Actually Cruz sounds like a brilliant man who can communicate extraordinarily well, as one of the great debaters and constitutional lawyers of our time, but the phrase that you used is the one the media wants to sell.
Outside of die hard conservative forums TC just doesn’t make all that favorable of an impression. If he did, he would be doing better. His team is competent and he’s more than adequately funded. The campaign strategy is competent as well. That leaves the candidate.
People don’t necessarily pick their favorite candidates based on objective criteria, more often than not its based on soft criteria such as likeability, or someone they can see having a beer with. TC just doesn’t do that well on the soft criteria.