Ted Cruz is positioned to win Iowa, insiders say
Ted Cruz, the no-compromise conservative purist, is on the verge of securing the Christian conservative bloc, a linchpin that could secure victory in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, GOP insiders say.
The question is whether Cruz can siphon enough tea party voters from front-runner Donald Trump to vault Cruz into the No. 1 slot when votes are counted less than two months from now, they say.
As the popular outsider Ben Carson fades, Cruz is ascending — and he’s eating into Trump’s base, religious conservative leaders told The Des Moines Register this week.
“I do sense he is picking up a lot of steam in Iowa,” said Royce Phillips, who is founding pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Coralville and has been plugged into conservative politics in Iowa for three decades. “I don’t think many people think deep down that Donald Trump is going to be one of the final players. I liken him to a blocking fullback — clearing people out of the way, but he’s not going to be the one that scores the touchdown. A smaller, faster player walks through that hole.”
Podcast: Exploring evangelical influence in the Iowa caucuses
Team Cruz is taking inspiration from an unlikely source for a firebrand hero of the right: Barack Obama and the 2008 “grassroots army” that vaulted him past the Hillary Clinton juggernaut in first-in-the-nation Iowa and into the White House.
The old GOP model for nominating “mushy moderate” Republicans like Mitt Romney and John McCain failed miserably, said Kellyanne Conway, a pollster who works for a super PAC backing Cruz.
“It’s time to follow the Democrats, who are masterful at electing young, inspiring, uplifting messengers,” she said.
RELATED: 10 possible vulnerabilities for Ted Cruz in Iowa
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Cruz, a charismatic first-term U.S. senator, likes to say he modeled his 2012 Texas bid — and now his 2016 bid — after the first black president’s 2008 race.
“I went and bought Obama’s campaign manager’s book, David Plouffe, ‘The Audacity to Win,’ and gave it to my senior team and said, ‘We’re going to do exactly this,’” Cruz said in Sheldon in June. “We had a grassroots army of young people, of Republican women, of Hispanics, of American men and women, of Reagan Democrats.”
Cruz ramping up his Iowa campaign
Cruz’s campaign, a sleepy, second-tier affair over the summer, is suddenly the talk of Iowa, GOP county leaders said. Cruz didn’t even have an Iowa office until September, when he hung a shingle a stone’s throw from the offices of the Iowa Christian conservative activist group the Family Leader, whose president announces his coveted endorsement Thursday. The speculation: It will be Cruz.
In the RealClearPolitics' rolling average of Iowa polls, Cruz has climbed into second, 3.4 percentage points behind Trump. He's also second to Trump in the national average, but by 13.8 percentage points.
Cruz is stepping it up now in Iowa. Last week, he did 14 stops in three days here. Politics watchers said he has run a tactically smart race: not staffing up too early, conserving money, banking endorsements, riding the national narrative and not treating Iowa like a traditional ground-pounding operation right from the get-go.
But does he now have the boots on the ground here to keep building momentum to Feb. 1, and then the wherewithal to push beyond Iowa?
Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley told the Register: “I’ve heard for a month (Cruz) seems to have a pretty good plan to get faithful people to come to the caucuses, and he may be benefiting from people who very much like Dr. Carson but feel he’s not associated with government close enough in these times with all this terrorism going on.”
But, Grassley said, “it’s too early to say (Cruz) could win Iowa.” Polling shows that three-quarters of likely GOP caucusgoers say they’re still willing to change their mind, Grassley noted.
Two polls were released this week that indicated momentum for Cruz in Iowa. Monmouth University’s poll put Cruz up 5 points over Trump — the first time he’s led in any early state. Trump’s national co-chairman, Iowa activist Sam Clovis, quickly emailed his mailing list to cast the poll as flawed.
“There is no need to pick apart the poll. You all can do that,” he wrote.
Clovis said the better poll was CNN’s, which found Trump up 13 points over Cruz.
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Caucuses tend to be all about the candidate who has the best organization and thus can best herd reluctant caucusgoers to participate in the unusual, somewhat time-consuming one-night party function. Is Cruz’s organization better than those of chief rivals like Trump, Carson and Marco Rubio?
His backers said it’s tricky to get a solid read on any campaign’s ground game, unless, as with Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s crew, a stream of door-knockers is obvious everywhere.
In the end, the best-organized candidate is the one who has the most buzz right before the caucuses, said Joel Kurtinitis, a 2012 Ron Paul backer who’s now with Cruz.
“That momentum sparks people to start grabbing those voters who don’t pay attention to politics all the time,” Kurtinitis said.
Trump's unpredictability makes him a wild card
Trump likely has more than enough supporter names in his campaign database, collected from Iowans who mobbed the reality TV star’s events, to win outright. For example, Trump’s rally in Burlington surpassed the 2012 caucus night turnout for all GOP candidates in the entire county. If he turns out those kind of numbers Feb. 1, he runs away with it, politics watchers said.
