Ted Cruz is so unpopular among fellow Republicans that South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham joked about murdering him in February. But that didn’t stop Graham from endorsing the Texas senator in March.
Cruz’s emergence as the main competitor to Donald Trump has had the strange effect of turning the conservative firebrand despised by many of his colleagues into a safer pair of hands for the party. Despite the longstanding misgivings of many in the Republican establishment about Cruz – an ambitious and grating striver whom even his allies describe as a young man in hurry – they have embraced him as the lesser of two evils, compared with Trump.
The first-time Texas senator was elected in 2012 as a Tea Party insurgent winning as an underdog against his state’s longtime lieutenant governor. Cruz quickly set about becoming a national figure by forcing a 17-day government shutdown less than nine months after his election to the Senate. That fight made Cruz a hero to the party’s conservative base but alienated colleagues who saw Cruz as pursuing a hopeless fight simply to boost his national profile. Less than two years later, Cruz announced his candidacy for the White House at Liberty University, an evangelical college in rural Virginia.
Cruz quickly emerged from the crowded Republican candidate field by consolidating the support of many of the party’s most conservative voters. By combining sophisticated campaign operation with debate skills honed by years as a champion debater at university, the Texas senator had long been viewed as one of the most formidable of the 16 Republican candidates.
But Cruz’s appeal was long limited. He has struggled to appeal to voters beyond his base and Wisconsin was only the second state – after his home of Texas – where he got more than 30% of the vote from voters who did not identify as evangelical. As the Republican primary moves to states on the eastern seaboard like New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, Cruz must continue to move beyond his Christian base.
At this stage of the campaign, however, Cruz doesn’t need to become the most beloved candidate running. He just needs to convince more moderate Republicans that while ardent social conservatism may be off-putting, it could be worse. He could be Donald Trump.
