AUDASE

What About Ted Cruz?

 Thomas B. Edsall NY TIMES

Despite Donald Trump’s victory in New Hampshire, what is the chance that Republicans will nominate Ted Cruz and that he will go on to win the presidency?

The website ElectionBettingOdds gives Cruz a 14.5 percent chance of winning the nomination — his victory in the Iowa caucuses and what looks like a third place showing in New Hampshire notwithstanding. It puts his chances of actually winning the presidency at 4.3 percent.

But let’s say Cruz beats the odds and wins the nomination. One of the most conservative members of the Senate, Cruz would test the argument made by leaders of the hard right that Republicans have lost four of the last six presidential elections because their candidates — George H. W. Bush of 1992, Robert Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney — were insufficiently conservative.

For more than 50 years, Phyllis Schlafly, the right-wing icon and founder of the Eagle Forum, has been a relentless proponent of the nomination of far-right candidates like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

In an Oct. 7, 2015, column, Schlafly wrote:

Establishment candidates have been unable to win the popular vote in five out of the last six elections, and that outcome is not something any Republican should want to repeat.

There is an unusual degree of consensus on the intensity of Cruz’s conservatism among experts in campaigns, elections and partisan polarization.

I asked Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, just how conservative Cruz is. Abramowitz replied:

Cruz’s positions are on the far right of the Republican Party today which would certainly place him far to the right of past conservative leaders like Reagan or Gingrich during his years as Speaker. In fact, his voting record is among the 2 or 3 most consistently conservative in the Senate. He is very conservative on every issue dimension: economic policy, social policy and national security/foreign policy. He is running on that record — emphasizing his purity compared with his rivals.

Cruz fits the conservative bill of particulars on every count. Edward Carmines, a political scientist at Indiana University, affirmed Abramowitz’s judgment:

What Cruz represents is the embodiment of the hard right; he has extremely conservative positions not just on economic and social welfare issues like social security, health care, affirmative action programs for women and minorities, and taxes but also on social and cultural issues such as gun control, prayer in schools, abortion, and gay marriage.

Cruz’s extremism has been statistically presented by Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of Georgia. Poole has produced a chart, based on voting records, of the ideological positions of presidential candidates who have served in the House or Senate. The chart shows Cruz’s voting record as substantially more conservative than that of Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Lindsey Graham or Bob Dole.

Cruz’s nomination would turn the general election in November into an almost perfect test of the viability of a pure conservative.

The pragmatic wing, which overwhelmingly opposes a Cruz nomination, includes many of the party’s consultants and strategists, much of the Republican lobbying community, and some elected Republicans from blue and purple states. The strategic views of this wing are embodied in the Republican National Committee’s 2013 Growth and Opportunity Project report, a.k.a. the autopsy report, calling for moderation of positions seen as anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-women and as intolerant of religious diversity.

Without addressing the issues of abortion and reproductive rights by name, the report clearly called for moderation of hard-line stands:

When it comes to social issues, the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming. If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues.

Cruz has staked out what he calls “courageous conservatism,” and refuses to budge from a hard-line anti-abortion stand. He subscribes to the belief that life begins at fertilization. This position would not only criminalize abortions in the case of rape and incest but would prohibit the use of contraceptive methods that are understood to prevent the uterine implantation of a fertilized egg like the intrauterine device and the morning-after pill.

In 2012, when Cruz was running for the Senate, the Houston Chronicle reported that “Cruz would allow abortion only in cases in which the mother’s life is in jeopardy” and quoted him as saying “I think that every human life is a precious gift from God and should be protected in law from conception until natural death.”

Cruz’s opposition to abortion in the case of rape and incest is well to the right of the vast majority of voters, including most Republicans. One CNN poll found that 76 percent of Republican voters said abortions should be legal in cases of rape and incest; 22 percent said they should be illegal under such circumstances.

Cruz is far outside the mainstream on a host of other issues.

Not only does he advocate overturning the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, but he faulted the Republican mayor of Dallas for participating in a gay pride celebration: “When a mayor of a city chooses twice to march in a parade celebrating gay pride that’s a statement and it’s not a statement I agree with.”

Cruz calls for the partial privatization of Social Security, raising the retirement age and using a new formula to slow the growth of benefits.

Cruz has declared that he is “fully committed to repealing every single word of Obamacare” and has attacked the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, arguing that expansion “will worsen health care options for the most vulnerable among us in Texas.”

During his three years in Washington, Cruz has earned an unprecedented level of animosity from elites on both the left and right. What is really stunning to a longtime observer of Washington is the number of reputable people who have brutally criticized Cruz on the record. The New Republic recently published an extraordinary collection of anti-Cruz quotes that runs from the left through the center to the right. His colleagues are on record as hating him — hate may be too mild a description. First and foremost, he has angered virtually everyone he works with, especially his fellow Republican senators.

