As Ben Carson’s campaign sinks in the winter of his discontent, Ted Cruz’s seems to be experiencing an early summer, so much so that he is telling supporters that he thinks that he will have the Republican nominations sewn up by March.
“There is a very good possibility that the Republican primary will be decided by the end of March,” the Texas senator told volunteers on a conference call in which he also rallied them against an anticipated deluge of attack ads.
“Strap on the full armor of God” for the negative advertising that is coming, Cruz told volunteers, predicting that foes could spend tens of millions of dollars against him in January alone. “We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Cruz urged supporters to remain upbeat as he faces a heightened level of scrutiny from his detractors, who are increasingly setting their sights on the Texas senator in Iowa. His opponents, he warned, will “toss out any lie, toss out any attack, and the attack will do its damage before anyone discovers it’s not true.”
Such confident statements by candidates are not uncommon, especially when they are trying to raise money and fire up their supporters because people like to think that they are part of the winning team. But it can lead to a bad fall.
One recalls Newt Gingrich, when he was experiencing a surge in the polls in the last cycle, confidently predicting in December 2011 at a similar point that he was the one true conservative in the race and that it was pretty much inevitable that he would be the eventual Republican nominee, saying “It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee.”
Although Gingrich won the South Carolina primary in January 2012 (the primaries were scheduled much earlier than in this cycle) and came second eight days later in Florida, his campaign floundered after that. Buoyed by a massive donation from billionaire Sheldon Adelson, Gingrich came first again in his home state of Georgia in March, but that was a brief resurgence and he crashed and burned, and by the end of April he was out of the race.
So is Cruz the Gingrich of 2016? He is riding high right now and seems to be as cocky as Gingrich was then. I hope he has a similar fall because I would love to see his smug face disappear from the scene.
Trump is in first place by a lot right now. Cruz is a distant second.
The only way Cruz will win is if Trump crashes and burns. And so far Trump is teflon coated. All he has to do is bash women or ethnic/racial/religious minorities and his racist supporters cheer wildly. He’s got the hater and bigot vote and it’s hard to see how he can lose them unless he says something nice about Hispanics.
Almost without exception everyone who has made the effort to look beneath the mask of smug entitlement and righteousness seeking inner goodness has found an even more loathsome self-serving parody of a real human being. To know him is to feel revulsion every time you hear his name. Cruz will always have one really big weakness: his political career is connected to Ted Cruz.
Apt or not, I’ve taken to thinking of Cruz as Grima Wormtongue: He was once a man … he will never be free.
For whatever very little its worth, I predict that by March Cruz won’t even be in the Repub race. Or if he is he’ll be trailing by Astronomical Units or even Mega Parsecs!
Which if the theory that I’m always wrong* works out doesn’t bode that well I guess except at least it won’t be Trump.
* I did get the last election right** when it came to Rmoney and Obama with Obama winning.
** Apart from briefly mistakenly supporting Newt Gingrich becoz his space exploration speech and advocacy was awesome and sadly unusual though therest of what he said and advocated and was and is was shit. Mea culpa there.
To paraphrase Arthur Dent, this is obviously some new definition of the phrase “riding high” that I wasn’t previously aware of.
According to the polling history I looked at, the last time Cruz had HALF of Trump’s numbers was July 13th. That was when Cruz was “riding high” in eighth place on 5% and Trump was third with 9.3%. Then at the beginning of December, as Carson’s numbers were falling off a cliff (having briefly been narrowly beating Trump just a month earlier -- the ONLY candidate to get near him since July) Cruz picked up to the point that he was polling half Trump’s numbers again… only this time Trump’s winning, over 15 ahead of Cruz.
I don’t know much about American politics but is there anything at this point that can realistically stop Trump getting the Republican nomination? (Other than a bullet, obvs). Is there some technicality the party can get rid of him with? Because from the outside, it doesn’t look like a one-horse race, it looks more like a race where all but one of the jockeys seems to have forgotten to bring a horse, while the other one has turned up in a Porsche Cayenne Turbo and is leaning out of the window shouting “WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” over the sound of the engine revving.
sonofrojblake,
You are right that nationally Cruz is nowhere close to Trump. What he has going for him is (1) that he leads in Iowa where the first contest is held and if he wins there it can help boost his numbers elsewhere and (2) in in this weird race, where the Republican party is trying to find anyone but Trump, the second place person can hope to gain strength when others drop out, even though the party elders hate Cruz too.
They’re doing a bizarrely bad job of it. It’s almost as though they’d prefer to lose the election than win it with Trump, which seems bafflingly self-defeating.
That said, UK politics has been similarly ridiculous of late. The 2010 election was a poison chalice that nobody really wanted to win, and in the end nobody did. A coalition ruled for five years, but somehow after it the main right wing party managed to pin all the blame on their centrist coalition partners, who were wiped out. Last summer, the right wing party won a victory nobody foresaw and which plunged the left into a crisis, to which they responded by electing a leader who is, to put it comedically, to the left of Lenin. In other words, entirely and completely unelectable. Again, it’s like they don’t WANT to win an election, or even form an effective opposition. Is there a country where politics isn’t rubbish at the moment? Germany looks favourite.