In his speech following the South Carolina Republican primary, Ted Cruz said that “we are the only campaign that has beaten, and can beat, Donald Trump.” The second part of that (the “can beat” part) is certainly debatable—Marco Rubio would beg to differ, and perhaps neither one of them can beat Trump—but Cruz has a point in focusing attention on the results to date.
Since 1980, no eventual GOP nominee has failed to win at least one state from among Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. And only one eventual GOP nominee has failed to finish in the top three in all three of those states (John McCain, who finished fourth in Iowa in 2008). Trump and Cruz have each done both of those things—finishing first in one state and in the top three in all three—while no other candidate in the field has done either of those things.
Whether Cruz can in fact beat Trump going forward may well hinge on his ability to turn around the results of one question in the South Carolina exit polling. Among the 31 percent of the state’s primary voters who said they most want a candidate who “can bring change,” Trump beat Cruz by more than a 2-to-1 margin (45 percent for Trump to 19 percent for Cruz, with Rubio getting 16 percent).
So long as GOP voters think Trump would do more to undo the Obama presidency than Cruz would—on Obamacare, on the debt, on the Constitution and rule of law, on national security, on Main Street economic concerns—Cruz will likely have a hard time making good on his claim that he not only has beaten Trump but can do so again across many, if not most, of the remaining 47 states.
