Posted on 08/24/2015 5:37:52 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Ted Cruz got a big boost in Iowa recently when the influential social conservative activist and radio host Steve Deace endorsed him.
To call it a sought-after endorsement would be an understatement. Deace says prospective 2016 GOP campaigns began contacting him well before the 2012 election. (All just assumed that Mitt Romney was going to lose.) The recruitment efforts picked up in 2013 and 2014.
When few people were paying any attention to the still-forming Republican race, Deace was hard at work.
“For me, this vetting process has been going on for a couple of years,” he says. “In our world, as activists on the ground, it’s actually kind of late in the game. You want to be winning the activist caucus now so you can win the actual caucus later.”
Now Cruz has won the Deace Caucus. Deace explains that he was looking for a candidate who can win the support of social conservatives like himself, and also of business-oriented establishment conservatives as well.
“We need a candidate who can walk through the front door of the American Family Association and Americans for Prosperity and, while not changing who they are, or pandering, win a standing ovation from both,” Deace said. “I don’t know of another candidate besides Cruz that we can say that about.”
Other campaigns would disagree, of course, but the endorsement comes on top of a good run by Cruz lately. The Texas senator really connected with conservatives during the earliest days of his campaign; for a while in April, Cruz was in third place in the GOP race, according to the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. By July, he had fallen to eighth. Now, Cruz has moved up a couple of spots and seems headed higher.
Part of it was a well-received performance at the Aug. 6 Republican debate. The interesting thing about that is that Cruz spoke for less time, and uttered fewer words, than any of the other candidates except Rand Paul. “Man of few words” is not a phrase normally associated with Ted Cruz. But when he opened his mouth, people listened.
“You can credit much of his steady gain in the polls to his strong performance in the debate, where many of the 24 million Americans watching got their first extended look at him,” said a Cruz campaign aide.
Team Cruz saw a significant increase in support after the showdown. Cruz did a 21-stop post-debate bus tour in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Oklahoma, and saw growing audiences in each.
“He was drawing crowds of up to 2,500,” said another aide. “We saw our RSVPs at every event go up by no less than 50 percent after the debate.”
But Cruz aides believe his recent uptick is about more than the debate. Cruz seems to be the Republican most benefiting from taking on other Republicans — not so much his GOP rivals in the presidential race but the party leadership in Washington. At the recent RedState Gathering of conservatives in Atlanta, Cruz won a huge ovation when he was asked what it means to lead from behind. “Well, sure,” Cruz replied. “Republican congressional leadership does it every day.”
All the things that have made many Republicans in Washington dislike Cruz just make a certain type of GOP voter like him even more. In much the way that primary voters admire Scott Walker for standing up and taking on the unions, they admire Cruz for standing up and taking on Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.
“He should make a commercial that is a montage of people hating him — McConnell, Boehner, the surrender caucus,” Deace said. “He would close with, ‘The same people you hate, hate me. See you in February.’” For a significant part of the GOP base, Cruz has the right enemies.
In a recent Fox News poll — the one in which Cruz jumped up to third place after the debate, ahead of Jeb Bush — Cruz did better with voters under 45 years old than any Republican candidate except Donald Trump. He’s got room to grow. No one knows how long his recent rise will last, but it appears that Cruz’s work is finally making a difference.
Then you know that almost all “unconventional” candidates go nowhere once the votes are cast. Trump is in a different class with his media experience, money, populism and name recognition.
I thought the whole point of stopping Bush was to get a real conservative in there! Now that's he done, suddenly everybody wants to put a big-government populist like Trump in the slot.
Trump is a silver spooned east coast elitist, with great rah-rah sound bites. Cruz is the true conservative we've been longing for since Reagan.
Cruz’s MOTHER called me to personally thank me for my donation to the campaign!
True, but I also think things are very, very, different and all bets are off at this point. I would not want to be a prognosticator at this point. On Cruz...I like him, he is obviously a Constitutionalist and a very smart guy with no experience. But we have a very smart guy (so he and others say) with no experience at the helm right now and that ship is sinking...has been for the last 8 years. We have many ills affecting our great country right now, from the debt, to the economy, to a feckless foreign policy, to wanton disobedience to the law...I could go on. However, if we don’t square away the immigration problem (a slow invasion?) and get some of the 94 million people who are unemployed back to work, we don’t have a country any longer. What has Cruz done in his career, thus far, that shows he can fix those two immediate problems? He wants to increase immigration through a 500% increase in H1B visas and he has no experience on the economy, devaluing currency by other competing nations, creating jobs, building things, etc. Is Trump a strict constructionist? Probably not. Is he a stalwart conservative? Probably not. But he may be the only one running that has a clue of how to fix the immediate problems and he wants to enact policies that help us and only us. Perhaps Cruz best bet is to stay in the Senate and wreak havoc on the RINOs there, or possibly AG or SCOTUS to render Constitutional justice and sanity at the Supremes level. On the issue of electability, Cruz obviously has the red meat for those of us on FR, but will it appeal to the crossover voters that are so important in a general election? He certainly will have the media hill to climb. He also lacks the charisma and leadership thing that makes people (outside of the conservative realm) stand up and take notice. There are many more people from all backgrounds that are taking notice of Trump than Cruz. Of course, it’s early and that can change very quickly, but the last several weeks have shown a consistent staying power for Trump and consistent lack of traction for other candidates. Heck, Cruz isn’t even polling higher than Trump in Texas.
Cruz is undoubtedly taking money from lobbyists. There are lobbyists I share common goals with and lobbyists who wish to influence the system in ways I disagree with.
The key to getting rid of the corrupt system is to burn the product they are selling - government power and influence in our lives. Do you think Trump is running to get control of all that power so he can give it back to the people? That would be entirely inconsistent with Trump's history, his style and his statements.
The longest-serving Solicitor General of Texas, the man who essentially won Bush vs. Gore, Heller and many other monumental cases is the same as a jumped-up community organizer? C’mon, you can do better than that! And Trump is beating both Bush and Rubio in Florida, Jindal in Louisiana, Kasich in Ohio, Christie in New Jersey and so forth. Trump is a national phenomenon.
Right. That's why Megyn Kelly tried to sucker punch him on National TV.
What background did Lincoln have in 1860?
Cruz is undoubtedly taking money from lobbyists.
And therein lies the problem. Not just with Cruz, but with 16 of the 17 candidates.
Again, I think you’re making my point.
That one "smart guy" is a Communist and the other a Constitutionalist makes no difference to you, huh?
Using your criteria, only billionaires could be president under the current system. Serfdom for the rest of us.
Mr. Lincoln was a frontier lawyer and ONE TERM congressman for a defunct party who had recently LOST a senate bid. He was never a governor, flag officer, business executive or diplomat, yet he is judged by most historians as the best president in our history. Just because Barack Obama was a neophyte doesn’t disqualify relatively inexperienced men if they have the intellect to be president.
A Constitutionalist that wants to increase the immigration and reduce opportunities for some of the 94 million that are unemployed.
yet he is judged by most historians as the best president in our history.
And Mr. Lincoln also ran roughshod over the Constitution. Seems to be a theme with the inexperienced?
Did you just bunch Lincoln with a group of progressive communists? Oh, are you a “Sons of the Confederacy” type? Because that would explain a lot.
I didn’t, but the historians did. So, it’s ok to disobey the Constitution, then?
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