Trump’s unpredictability makes Feb. 1 a big unknown, said Cindy Golding, chairwoman of the Linn County GOP. "The people I talk to who are Trump supporters are not your typical voters or caucusgoers," she said.
But if Trump backers are more inclined to stay home on a warm couch and watch an engrossing TV show on Feb. 1, the tried-and-true activists who normally attend the caucuses — evangelical Christians and tea party types — will likely pull the night for Cruz.
The fact that Cruz is turning out sizable groups of folks at small-event places — a Casey's in Chariton at 10 p.m. and a convenience store in Van Horne on a late Sunday afternoon, as he did a few weeks ago — hints at good organization.
Another sign: The campaign last week opened “Camp Cruz” in some of the apartment buildings near a soon-to-close business college in Des Moines. The 48 dorm-style rooms will house supporters from outside of Iowa (mainly from Texas) who have been moved to come to the state to organize for him.
“We have to date over 500 volunteers … who have volunteered between now and Feb. 1 to come from all over the country to Camp Cruz to relive life in a college dormitory,” Cruz said Saturday. “I’m told they’re having a keg party next week.”
Cruz said his campaign has 3,360 volunteers in Iowa, including 274 county chairs and co-chairs.
“The other campaigns are looking at what y’all are doing as dangerous,” Cruz said. “If you have a campaign that’s designed by a Washington consultant, that’s designed to spend the money from the New York billionaires to run a bunch of TV ads and try and pull the wool over the eyes of the voters, then this is dangerous.”
To motivate its volunteers, the Cruz campaign has turned to food, prizes and “call nights” dedicated to reaching potential voters, including specific nights to call younger Iowans, according to emails sent to volunteers. The reward for three of its top Iowa call-makers: opening night tickets to the new “Star Wars” movie.
Also a Cruz strength: His dad as surrogate
Another one of the secrets to Cruz’s success: his father, Rafael, a minister and native Cuban who has spent 25 days in Iowa since his son’s campaign launch in March.
“I don’t know I’ve seen a better surrogate in my 30 years,” said Phillips, the pastor at Tabernacle Baptist Church, who had a private lunch with Rafael Cruz in November. “He’s very energetic and very passionate and very good. You’ve got to have a lot of resistance to not yield to his request.”
Phillips said he won’t publicly endorse before the caucuses, but has narrowed his list to Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.
Team Cruz has long been going after Huckabee's and Santorum’s religious conservative Iowa backers, as well as liberty conservatives from Ron Paul’s 2012 base, even as it laid groundwork on the national level to send a message that Cruz won’t peter out like those three presidential contenders did in past cycles.
A big turning point in the race: Cruz’s “this is not a cage match” line in the CNBC debate in Boulder, Colo., in October, Iowa conservatives said, which showcased his remarkable memory and rhetorical skills.
Cruz said in that debate: “Look at the questions: ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues people care about.”
“You haven’t seen his poll numbers dip since that moment,” Kurtinitis said.
U.S. Rep. Steve King’s Nov. 16 endorsement of Cruz also likely will go down in history as a huge turning point if Cruz wins.
“I think my dad stole a line from me,” the congressman’s son, Jeff King, told the Register with a laugh. He signed on months ago as Iowa strategist for one of the pro-Cruz PACs, Keep the Promise I. “I always say, ‘Ted Cruz checks all the boxes for the caucus winner.’ I heard Dad say it a couple weeks ago. It’s like, ‘Darn it!’”
Between the Cruz campaign and the Cruz super PACs, organizing mechanisms are in place to ensure Cruz backers show up to caucus, King said.
“I don’t know if you can ever have enough field staff, enough volunteers making phone calls,” King said. “But I think he and Trump have the best ground game.”
Asked if Cruz will win, King said: “I’m pretty confident. But this is Iowa, so I won’t sleep perfectly until the day after caucusing.”
Poll: Cruz trusted in Iowa on national security
National security has emerged as a defining issue for GOP presidential voters.
Asked who's trusted most to handle it, an early December poll of likely Republican caucus and primary voters by the special interest group Americans for Peace, Prosperity and Security found these results:
Iowa: Ted Cruz, 34 percent; Donald Trump, 19 percent; Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, 12 percent each.
New Hampshire: Trump, 25 percent; Bush, 14 percent; Chris Christie, 12 percent.
South Carolina: Trump, 24 percent; Cruz, 17 percent; Bush 15 percent.
The poll was automated, with a computer voice asking respondents to push buttons to record their opinions, a method that's considered less reliable than a survey like The Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll, which uses live interviewers. It had a margin of error of about plus or minus 4 percentage points.