Posted on 03/02/2016 4:49:32 PM PST by drewh
n. Ted Cruz is right: He is the most successful Republican this year not named Donald Trump. After Super Tuesday, he has won four GOP contests, including the primary in his delegate-rich home state, Texas. Marco Rubio has won just one contest, the Minnesota caucus, and John Kasich has won bupkis.
The Republican nomination race has been a three-man fight for at least two weeks now, since Jeb Bush threw in the towel, and in his Texas-Oklahoma victory speech, Cruz asked his remaining non-Trump rivals — meaning Rubio, mostly — to "prayerfully consider" leaving him to fight Trump mano a mano. He repeated his formula — true when he said it — that he is the only candidate who has beaten Trump so far.
The online betting markets seemed to buy the argument. On the New Zealand–based site PredictIt, Cruz's chances of winning the GOP nomination rose to a high of 10 percent Wednesday morning, putting him even with Rubio, who fell 1 point (Trump was the odds-on favorite, at 76 percent). The Irish betting site Paddy Power put Cruz's odds of winning at an improved 12-to-1, versus 5-to-1 for Rubio and 1-to-7 for Trump. Those numbers will probably move in Cruz's favor, at Rubio's expense, as the Super Tuesday results are digested.
More importantly, establishment Republicans seem to be warming up, if warily, to the idea of Cruz as their last best hope of stopping the Trump juggernaut. "Ted Cruz is not my favorite by any means," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in an interview with CBS News late Tuesday night. "But we may be in a position where we have to rally around Ted Cruz as the only way to stop Donald Trump."
In this case, the medicine may be worse than the malady.
Will the GOP establishment line up behind Ted Cruz now?
This is Donald Trump's world. You're just living in it. Donald Trump is very likely going to be the Republican nominee, and nobody knows what that will look like in a general election match-up against Hillary Clinton, the probable Democratic nominee. It's a good bet that once he has the Republican nomination sewn up, Trump will execute his own version of what just about every nominees does: Moderate his message for a general electorate. He might be able to pull it off, too, because he's shameless and a very good showman.
The first warning bell for Republicans if they rally behind Cruz is that he probably wouldn't moderate his "consistent conservative" pitch very much. Purity is his core brand, and he's too invested in it to let it go. That might show more integrity than Trump's ideological flexibility, but it isn't a great recipe for winning over suburban soccer moms, say, or moderate independents.
The second red flag is where Ted Cruz has won, and where he hasn't. Oklahoma? Mitt Romney won 67 percent of the vote there in the 2012 election. John McCain and George W. Bush won 66 percent in 2008 and 2004, respectively. Texas went for Romney 57 percent to 41 percent. Any Republican is going to win those two states in November. Iowa is a legitimate swing state, but Cruz had to practically live in the state for months to pull off a narrow victory over Trump in the GOP caucus. He wouldn't expend the same time or energy again for seven electoral votes.
Rubio, on the other hand, crushed his rivals in the Minnesota caucus, nearly beat Trump in the Virginia primary, and slid by Cruz for second place in Nevada. Those are the type of swing states that will decide the next election. Rubio won only one of them, but he has consistently performed more strongly than Cruz in states Republicans need to put on the table in November. Trump is winning in all kinds of states: red, blue, and purple.
The last thing #NeverTrump Republicans might want to consider before throwing what weight they have behind Cruz is a factor that's less tangible and quantifiable but probably equally important: He's not very likable. None of his Senate colleagues have endorsed him or seem to like him. Cruz can wear that as a badge of his anti-"Washington dealmaker" piety, but at some point it just comes across as antisocial. I don't know Cruz, and I'm sure his friends and family enjoy his company, but as a public figure, he flunks the "would you want to have a beer with him?" test.
Cruz knows that. "If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy," he said at a Republican debate in November. "But if you want someone to drive you home, I'll get the job done." Maybe voters want a sober designated driver, but so far they seem to be going with the rich guy in the flashy sports car.
