Ted Cruz has as good a chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 as Donald Trump or Marco Rubio. But there are serious doubts whether he can win the general election.
To capture the White House, Cruz would need to win most or all of the states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012. Romney won 206 electoral votes. Cruz would need to flip enough states won by President Obama to gain at least 64 more electoral votes to win the presidency.
That means winning “purple” or swing states. A Republican operative lists nine of them: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, and Virginia. Besides being toss-ups, they have something else in common. President Obama won all nine both in 2008 and 2012.
Can Cruz cut into the Obama electorate? That would be difficult for any GOP nominee, but particularly for Cruz. He calls himself the most reliably conservative candidate in the race. And his campaign focuses especially on winning the Christian evangelical vote.
Cruz and his strategists have an answer for doubters. With effective outreach to conservatives, he can gain the votes of the four million conservative voters who supposedly stayed home in 2012.
There are problems with this strategy. Expectations of a surge of new conservative voters if only Republicans nominated a full-blown conservative candidate are not new. Republicans did just that in 1964 with Barry Goldwater as the nominee. He lost to President Johnson by 486 electoral votes to 52.
The bigger problem is that story of the four million missing voters in 2012 has been knocked down repeatedly, and convincingly. “Exit polling doesn’t really support the notion that self-identified conservatives were noticeably missing,” wrote Dan McLaughlin, an attorney and political analyst, in Red State. “The missing potential Republican voters are mostly people who have not been regular voters in the recent past, and many of them may not be politically engaged people who think of themselves as conservatives.”
Karl Rove has made an even stronger case that the stay-at-home story is a myth. The exit poll in 2012 found that 35 percent of voters were self-identified conservatives. This conservative turnout, Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “was the highest since exit polls began asking voters about their political leanings in 1976.”
Conservatives who didn’t vote “are unreliable voters who are difficult to turn out,” Rove wrote. “If the opportunity to vote against Mr. Obama after four years in office wasn’t enough to turn them out, the most likely reason is that they are not politically engaged and tend to be drawn to a candidate less on political philosophy and more because of personal characteristics.”
According to Rove’s math, since 82 percent of conservatives voted for Romney, he would have needed an additional 7.7 million votes to defeat Obama, with the conservative share of the electorate rising to 39 percent. “This has never happened,” Rove wrote.
Where might Cruz inspire a fresh wave of Republican voters? They’re unlikely to come from the growing Hispanic electorate. Just last week, he insisted that he had never favored a path to legalization for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.
Fair or not, Hispanic voters are sensitive to how immigrants are discussed publicly. Cruz has agreed with Trump that a wall should be built along the American border with Mexico to block illegal entry.
When Cruz ran for the Senate in Texas in 2012, he got 35 percent of the Hispanic vote. Compared with other Republicans, however, he underperformed. In 2014, Senator John Cornyn of Texas received 48 percent of the Hispanic vote, and Greg Abbott was elected governor with 44 percent. Marco Rubio, Cruz’s rival in the presidential race, got the votes of 55 percent of Hispanics in winning a Senate race in Florida in 2010.
To win in 2016, the Republican nominee will probably need to win at least 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Romney got 27 percent in 2012. George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 with 44 percent.
Three purple states—Florida, Colorado, and Nevada—have large Hispanic communities. To carry them, Cruz would have to make substantial inroads. In Florida, Romney got 39 percent of Hispanic voters and lost. Had he matched the 56 percent George W. Bush won in 2004, Romney would have won Florida.
Improving on Romney’s 59 percent of the white vote would also be tough. Whites were 84 percent of the electorate in 1980. They’re expected to constitute roughly 70 percent in 2016.
Obama did poorly among white voters: 39 percent in the last presidential election. In 2004, John Kerry got 41 percent of whites. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, could top Obama, assuming she compensates for losing white males by running more strongly among white women.
The point is that gaining a higher percentage of voters in the shrinking white electorate won’t help the Republican nominee much. President Reagan, by the way, won reelection with 66 percent of whites in 1984 in a 49-state landslide.
Then there are the moderates Obama won in 2012. As a candidate who brags about the breadth and intensity of his conservatism, Cruz doesn’t have much ground to plow among moderates.
So Cruz is doomed as a general election candidate? I don’t think so, just at a disadvantage. He’s a dynamic candidate, a strong debater, and extremely clever in his treatment of issues. He’s usually adept at not locking himself into positions that might haunt him later.
And there’s one big thing. The future in politics is never a straight line projection of the present. And 2016 is likely to be a volatile year with a wide-open race. Millions of voters, and not only conservatives, may balk at electing Hillary Clinton. Around this time in 1979, Ronald Reagan was said by many to have no chance to win the general election in 1980. Cruz is no Reagan, but the precedent is intriguing.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
