Why Ted Cruz’s plan to win over America’s disgruntled conservatives failed
Republican voters turned out to be less interested in ideological purity than the senator from Texas had hoped
By A.M.
HANDS triangled in prayer, then a sideways karate chop. Those two gestures, often performed in quick succession, were the signature gesticulations of Ted Cruz’s stump speeches during his now-abandoned bid for the Republican nomination. They also embody the main themes of his campaign, namely piety and violence, both real and rhetorical, which he promised to inflict on enemies from the corrupt halls of Congress to the glowing sands of the Middle East.
The rationale was that yoking religiosity to anti-establishment ire would tie up the evangelical vote with those of other disgruntled conservatives—millions of whom, in the estimation of the Cruz campaign, had stayed away from the polls in recent elections because no true believer was on the ballot. The strategy seemed to be vindicated by the Iowa caucuses, the season’s first contest, in which Mr Cruz narrowly beat Donald Trump. “Father God, please,” ran his regular sign-off in Iowa, “continue this spirt of revival, awaken the body of Christ.”
But although the plan was sufficiently sound for Mr Cruz to outlast the other non-Trump contenders, and despite his dogged campaigning and superior organisation, in the end the chop and the steepled hands were not enough. The iconoclasm that, as a senator, Mr Cruz did as much as anyone to cultivate, found a more obvious outlet in Mr Trump, who, whatever else his drawbacks, had not spent his adult lifetime in politics, and moreover had no attachment to Republican shibboleths on trade and protectionism. As for those evangelicals: too many of those preferred Mr Trump, too, for reasons that will be the subject of political-science PhDs for decades to come.
Republican voters, in other words, turned out to be less interested in ideological purity than Mr Cruz—who would comfortably have been the most right-wing presidential nominee for 50 years—had hoped. To his credit, at least among ultraconservatives, as the word “Trump” began to be written on the wall he kept banging on about his staple themes: the moral degeneracy of gay marriage and abortion, the evils of gun control and the need to abolish various agencies of government and undo much of Barack Obama’s diplomacy. But in other ways his campaign seemed to vindicate the “Lyin’ Ted” sobriquet that Mr Trump saddled him with.
He vowed to focus on substance, yet his aides kept getting caught in underhand tricks. At the beginning, when, like everyone else, he thought Mr Trump would fade, Mr Cruz tried to cosy up to him, scheming to inherit his supporters. When, eventually, they went after each other, Mr Cruz—like Marco Rubio in the dying days of his own campaign—dived into the gutter. Yesterday, as the Indiana primary slipped away from him, he attacked Mr Trump as a “pathological liar” and “utterly immoral”. Likewise, where once he revelled in his unpopularity among the Republican colleagues he has spent so long denouncing, he touted their endorsements when, belatedly and out of desperation, they began to trickle in. His premature choice of Carly Fiorina as his running mate will be remembered as the absurd, flailing stunt it was.
Still, Mr Cruz did sufficiently well for the notion of that sleeping far-right constituency, powerful enough to take the White House and remake the country if only it were galvanised, to live on. After all, as he and others will surely point out should Hillary Clinton defeat Mr Trump in November, no genuine conservative will feature in the general election. When the nomination circus starts up again Mr Cruz’s argument will be ready, as, no doubt, will his eerily memorised speeches, delivered with that awkward amalgam of lawyerly and preacherly mannerisms, and those corny jokes, often accompanied by an excruciating little self-satisfied chuckle. And the karate chop and prayerful hands of the senator from Texas will be unleashed on America once more.
