Ted Cruz has emerged as the strongest alternative to Republican frontrunner Donald Trump after this week’s decisive victory in the Wisconsin primary.
But as the party establishment rallies reluctantly around the Texas senator, the Republicans’ apparent last hope of stopping Trump remains far from the party mainstream.
While Cruz is more cautious with his rhetoric, he is no stranger to controversy and remains to many within his party no more acceptable than Trump as the GOP nominee. For Democratic supporters eyeing the opposition field, he also holds a record that is more reliably conservative than Trump and is in many cases to the right of the real estate mogul.
Cruz, elected to the US Senate in 2012, has meticulously built an image as a conservative firebrand with little deference toward the traditional rules and procedure that bound both the Republican party and the institution in which he serves. The senator rose to national prominence by orchestrating the 2013 shutdown of the federal government over Barack Obama’s healthcare law and has routinely pursued tactics denounced by Republican leaders in Congress.
But in the absence of any palatable candidates who could actually defeat Trump, the same “Washington cartel” Cruz often rails against is now shuffling reluctantly to his cause and coalescing around the first-term senator’s candidacy. The differences between Cruz and Trump are largely style over substance, however, and if chosen as the Republican nominee Cruz would be the party’s most conservative standard bearer in modern history.
Immigration
The cornerstone of Trump’s candidacy has been the issue of immigration, most notably his pledge to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. Cruz also supports such a wall, only without Trump’s bombastic suggestion that he will force Mexico to pay for it.
Last year, Cruz also embraced much of Trump’s immigration platform as his own. The senator came out against birthright citizenship, despite previously stating it was not a feasible goal under the US constitution. Cruz also took a hardline stance against the H-1B visa program for foreign workers, even though he once backed legislation that would have quintupled the cap on guest worker visas.
And in a much-publicized feud with former candidate Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, Cruz reluctantly made clear he did not support granting even legal status to the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.
Over the course of two years, Cruz had repeatedly left the door open to legalization. But amid a nasty debate with Rubio over what to do with the undocumented, Cruz categorically ruled out bringing the millions out of the shadows and said he instead favored “attrition through enforcement” – which pro-immigration advocates likened to self-deportation.
Religious liberty
The son of a pastor, Cruz has long placed the culture wars over social issues such as LGBT rights and abortion at the heart of his political brand. The senator’s pathway to the nomination was even plotted around the evangelical voters who hold an outsize influence in the Republican primary.
When the supreme court declared same-sex marriage the law of the land last year, Cruz immediately responded with a proposed constitutional amendment that would institute a federal ban on gay couples from marrying. He has also vigorously defended the spate of religious freedom laws that have emerged in conservative states and are viewed by progressives as gateways for discrimination by businesses against LGBT individuals.
Trump’s forays into religion have been clumsy and unconvincing at best, not least when he was derided for quoting a biblical passage from “Two Corinthians”, rather than Second Corinthians, inspiring a wave of “Two Corinthians walked into a bar” gags.
Abortion
On abortion, too, Cruz draws upon his faith to advocate a fiercely pro-life position. He has sponsored numerous bills that would limit access to abortion, such as a ban on the procedure at 20 weeks of pregnancy. Cruz would also be to the right of Trump by opposing exceptions to abortion in cases of rape or incest.
And whereas Trump has defended Planned Parenthood as a candidate for providing other vital women’s health services, Cruz has publicly lambasted the organization and vowed to defund it entirely. He has, in fact, criticized Trump from the right over the latter’s inconsistency on abortion – Trump was once pro-choice – and although Cruz never called for women to be “punished” as his rival notoriously did, he has supported criminalizing abortion providers.
“When it comes to rape, rape is a horrific crime against the humanity of a person and needs to be punished and punished severely but at the same time, as horrible as that crime is, I don’t believe it’s the child’s fault,” Cruz told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly this week.
“And we weep at the crime. We want to do everything we can to prevent the crime on the front end and to punish the criminal, but I don’t believe it makes sense to blame the child.”