A prime example took place on the Senate floor last July 24 when Cruz called Mitch McConnell, his majority leader, a liar, claiming that a McConnell promise about a key amendment was a “flat out lie.”

Even more remarkable than the willingness of, say, Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, to declare that “Cruz isn’t a good guy, and he’d be impossible as president. People don’t trust him.” is the willingness of Republican lobbyists — men and women whose livelihoods depend on good relations with potential presidential administrations — to disparage Cruz.

“Cruz is a leader of the ‘purity caucus’ that is obstinate, grandstanding and very un-Reagan like and very frustrating for his Senate colleagues,” Ed Rogers, chairman of the BGR Group, one of the major lobbying firms, wrote to me in an email. John Feehery, president of Quinn Gillespie Communications, and a former top Republican staffer on Capitol Hill, was more outspoken:

Cruz is an army of one, alienating anybody who is in his path. He advocates losing strategies purely to further his own career at the expense of the party.

The second basis for Republican animosity toward Cruz is the widespread conviction that Cruz would not only lose in a landslide, but that he would bring the Republican Senate majority and many House Republicans down with him.

“If he’s the nominee, we’re going to have wholesale losses in Congress and state offices and governors and legislatures,” said Bob Dole, a former Senate majority leader and the Republican nominee in 1996.

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party.... it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly,...

Cruz, more than any of the other Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, is ideally suited to mobilize every Democratic constituency, including single women, minorities, young voters and socially liberal professionals — with the possible exception of some Hispanic voters who would be drawn to a Cuban-American candidate. With Cruz as the nominee, Democrats could make substantial inroads among moderate and centrist Republican voters as well as married women.

Cruz’s appeal is restricted to core Republican constituencies, most of which are in decline as a percentage of the electorate. Married white Christians have steadily dropped from 80 percent of voters in the late 1950s to fewer than 40 percent now. In 1940, 82 percent of adults were members of the white working class; now that number is well below 30 percent. In the bleak demographic environment facing the Republican Party, Cruz offers little or no prospect of enlarging the party’s base.

Even if Cruz were to lick the 20-1 odds against him and win the presidency, his ability to accomplish any of his policy objectives would be severely constrained not only by Democrats but also by the legions of Republicans who hold him in contempt.

Strategically, many in the Republican establishment had been looking favorably on Marco Rubio as their best — or least bad — choice. Rubio’s disastrous performance in the most recent debate — and his apparent fifth-place finish in New Hampshire — have, however, given renewed momentum to the unexpected willingness of Republican elected officials to back Trump in order to choke off Cruz’s bid.

Charles Black, a conservative lobbyist active in Republican presidential politics for half a century, told the Times before voting began this month that if Cruz were nominated, party leaders would “sit down and try to help Cruz run a better campaign, but he may not listen.” In contrast, “You can coach Donald,” Black said. “If he got nominated, he’d be scared to death. That’s the point he would call people in the party and say, ‘I just want to talk to you.’ ”

For a deeply partisan Democrat, the strategic calculus is different. Hillary Clinton remains the favorite in national polls and can be expected to begin winning primaries starting on Feb. 27 when the battle moves South and she will likely get strong African-American support.

In that case, the best choice for registered Democrats in states holding Republican primaries would be to switch parties and vote for Cruz on the theory that as a nominee he would shrink the Republican coalition.

The Republican National Committee and other conservative groups are attempting a similar approach by supporting Bernie Sanders on the calculation that he would be a much weaker general election candidate than Clinton.

If you think this is paranoia, take a look at the Twitter feeds during the Democratic debate on Jan. 17. Sean Spicer, the communications director for the Republican National Committee, repeatedly posted pro-Sanders tweets, including this one:

This election cycle is the first in recent memory in which both parties are giving serious consideration to candidates like Trump, Cruz and Sanders, who would bring striking liabilities into the general election.

There have been many elections in which one party chose a lemon — Barry Goldwater, Bob Dole and Mitt Romney on the Republican side; George McGovern, Fritz Mondale and Michael Dukakis on the Democratic side — but none in which both parties have chosen candidates with severe electoral liabilities.

In 2016, Republican and Democratic party elders are struggling to reassert authority, with little success.

As a result, the prospect of a general election between candidates whom leaders and strategists see as losers – Sanders versus either Cruz or Trump – is more than an idle fantasy.

The Sanders victory in New Hampshire — and who would have thought that he would have won any state at all when the campaign began? — raises the prospect, however fleeting, of a contest the likes of which we’ve never seen.