Cruz’s Judgment

Ted Cruz’s Judgment 

He built his campaign around March 1, but he never anticipated Donald Trump.

By Katie Glueck

It was July, only four months into the campaign, and Ted Cruz’s Iowa chairman was nervous.

Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee were practically living in Iowa, but Cruz was all over the map: On a book tour in Georgia, visiting Oklahoma, rolling out a leadership team in Tennessee. Matt Schultz got on a plane and flew to Houston, planning to tell Cruz’s senior staff that their candidate risked becoming an afterthought in the most important state for a conservative, evangelical Republican.

When he got to the Chick-fil-A-fueled confab, planned as a strategy session for early-state leaders, Schultz confronted the team: Cruz needs to get back to Iowa and show some real commitment to the state, said Schultz, who didn’t understand the attention showered on the South, when much of it wouldn’t vote until March. If he doesn’t, Schultz warned, Cruz would be overshadowed on winnable turf.

Campaign manager Jeff Roe heard him out. The campaign wouldn’t ignore Iowa, he promised. But the South, Roe said, isn’t a distraction—it’s the big prize.

Since the very beginning, the Cruz campaign has seen a strong Super Tuesday—when 595 delegates will be awarded—as the critical, defining moment in the effort to emerge as the consensus conservative choice. It’s the day Cruz has said will be an “amazing” one for his team, the day his campaign has described to potential donors as the one that will demonstrate this campaign, unlike every other conservative insurgent campaign in recent memory, is built to last in a long nomination fight.

But Cruz walks into March 1 on his heels. He failed spectacularly in South Carolina, the first test of his appeal in the South, and is now on the defensive even in his home state of Texas. And if polls are to be believed, he could lose it all on Tuesday to Donald Trump—a man his political and personal opposite in almost every relevant way, yet one who has still managed to commandeer a significant slice of the anti-Washington conservative base Cruz long banked on.

“He’s gained our voters, there’s no two ways around that,” said one of Cruz’s senior advisers. “Yeah, we’re getting beat because he is getting some of our votes. He’s not getting all of our votes, but he’s getting some of our votes, there’s no working around that.”

For Ted Cruz, Super Tuesday has become Judgment Day.

When Cruz officially launched in March 2015, his team began building voter models in states with March 2016 primaries — the initial models were based off profiles of Cruz’s Texas supporters—and using analytics to identify possible county chairs and supportive local leaders. The numbers told them Cruz had strong potential in states that looked most like Texas—Oklahoma and Georgia, for example.

By mid-summer, the campaign was ready to introduce Cruz to the region—a place where he was already well-known in conservative activist circles as a tea party hero but not as a like-minded evangelical. To that end, Roe conjured up the idea of a bus tour through the region, designed to show Southern voters that they could identify with Cruz.

“What do we share with the culture? It’s food, it’s football,” Roe said as he opened another July discussion at the Houston headquarters, recalled a source familiar with the planning of the bus tour.

The room full of the strategists with ties to the South and the rural Midwest lit up in conversation about barbecue and Friday night football games. “We were joking about things we remember growing up doing, joking about, ‘Should we have Cruz throw hay in the back of a pick-up truck?’” recalled another Cruz source in the room, who like many people interviewed for this story was not authorized to speak on the record.

At that meeting, the Cruz operatives decided that instead of the usual campaign stops, Cruz would instead host events with a distinctly Southern flavor: a biscuits and gravy breakfast in Chattanooga, for example, or a stop for barbecue in Newnan, Georgia.

It was a branding decision designed to signal to Southern voters, “He shares our values,” said the source familiar with the bus tour planning.

“The idea was that, Ted is the candidate for this area,” this person said. “We thought at the time, you want to be the conservative, evangelical, tea party candidate—a big part of that is the South. Knowing the math lined up like it did, what’s a really good way to show you’re a candidate that most identifies with those people? Culture is a very uniting factor.”

A few weeks later, it wasn’t culture on Cruz’s mind as he rolled through rural Georgia on the second day of his bus tour; it was raw politics.

Several state lawmakers, newly minted co-chairs of his Georgia efforts, climbed aboard Cruz’s bus. The senator wanted to hear about his chances in their state, which offered the second-biggest delegate bounty on Super Tuesday. So over soft drinks and coffees, Cruz peppered them with questions: Who were the influential conservatives he needed to meet in the state? What were the key issues at hand in the Georgia General Assembly?

And he shared his own strategic vision, saying that laying the groundwork in Georgia and other Southern states in the summer would help ensure that he would still be standing, and in a good position to benefit, should rivals such as Ben Carson and Rick Perry stumble, according to state Sen. Marty Harbin, one of lawmakers aboard the bus.

Off the bus, Cruz’s first major foray into the South was going well too.

He met large and adoring crowds everywhere he went, finding that the message that works in Texas—heavy on faith, the Constitution and supporting the military—was playing equally well across the South. And as he traveled, Cruz’s team saw evidence that the theories suggested by the campaign’s data modeling, and their assumptions about the South, aligned with the reception he was receiving on the ground.

It was encouraging enough, in fact, that Cruz began talking up the stakes of Super Tuesday to reporters, framing it as a day when his campaign would—and must—do well.