Donald Trump says a lot of outrageous things, but he pulls it off because he is also somehow personable. Would I vote for Trump? No. Would I have a beer with him? If he was buying, probably. Comedian John Oliver, before clinically dissecting Trump for 20 minutes, acknowledged on his show Sunday that "there is a part of me that even likes this guy. It's a part I hate, but it is a part of me."
There is something comforting in the idea of a Cruz-Clinton matchup, or even a Rubio-Clinton race. The arguments and parameters are predictable, and the electorate would know more or less where each candidate stands. Trump is shrewdly charting his own course, and that's thrown the whole race into uncharted territory. This may well be his core appeal, and it may also be the Republican Party's undoing.
It makes sense that Republican leaders want to neutralize the Trump threat. It's not clear they will be able to — Republican voters get the final say, as they should. But if they do settle on one anti-Trump to champion, they pick Ted Cruz at their own peril. If the voters reject the other Trump alternatives, Rubio and Kasich, it might be safer for the GOP elite to bet it all on orange: Donald Trump may be a wild card, but Ted Cruz is a joker.
Actually, Ted Cruz is the most successful Republican this year. Donald Trump is NOT a Republican which too many voters will find out too late.
I would be shocked,stunned disbelieving if the eGOP backed Sen Cruz. After all this is “ the most hated man in the Senate”.
Hated, sure. But in their minds, he’s still kin.
My absolute dream would be a clinton/Cruz series of debates.
Mister (inarticulate) trump? Not so much.
.
If by being Republican, you mean a person who will stab his own party and voters in the back, then yes, Trump is not a Republican.
If Trump wins the nomination, will you vote for Trump in the general election?
I wonder how Rush Limbaugh takes this. For months, he has described how, although the establishment hates Trump, it HATES (he hisses the word, every time) Cruz so much more than Trump because they KNOW that Cruz is unbowed and unbroken when it come to bucking the establishment folk. Why, he even called McConnell a liar on the Senate floor.
I suppose the establishment has not blocked out of their minds, like Rush has, that when the chips are down and the globalists agenda is on the line, Cruz comes through like a champ — TPA, Corker bill, H-1B visas, more legal immigration. Ted is their boy.
Most Americans are not ideological conservatives.
They don’t live by a dogma or think about big issues.
They live quiet and orderly lives.
But they see they’re losing their country and are waking up fighting to take it back.
The elite is witnessing a revolution and they still don’t know what hit them.
Its much larger than Donald Trump.
ruh roh i can hear heads a splodin
You tell ‘em Mikey!
Last election We The People kept voting for anybody but Romney until the GOPe finally won. This election the GOPe is fighting for anybody but Trump. Hilarious. This time aI hope we win
Many Cruz supporters refuse to see or acknowledge this.
Because Republicans have been so good the last 20 years or so, right?/s
Well said.
“Lindsey Graham: Maybe It’s Time to Rally Around Cruz, The Guy I Joked About Murdering Last Month”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3404287/posts
Why not? Cruz has been GOPe since at least 1999.
All this anti-Trump clusterbuck does nothing but to strengthen my resolve that Trump is what the country needs, what the folks have and will state as their overwhelming choice.
If the archaic dinosaurs called the G.O.P. attempt anything to remove Trump from being the chosen favorite of John and Jane Q. Public, either politically or physically, John and Jane just might know of a tree that those G.O.P. buzzards might end up watering.
I am not a millenial basement inhabiting couch lounging keyboard banging fool. I have been a witness of American politics since the election of John F. Kennedy.
One question I was taught to ask, and examine the possible answers was, in the realm of politics, ‘How will it benefit the nation?’
The Democrats and the Republicans have long erased this question from the minds of Americans, and have instead asked themselves, ‘How will this ensure my re-election in the next term?’
But they don't, so they don't.
I caught that, too. Apparently Cruz believes Trump is a republican. And if Cruz brings up in the debate that Trump is not a republican he needs to remind him of what he said.
Cruz is the second most hated man in the senate. Jeff Sessions took the first spot.
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