South Bend, Ind. —
Ted Cruz roamed a platform surrounded by a sea of supporters and smirked. “How about Carly?” he asked. Everyone whooped. Fiorina, the one-time presidential candidate and “running mate” of the Texas senator, had just given a tight, 15-minute introduction, rousing a half-seated, half-standing crowd that was 10, 11, 12 people deep in some places. She got ‘em going with a simple pitch: Ted Cruz is a good man and a good conservative, and it’s questionable that Donald Trump is either.
“I have never seen [Cruz] lose his temper,” Fiorina said. “I have never seen him waver from the fight that he has in front of him, or from his convictions.”
When Cruz took the stage a little while later, he took the baton from Fiorina with him. He immediately began speaking about personal traits, saying he valued the “knowledge, judgment and character” in the former Hewlitt Packard CEO. But in explaining what each attribute meant to him, it sometimes wasn’t clear whether Cruz was praising his political partner or denigrating his political archrival.
“If you can’t have character,” he said, “nothing else matters.” A man in the crowd interjected with a “That’s right!” prompting a round of applause. Cruz only continued from there, emphasizing human themes like decency, stability, and consistency.
America, Cruz said, needs someone “who will stand up for what they believe—who knows what they believe—and is going to believe the same things today that they believed yesterday, and they’re gonna believe the same things tomorrow.”
For a GOP contest in which a candidate’s attitude and anywhere-but-D.C. ZIP code has mattered as much as beliefs and principles—Donald Trump, take your bow—Cruz’s arguments could have crucial appeal. His remarks to the audience in South Bend fit the region: Christian, deep red, and culturally conservative. The state is part of an area of the country that has voted and caucused for Cruz (Wisconsin and Iowa) and Marco Rubio (Minnesota). And its mild-mannered Midwestern reputation was reflected in Gov. Mike Pence’s predecessor, the low-key and popular Mitch Daniels, to a tee.
That would seem to conflict with a candidate like Trump, whose image has plummeted during the campaign despite his electoral success.
“Indiana has not ventured into the realm of political theater yet. There has been no Jesse Ventura or Gov. Moonbeam (Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown) elected by Hoosiers,” Curt Smith, the president of the Indiana Family Institute, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “We go for solid, stable, steady leaders on both sides of the aisle.”
Smith is a Cruz backer and a delegate to the Republican National Convention.
Still, multiple Hoosier GOP officials across several congressional districts have told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that there is an unpredictable tension among their voters. While Indiana may have gone for a figure like Daniels at the state level, its Republican residents have been animated by Washington politics just the same. Some of them have taken to Trump’s populist message, with polls taken in the last two weeks showing him with a small lead.
But Trump won’t have a monopoly on such Hoosiers if Cruz can help it, with Fiorina saying in South Bend that Trump is no outsider.
“Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not going to fight the system: They are the system,” she said.
Given Cruz’s abrasive reputation in the Senate, it might be hard to believe that he’s trying to be the relatively peaceable candidate to convince voters of that message. He at least picked the right state to do it.
