruz can't both win. Worse, they are both chasing the same voters. If they both stay in, then Jeb! or Rubio will be the nominee. I don't see that happening though. I'd bet on Cruz lasting longer than Trump. Another thing is that while we have been watching the national demographic changes, we may have missed the hard right turn in the GOP. Many moderates have walked away or never registered as they moved, came of age and so on. The party now seems dominated by the extreme based on the polling supporting the right wing candidates. Jeb!, Rubio, and the money behind them may need to find another party.
Trump and Cruz can't both win. Worse, they are both chasing the same voters. If they both stay in, then Jeb! or Rubio will be the nominee. I don't see that happening though. I'd bet on Cruz lasting longer than Trump. Another thing is that while we have been watching the national demographic changes, we may have missed the hard right turn in the GOP. Many moderates have walked away or never registered as they moved, came of age and so on. The party now seems dominated by the extreme based on the polling supporting the right wing candidates. Jeb!, Rubio, and the money behind them may need to find another party.
Trump is chasing the Establishment vote by calling Cruz a maniac. Pot meet kettle. That actually showed he was pandering, pretending that he is above the fray.
Maybe the GOP need a crushing defeat in the Presidential election as that might motivate them to get rid of the religious nuts, no-hopers, narcissistic self publicists, clowns and comedians that routinely contest their primaries and start moving back to being the center-right party that most Americans could support.
That's what I've always said.
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