http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/super-tuesday-ted-cruz-judgement-day-213691 Ted Cruz’s Judgment Day
He built his campaign around March 1, but he never anticipated Donald Trump.
By Katie Glueck
March 01, 2016
HOUSTON — It was July, only four months into the campaign, and Ted Cruz’s Iowa chairman was nervous.
Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee were practically living in Iowa, but Cruz was all over the map: On a book tour in Georgia, visiting Oklahoma, rolling out a leadership team in Tennessee. Matt Schultz got on a plane and flew to Houston, planning to tell Cruz’s senior staff that their candidate risked becoming an afterthought in the most important state for a conservative, evangelical Republican.
When he got to the Chick-fil-A-fueled confab, planned as a strategy session for early-state leaders, Schultz confronted the team: Cruz needs to get back to Iowa and show some real commitment to the state, said Schultz, who didn’t understand the attention showered on the South, when much of it wouldn’t vote until March. If he doesn’t, Schultz warned, Cruz would be overshadowed on winnable turf.
Campaign manager Jeff Roe heard him out. The campaign wouldn’t ignore Iowa, he promised. But the South, Roe said, isn’t a distraction—it’s the big prize.
Since the very beginning, the Cruz campaign has seen a strong Super Tuesday—when 595 delegates will be awarded—as the critical, defining moment in the effort to emerge as the consensus conservative choice. It’s the day Cruz has said will be an “amazing” one for his team, the day his campaign has described to potential donors as the one that will demonstrate this campaign, unlike every other conservative insurgent campaign in recent memory, is built to last in a long nomination fight.
But Cruz walks into March 1 on his heels. He failed spectacularly in South Carolina, the first test of his appeal in the South, and is now on the defensive even in his home state of Texas. And if polls are to be believed, he could lose it all on Tuesday to Donald Trump—a man his political and personal opposite in almost every relevant way, yet one who has still managed to commandeer a significant slice of the anti-Washington conservative base Cruz long banked on.
“He’s gained our voters, there’s no two ways around that,” said one of Cruz’s senior advisers. “Yeah, we’re getting beat because he is getting some of our votes. He’s not getting all of our votes, but he’s getting some of our votes, there’s no working around that.”
For Ted Cruz, Super Tuesday has become Judgment Day.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/super-tuesday-ted-cruz-judgement-day-213691#ixzz41fAdgQDr
