What happened to Ted Cruz? A month ago, he won the Wisconsin primary in a landslide and was poised to combat Donald Trump with a fresh burst of enthusiasm. Now he’s out of the race and Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Things happened in two cycles, some in recent weeks and others that plagued his campaign from the beginning. As Trump said last night, Cruz is tough and smart. But he made big mistakes as a presidential candidate.
Cruz thought he could skip primaries in states that looked unpromising. He made a weak effort in New York on April 19 and finished third in the primary. That had an immediate impact on the primaries a week later in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Rhode Island. He lost all five and finished third – that is, last – in four of them.
In primaries late in a presidential race, winning is everything, says Scott Reed, the political adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Second doesn’t matter. Third is a joke.” Reed ran Bob Dole’s successful campaign for the GOP nomination.
“It’s a sequential process,” according to Jeff Bell, a campaign adviser to Ronald Reagan in 1976. Voters are affected by the success of a candidate in earlier primaries. Trump’s victory in New York led to the five-state sweep and to his triumph over Cruz in Indiana primary yesterday.
Cruz decided to make a stand in Indiana, brushing off the five Northeast states. He believed they “wouldn’t make any difference in voters’ minds in Indiana,” says Rich Danker, who ran a pro-Cruz super PAC. But states “don’t have to be all alike” for voters to be influenced by their outcome, he says.
After Cruz came in a distant third in New York, his poll numbers began to drop. Over ten days in late April, Cruz went from six percentage points behind Trump (WTHR/Howey Politics) to 15 points behind (NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist). Trump won Indiana by 16 points. On Monday, Gallup’s editor in chief Frank Newport disclosed that “after a holding period of sorts in March and early April, Cruz’s image began to deteriorate significantly in the last two weeks.”
Two other factors contributed to his demise. He accused Trump of being a liberal like Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee. The charge wasn’t credible. Trump may not be a conservative, but he’s hardly a liberal.
And Cruz talked incessantly about process. He and his campaign aides boasted about how well he was doing in putting Cruz backers in delegate slots pledged to Trump. They pointed to their success in winning all 34 delegates in Colorado, though neither a primary nor a caucus had been held.
This backfired. Voters tend to be uninterested in campaign process. Worse, Trump insisted the nomination fight was “rigged” because delegates were being chosen undemocratically, without the assent of voters. Trump exploited this issue successfully for days.
Then there were Cruz’s long-term problems. One was his persistent claim to be the only “true conservative” in the race. Indeed, he is a conservative. But by saying so incessantly, he cut himself off from voters who weren’t interested in a right-wing candidate.
“I believe Cruz’s ideas on reviving the economy and destroying ISIS could have won over voters, but they got diluted by his quest to be seen as the most conservative candidate in the field – a contest that’s a sideshow to most Republican voters,” Danker wrote in an “overview” of the GOP race.
“Picking a president is about the candidate’s vision of where to take America,” Danker wrote. “‘Making America Great Again’ may be facile but it meets this objective. Cruz did not have a campaign theme like this of his own, never mind a slogan for it.”
Nor was Cruz’s stump piece the equal of Trump’s. Cruz delivered a stream of applause lines. Trump ad-libs about the news of the day. He is interesting and lively and gets far more media coverage as a result. “Trump talks about things that matter to people,” a Republican consultant says. Cruz stressed ideology.
Cruz was praised by the media for his data-driven strategy. He knew so much about voting blocs, even tiny ones, that he was free to select what states – usually the winnable ones – in which to compete. This strategy failed.
In New Hampshire, the most important early primary in the entire contest, Cruz took a pass. Had he run hard – he had the money to do so – he probably would have finished second to Trump. Instead he came in a weak third and his performance in South Carolina’s primary two weeks later suffered. He came in third, behind Trump and Marco Rubio.
“Trump’s strategy was so simple that it’s almost crude: try to win every state,” Danker wrote. “He visited just about every state that had a nominating contest, and refused to concede there was any place where he couldn’t do well. Because his campaign was not reliant on paid advertising, he was able to use this approach without much regard to his campaign budget.”
By the way, Cruz’s worst fear was realized in Indiana. He lost the bloc of “very” and “somewhat” conservative voters to Trump.
