Trump, Cruz or Rubio. Who is Muy Macho?

Ted Cruz struggles to unify conservatives

The candidate chosen by evangelical leaders scrambles to stop defections to Trump and Rubio.

By Katie Glueck

Ted Cruz has long insisted he is the only candidate capable of uniting the conservative base, but a disappointing third-place finish in South Carolina that saw evangelical Christians flock to Donald Trump is suddenly undercutting his status as the conservative chosen one.

“It’s going to be more difficult for him to make the argument that he’s the front-runner, that he’s the guy for everyone to coalesce around,” said Penny Nance, the head of Concerned Women for America, of Cruz’s finish behind Trump and Marco Rubio. She has been courted by both Cruz and Rubio but remains neutral, though opposed to Trump. “It throws that into question.”

The results in a state where 73 percent of voters identified as evangelical in exit polls are a clear signal that despite spending months trying, Cruz is far from locking down this core group of politically active Christians. The outright winner of the evangelical vote, according to exit polls, was Trump, who pulled in 33 percent of that segment.

Cruz took 27 percent of the evangelical vote, followed by Rubio with 22 percent.

“Sen. Cruz has been and continues to be a stalwart champion for conservative issues and also for evangelical issues, but like we’ve seen with the vote for Mr. Trump and also for Sen. Rubio, the evangelical vote doesn’t only vote on historically socially conservative issues,” said Timothy Head, the executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a prominent Christian group. “We’re weeks away from seeing an actual coalescence around one candidate.”

Cruz still significantly outpaces Rubio and Trump in support from movement conservative leaders, from Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, to James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family. Many of them are supporting Cruz because they wanted to unite early around one candidate whom they thought could go the distance. And evangelicals and deeply conservative voters did come together to propel Cruz to a victory in Iowa and a respectable third-place showing in more moderate New Hampshire.

Looking ahead to contests in Nevada and throughout the South, Cruz on Saturday night urged these voters to rally to his campaign again.

"If you are a conservative, this is where you belong, because only one strong conservative is in a position to win this race," he said. "We are the only campaign that has beaten and can beat Donald Trump."

But the South Carolina results, Nance said, show that that message isn't fully translating even with conservative, evangelical primary voters that should be Cruz’s natural constituency.

“Certainly the activist base, the tea party base, those folks really like Ted Cruz and support him, but for the evangelicals who maybe aren’t living and breathing…Senate floor fights, people who are evangelicals, social conservatives, there is something about Marco Rubio they like,” she said.

That creates a more challenging dynamic for Cruz as March 1 nears and a dozen states, many of them Southern, heavily evangelical, and similar to South Carolina, vote in primaries, where strong organization moves the dial less than in caucus states such as Iowa. The Cruz campaign has set expectations high for that day: They have been organizing in the South earlier and harder than any other campaign and have said they must, and will, have a strong showing.

Rubio and Trump, however, also have paths in states politically similar to South Carolina, and Trump in particular comes in with a head of steam.

“South Carolina is a good indicator on what to expect on Super Tuesday, especially among SEC states,” acknowledged someone close to the Cruz campaign, who also added that the expectation is that those states would be more conservative, with more deeply conservative evangelicals who should favor Cruz.

At the end of December, Cruz predicted that the race would be over, with the nomination sewn up, by the end of March. Now his backers say they are bracing for a long race over a splintered electorate unwilling to coalesce around one conservative standard-bearer.

“As long as you have a fragmented field, you’re going to have a fragmented vote,” Perkins of the Family Research Council said. “Evangelicals are not all monolithic…You have a portion of them going to Trump, a portion going to Rubio and a plurality going to Cruz [though that didn’t happen on Saturday]. The only way that changes is if you see someone like Rubio going out…That’s the only way you solidify the evangelical vote, is some of these candidates dropping out.”

That’s certainly not in the cards for Rubio, who stands to be a major beneficiary of Jeb Bush’s Saturday night exit from the race and who is also competing for evangelicals. And Ben Carson, who is a longshot candidate, still commands some support among religious Christians, and has also pledged not to bow out anytime soon.

“It’s going to be awfully hard, with the field the way it is, for anybody to get past Trump,” the Cruz source said.

Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, on Saturday acknowledged that the campaign sees a three-person race headed into March 1—and that there is some cross-over voting.

“It’s clear the top tier, there’s three people, we call it three wide going into Talladega,” Roe said. “We have a message that is clear and consistent and there is going to be some infringement on each other’s lanes going forward.”

He added later, “It’s not just like Ted Cruz is only evangelicals, only very conservative. It’s not just that Marco Rubio is only the center in these states.”

But Roe said that as March 1 nears and the race grows more nationalized, without so many attack ads concentrated in one place, the more traditional views of the candidates—Cruz as the conservative choice, Rubio as the more moderate one—will come back into play.

“They watch the candidates, they aren’t frankly impacted as greatly by the advertising of the campaign that’s beating on their door every day,” he said. “So they come to a more natural place. …It’ll still happen in Nevada, we’ll have negative ads up against us next week. But after that it becomes much more of a profile race.”