National security
Trump has gained substantial media coverage over his controversial proposals to ban Muslim immigrants from coming to the US and shut down mosques in America and for suggesting he was open to a federal registry of Muslim Americans.
Cruz has on occasion distanced himself from Trump’s more outlandish proposals in the debate over terrorism and national security. But in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Brussels last month, it was Cruz who looked to get out ahead of his rival by proposing that police patrol Muslim neighborhoods in the US.
The suggestion garnered immediate backlash from Bill Bratton, the commissioner of the New York police department, as well as from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Cruz nonetheless stood by his plan amid the scrutiny and dismissed his detractors for their “leftwing radical” positions.
And while Trump has been criticized for lacking substance on foreign policy, Cruz’s opponents in both parties have seized on the senator’s declaration that he would “carpet-bomb Isis into oblivion” as an unrealistic, if not unclear, strategy.
Criminal justice
Cruz has been a vocal opponent of a bipartisan compromise in the Senate to reform the criminal justice system, despite once supporting lower sentences for nonviolent criminals. During a hearing on the bill, which was authored by Cruz’s only friend in the Senate, Mike Lee of Utah, the senator in a scathing speech characterized the reform efforts as dangerously lenient. Lee, who later went on to endorse Cruz anyway, was reportedly blindsided by his colleague’s actions.
Cruz has also aggressively criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, stating in an interview last year that the protesters were “literally suggesting and embracing and celebrating the murder of police officers”.
It was no surprise then that Cruz, during a campaign stop in the Bronx on Wednesday, seized on the opportunity to blast the New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio.
“Every time there is a conflict between criminals and police officers, liberal Democrats side with the criminals,” Cruz said. “The moment when the brave men and women of the NYPD stood up and turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio, I cheered … that spoke to the entire country.”
Style
Even as Cruz casts himself in the role of political outsider, competing for much of the Republican primary in the same lane as Trump, the senator holds the pedigree of a more traditional politician. With a background that includes a debating career at Princeton University and tenure as the solicitor general of Texas from 2003 to 2008, Cruz is far more polished on the stump, although not without his own element of theater.
His speaking style is often characterized as abrasive, even if he lacks the braggadocio that has defined Trump as a candidate. But Cruz, like his opponent, has a take-no-prisoners approach to his agenda – he once infamously referred to Republican leader Mitch McConnell as a “liar” on the Senate floor. His at times ruthless pursuit of ideology over practicality has earned Cruz few friends in the Senate, and just two of his colleagues in the chamber have endorsed him despite the Texan’s reported overtures.
Earlier this week, McConnell twice ducked a question in his weekly press conference as to whether he was willing to put aside his bad blood with Cruz as a means of stopping Trump. Whether Cruz can, in fact, build the relationships he would need within the halls of the Capitol if he is to be the nominee – and whether doing so would undermine his anti-Washington shtick – remains an open-ended question.
Trump and Cruz one and the same to Democrats
Even if Cruz is able to assuage the remaining concerns among those Republicans who see him as indistinguishable from Trump, Democrats are already showing themselves as eager to paint the two candidates as one and the same.
Priorities USA, the Super Pac supporting Clinton, has already gone to work to make the record clear. The group unveiled a new digital ad on Wednesday in partnership with Planned Parenthood Votes, targeting women in the swing states of Florida and Ohio, that shows a mashup of comments by both Cruz and Trump to portray them as holding the same views on women’s reproductive rights.
Top Democrats have also turned their attention toward Cruz in recent days as the senator’s standing has risen in the polls.
Addressing reporters on Tuesday, Obama said Cruz’s proposals were “just as draconian” as those of Trump – particularly on the issue of immigration. And Clinton, in an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush on Wednesday, blasted Cruz as “a mean-spirited guy”.
When asked about the choice facing the Republican party, she added: “I don’t think that, you know, Ted Cruz is any better.”