“It was a critical moment for the campaign to engage outside the first four states,” the Cruz adviser said. “It got us a leg up, it built out the narrative that we’re not just a one-and-done candidate, it’s not a one-state strategy.”

As summer turned to fall and Scott Walker and Perry dropped out of the race, Cruz’s team took its emphasis on the SEC into endorsement meetings in Iowa and ritzy donor gatherings in Utah. The aim was to help influential conservatives understand that Cruz was no Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum—past Iowa winners with no real path to the nomination.

“When we got into the fall and it was apparent we had put together a team in all of these other states, then we were able to start looking Iowans in the eye and saying, unlike the last two cycles, when you cast your vote in the caucus for Ted Cruz, he’s also got the capacity to take that momentum and go on to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and beyond,” said Bryan English, Cruz’s Iowa state director.

Roe, the chief architect of the Southern strategy, was also its best messenger. After working for the Huckabee campaign in 2008 and watching the former Arkansas governor sputter out due in part to lack of organization and money in later-voting states, he ensured that the Cruz campaign was built to protect against exactly that. The South, he told donors and state leaders on his own team, would play a critical role in helping them do so. It was a message that ultimately resonated with Schultz, a 2012 Santorum backer, in that July meeting. And it impressed donors to hear the long-game strategy spelled out.

“If you looked at the calendar of the whole primary, but especially March 1, you couldn’t ask for a better calendar if you were Ted Cruz,” said one Cruz donor, describing messages delivered by Roe and Cruz chief strategist Jason Johnson during a donor retreat at the St. Regis in Park City, Utah, last October, as Cruz looked on from the audience.

By December, Cruz was increasingly, and confidently, making that pitch himself, raising the stakes as he talked up his advantage and drawing the public’s attention to his Southern organization as Donald Trump and Marco Rubio were only beginning to get serious about organizing in the March states. A narrative emerged: Cruz was the best-organized candidate in the region at a time when it was not at all clear that Trump’s high polling numbers would be matched by high turnout.

As 2015 came to a close, Cruz returned to the South with huge fanfare, jetting from stop to stop across Alabama, Tennessee and other states with a flashiness that invited comparisons to Trump.

But Ted Cruz is no Donald Trump. And in the final days before the SEC primary, Cruz supporters have begun to doubt his ability to overcome Trump’s momentum, fueled by three straight wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

After notching the Iowa victory that Schultz fretted about six months beforehand and locking down a stronger-than-expected third-place finish in New Hampshire, Cruz strode into deeply conservative and religious South Carolina, a state that should have been friendly territory. Everything fell apart.

Battered daily by Trump and by Rubio, and dogged by accusations of running a campaign uniquely full of “dirty tricks,” Cruz came in third, double-digits behind Trump. Most devastating to Cruz backers, Trump swept up the evangelical vote.

“South Carolina, for me, was the linchpin, where I realized, ‘OK, we won Iowa and that was sweet, we kicked [Trump’s] ass, now the air of inevitability, take that off,’” said the donor who heard the Cruz team’s pitch in Park City and bought into it. “South Carolina was the first test, and it didn’t go well. I mean, it went about as badly as you could have imagined.”

The Cruz campaign has taken Trump seriously for months now. It took note over the summer of the thousands and thousands of people attending his events, and Cruz spent the entire fall assiduously avoiding offending Trump, in the hopes that some of his backers would eventually come over to Cruz. When he did unload, the campaign put thousands of dollars behind negative ads.

But when it hatched its Southern strategy a year ago, no one predicted that there would be another candidate who would better tap into the fierce anti-Washington sentiment that Cruz spent his first years in the Senate owning.

“At the time when we constructed this nearly a year ago, we were not going to be opposite of Donald Trump, it was going to be opposite the establishment candidate,” the Cruz adviser said. “None of us ever thought, with one quarter of the delegates cast, there would be a nominee. What we believed this night would be was us versus the establishment candidate, the establishment field would narrow, we would have narrowed the conservative field.”

“This happened,” the source continued. “Plus Donald Trump.”

In the final hours before Super Tuesday, Cruz found himself playing defense in his home state, aware that a loss in Texas would signal, to many, the end of his campaign.

“It would be his Waterloo if not,” acknowledged Mica Mosbacher, a Cruz fundraiser who stressed she believes he will win Texas.

Cruz’s adviser said that in their team’s view, Cruz is better-positioned than Rubio to pick up delegates Tuesday, assuming that they win Texas—which the campaign expects to do. From there, the adviser said, Cruz will have plenty of rationale to move on to other states, looking to run up a bigger delegate lead in places such as Louisiana and Kansas ahead of the winner-take-all contests that hit March 15. They start advertising in Maine on Tuesday ahead of the March 5 caucuses there. They are skeptical that Rubio will win Florida, and hopeful that if they can take on Trump in a head-to-head, they will still have a path to victory. A decent March 1 showing still puts them within “spitting distance” of Trump’s delegate count, the adviser said.

“All of us are hurt by what Trump will do tomorrow night,” the adviser said on the eve of Super Tuesday. “For some, it will be lethal. For others, it will be impactful.”

“It’s going to impact us for sure.”