Cracks Cruz

Trump cracks Cruz’s lock on conservative media

The Texan had the right’s most influential voices wired, but it’s the New Yorker who is now driving their ratings. 

By Eli Stokols and Hadas Gold

Ted Cruz worked early and hard to cultivate the support of the most important voices in conservative talk radio and on the Web and was rewarded with an army of defenders who have for nearly a year inoculated him against criticism, advanced his message and bashed his rivals on a daily basis.

No more. With just days to go before the Iowa caucuses, Cruz’s wires into conservative media have gotten crossed by Donald Trump.

While opinion-makers on the right found it easy to dismiss Cruz’s earlier rivals — from Marco Rubio and Rand Paul to Jeb Bush — Trump has proved a tougher foil. That’s partly because his rhetoric and stated policy positions appeal to so many conservative listeners and readers that covering them generates ratings gold. Breitbart, the conservative site, says it has experienced a 75 percent growth in traffic in the past year. And Rush Limbaugh says his audience “is expanding at near geometric proportions, as people seek guidance, answers, explanations, information, and an answer to the basic question, ‘What the hell is happening out there?’”

But it’s also because leading voices in conservative media to recognize, and appreciate, that it has been Trump, even more than Cruz, who has driven the 2016 field to the right.

“What’s different in a Trump-Cruz fight is that Trump is just as good for these conservative websites as Cruz is,” said a high-level staffer for a rival campaign. “A Trump interview on any given day beats a Cruz interview.”

Indeed, some of the most powerful leaders in the conservative media world have gone as far as to take Trump’s side over Cruz’s as the closing weeks of the caucus campaign have pitted the two candidates against each other. While Breitbart, a blog financed in large part by Cruz’s biggest donor, had served as something of a home for both Trump and Cruz, the site has begun to validate Trump’s questioning of Cruz’s U.S. citizenship, for instance. And Rush Limbaugh, who had consistently defended Cruz, told his listeners he was “sitting out” the skirmish between the two leading GOP contenders.

Nothing lays bare the tension inside conservative media like the birther dispute, which has fueled a fight between Breitbart editor-at-large John Nolte and radio host Mark Levin.

The night before Cruz’s campaign announcement, Breitbart was granted exclusive access to the candidate and his family, taking photos of Cruz spending time with his daughters and posting the shots as part of a glowing story. But as Trump turned up the heat surrounding Cruz’s Canadian birth to an American mother, the site followed suit, publishing dozens of articles about the theory that the senator from Texas might not, in fact, be a “natural-born” citizen, as the Constitution requires for the presidency.

“There seemed to be an effort to create narratives,” a person intimately familiar with Breitbart’s operations said. “They try to make stories that aren’t just one article, but multiple ones, because that gets more traffic.”

In response, Levin, who claims about 7 million listeners a week, turned into one of the most outspoken anti-Trump, pro-Cruz advocates in conservative media, calling the attacks on Cruz “attacks on us,” referring to “true conservatives.”

“Here’s Ted Cruz, one of the leading conservatives in the country. Here’s Ted Cruz, 30 days ago, was considered a solid conservative constitutionalist. And in 30 days’ time, you and I are supposed to believe the opposite. The opposite, that he’s a maniac, that he’s a criminal, that he’s Canadian, that he tried to hide his loans. Nixon,” Levin said last Wednesday, calling Trump’s attacks on Cruz “Nixonian” and “Alinsky-ite.”

Brietbart’s Nolte fired back: “As ‘stupid’ as this issue may be for Levin, do we want to litigate it in front of the American people today or three weeks before the general election, when Cruz is either our presidential or vice-presidential nominee? Because you have to be wearing blinders to believe that will not happen.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, according to Cruz’s team, which expected its courtship of the right-wing media to create a direct line between their candidate and the base, and serve as a firewall on uncomfortable or troublesome issues.

“The key talk radio thought leaders” have backed Cruz in “the critical moments in this race,” said Chad Sweet, Cruz's campaign chairman, acknowledging the strategic emphasis on talk radio. “The reality is, the reach of talk radio is greater than any other medium, it’s greater than written print media, greater than television media. There is no other candidate that has had the groundswell of organic support among talk radio than Ted Cruz.”

