Sigh, if you think Cruz has a chance in hell in a general election we are just going to have to disagree. Please don’t try to compare Reagan to Cruz, its insulting. Reagan couldn’t get elected today because you ideological purists would be bashing him for his years as a Democrat prior to him changing parties...
Cruz is no Reagan, he doesn’t have one ounce of the charm or personality of Reagan. Reagan didn’t simply win because he was a conservative, he won because he had the X factor as well, something Cruz is lacking in spades. You want to run an ideological conservative, fine, you might even win with one, but Cruz ain’t it. He preaches to the choir and that is all, he doesn’t have the personality or charm to remotely be mentioned in the same breath as Reagan.
As to Bush, seriously? A squeaker election doesn’t bode well for that argument.
I like Cruz, but his devotees are flat out self deluded. He can’t even get support enough to win in the Republican Primaries, where his ideological “purity” (snicker) should be an asset to him.
If you can’t win a primary, you can’t win a general. So far, Cruz isn’t looking like he’s anywhere close to being a victor in the primary race. Could that change? Maybe, time will tell... but it ain’t looking good right now.
So please, take your, if we just run a conservative we’ll win nonsense and take it back into the loser locker room, with every other ideologue who’s never gotten past primary season.
As to McCain, he had no chance of winning, Reagan himself could have run in 08 and would have lost, the electorate was not going to put another Republican into the White House after what was perceived as the disaster of the Bush years... and as to Romney, mismanagement of his GOTV is the only reason we got an Obama second term... the failure of this is well documented. Crediting ideological purity with victory is a dubious argument at best.. it ignores so much of what is the election process.
Republicans should be a shoe in, any of them this year, after the disaster of the last 8 years, but they won’t be, because the divide in america has formented around urban vs rural. Heavily Urban population states, particularly in the north east, midwest, west coast, and mid atlantic have become locks for the democrats, and the south and central US are largely locks for the Republicans. Ideological candidates aren’t going to largely break through on either side, which means you wind up with elections where the GOTV effort in a few “battleground” states pick your victor. NO ideologue is going to break that, on either side.
I disagree, I find Cruz extremely charismatic and compelling. I watched his Obamacare filibuster for hours and never was bored. And his debate answers are amazing while most of the other candidates put me to sleep with their lack of focus and clarity.
I will never sacrifice the right policies in order to win an election. You have provided absolutely no evidence that anyone who’s moderate on policy or ideology can win. All of those guys like Romney lost.
So please, take your, if we just run a moderate we’ll win nonsense and take it back into the loser locker room, with every other moderate Republican who’s failed to win the general election.
Obama soared to victory by being a rigid ideologue as far as his base was concerned. We need to do the same. If a candidate can “trick” liberals into thinking he’s moderate, fine. But if we as the base can’t sense he’s a conservative, there’s no hope of a victory. The base has to be energized. It’s just like coming out with a Star Wars movie. When in the opening week, the hardcore fans make it a hugely popular event, it created an energy that gets average people who otherwise wouldn’t care following them to the theater like lemmings. That’s the kind of energy that wins election. The fuzzy-minded “swing voters” like to jump on the bandwagon, and that bandwagon is driven by the ideological base.