Cruz is true blue. The truest and the bluest.
by digby
Cruz making the conservative case:
Cruz is attempting to appeal to conservatives who are displeased with government and the Republican Party establishment. Voters in Iowa told ThinkProgress they admire Cruz’s willingness to fight back against the Washington elite.
“He’s fought a lot against Congress when they were wrong,” Keokuk resident Joyce Schevers told ThinkProgress. “He had the guts to get up and fight.”
Schevers said she’s “very disgusted” with most Congressional Republicans who have lost their conservative values and voted with Democrats. “I’m glad that Boehner stepped down because he voted with Obama a lot and he didn’t even fight,” Shevers, who identifies as a member of the Tea Party, continued. “That’s what’s so frustrating. The Republicans won by promising this and that, and they didn’t fight.”
Fort Madison, Iowa resident Tom Schulz, who said that he has “nothing in common with the establishment Republican Party,” called Cruz “potentially the next Ronald Reagan.”
“The Republican establishment absolutely despised Ronald Reagan,” he told ThinkProgress. “Very much the same dynamic you see today. I think it’s a repeat, although I think Cruz is maybe a little deeper than Reagan in his understanding of how the Washington machine works.”
The latest Monmouth University poll puts Ted Cruz in third place with ten percent of Republicans saying they’d support him for the GOP nomination, leading all of the 11 other “establishment” candidates who together hold just 25 percent support. The only candidates currently leading Cruz — Donald Trump and Ben Carson — have never held political office.
That same poll showed that Tea Party supporters, many of whom make up Cruz’s base, have a much more negative view of the party than other Republicans. Fifty-nine percent of Tea Party supporters say the party is doing a bad job.
The Republican Party’s dissatisfaction with Washington is a direct reflection of Congress’ inability to follow through on its commitments, Cruz said. While other members of Congress will campaign on the promise they will do something — like defund Planned Parenthood or repeal Obamacare — they quickly give up their demands to compromise with the party establishment and with Democrats in Congress.
On the campaign trail, Cruz is tirelessly repeating the point that he stands up for what he believes in and follows through on promises. In Kalona, Iowa, he said that Trump’s candidacy has been “immensely beneficial for our campaign” because he has “helped frame the central question of this primary as: who will stand up to Washington?”
“Well if that’s the central question, the natural next question is who actually has stood up to Washington?” he said, to cheers from the crowd. “I can’t think of a better question for the Republican Party to be decided on than that one.”
Cruz’s ability to tout his record of standing up to Washington has helped him on the campaign trail and has put him in a good position to await Trump and Carson’s fade. “At the same time the Trump shine is starting to fade, Cruz could be positioned to become the candidate vehicle that the most conservative voters rally behind,” GOP pundit Kevin Madden told the Wall Street Journal.
FWIW, I’ve been saying this for a while. Don’t count this guy out.
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