That was certainly true a month ago. When Marco Rubio put him on the defensive during a December debate over his 2013 position on immigration reform, and even after Cruz stammered through a Fox News interview on the subject the next day, his campaign evinced no panic as it counted up the number of conservative media voices who were rallying to their side — Limbaugh, Levin and Steve Deace among them.

But while Levin, Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck, among others, all came to Cruz’s defense during the height of the “birther” attacks, the Cruz campaign now sees some of the leading figures in talk radio helping build a bulwark against Trump. Trump’s brand of politics has increasingly become aligned with the conservative radio talkers and bloggers, who have expanded their audiences by provoking grass-roots activists, amplifying hard-line positions and pushing Republicans further and further to the right.

And whatever his other transgressions with conservative orthodoxy, Trump has positioned himself farther to the right than any of his rivals on immigration, the issue that most riles up conservative listeners and audiences. Trump has not only driven Cruz rightward on the issue, he’s now running a new TV ad in Iowa featuring Cruz’s stammering Fox News interview that aims to hold Cruz to account for his past openness to legal status for undocumented immigrants.

Suddenly, some of Cruz’s consistent supporters in the right-wing media are hedging their bets. Limbaugh, for example, has carefully straddled the divide; while giving his full-throated support to Cruz, Limbaugh has praised Trump’s tactics, noting that, to his broad base of support, the tycoon represents “opportunity,” “newness” and the "breaking out of whatever it is that’s got us shackled." Laura Ingraham, a staunch Cruz defender, also initially validated Trump’s questioning of the Texas senator’s U.S. citizenship before changing her mind and stating that the question has been resolved. But just days ago, Ingraham pointed out to her listeners Cruz’s flip flops on free trade and immigration reform.

Beyond talk radio, there are other examples of Trump making inroads on Cruz’s conservative turf. National Review, a stalwart of Washington’s conservative establishment, devoted an entire issue to stopping Trump, whom it bemoaned as a “philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones” — the kind of broadside that only solidifies Trump’s anti-establishment credentials. And Sarah Palin, a political celebrity of sorts still held in high regard by much of the conservative grass roots, just endorsed Trump last week.

And it’s had an effect. As Cruz’s hold on conservative media weakened, Trump regained lost ground in the polls. Cruz peaked with 31.8 percent support in the RealClearPolitics average of Iowa GOP polls on Jan. 6, good for a 4-point lead over Trump. As of Sunday, Trump is tracking at 32.2 percent, more than 5 points above Cruz, who’s down to 27 percent in the same RCP Iowa average.

But as conservative media personalities have had to pick a side, most are still choosing Cruz, and only some of them are tempering their tone in talking about Trump. Conservative media personality Glenn Beck on Saturday endorsed Cruz during a campaign rally in Iowa, warning against Trump’s “reality show tactics” as he became one of Cruz’s highest-profile backers to date.

“The great news is we don’t live anymore in a world of three networks that have a stranglehold on information,” Cruz said Sunday, hinting at his campaign’s decision to go around the mainstream media, long a target of conservative ire, during an interview on Fox News. “We have got the Internet. We have got the Drudge Report. We have got talk radio. We have got social media. We’ve got the ability to go directly around, and directly to the people.”

Beyond Iowa, however, galvanizing the grass-roots supporters via talk radio might not help Cruz or Trump in their effort to win broader support across more diverse primary states or in the general election, should one of them win the GOP nomination.

“The big risk of spending an inordinate amount of time shaping that conversation is you begin to think it’s the only conversation that’s taking place in the race,” said Kevin Madden, a GOP communications consultant who advised Mitt Romney in 2012. “Oftentimes, you are fighting over voters who are already persuaded one way or another; and you begin to lose your ability to win over and attract voters who remain undecided. That’s where a focus on other outlets remains important.”

Many Republicans view the growing influence of conservative media as the root, not a symptom, of the GOP’s problems winning the White House and effectively running Congress.

“It goes beyond finding an electable nominee and affects governing,” said Brian Walsh, a former National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman. “They create unreasonable expectations with voters and talk about things that they themselves know aren’t possible, but they demagogue the issue and that has created a problem for Republicans being able to actually govern.”

But for now, the nation’s most conservative voices are enjoying the runup to Iowa, and helping the rivalry between their two preferred candidates as it denies airtime to the more moderate contenders they so disdain.

“Ted & Trump (should) be working together to expose Establishment until it’s killed off completely," Ingraham tweeted last week.