Tim Alberta of National Review Online labels today a “crossroads” for Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign.
[W]hatever the outcome, it’s a moment entirely of his own making.
On August 7, the day after a sprawling 17-person Republican field debated for the first time in Cleveland, most of the candidates decamped to familiar territory on the campaign trail. Some went to Iowa, others to New Hampshire.
But Cruz went to South Carolina. He held a rally there in the afternoon, and then hopped on a bus heading South to make two stops in Georgia that evening. He spent the entire next day there, appearing in three different cities. On Sunday he zigzagged across Alabama, again hitting three cities and holding three different events. He did the same in Tennessee on Monday, Mississippi on Tuesday, Arkansas on Wednesday, and Oklahoma on Thursday.
This was an exercise in “narrative setting,” as Cruz’s lieutenants like to say. They had long ago circled March 1 as the most important day on the primary calendar, and hoped to impress on the political class two interconnected realities: That the southern states voting that day would play an outsize role in selecting the GOP nominee, and that Cruz was uniquely positioned to win them. …
… The good news: The campaign’s “narrative setting” worked. Hordes of media trailed Cruz that week, analyzing the intersection of his campaign’s operational theory and a southern-dominated Super Tuesday. Cruz was all too happy to play along, boasting to reporters on his bus of his ideological and religious compatibility with the region’s voters. It wasn’t a one-off trip, either. Cruz returned time and again, including later that month, where during an hour-long ride from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham he argued that he was the only candidate paying attention to the South. “We went from South Carolina to Georgia to Alabama to Tennessee to Mississippi to Arkansas to Oklahoma,” he told me. “We had over 19,000 people come out on that bus tour. It was standing-room-only everywhere we went.”
The bad news: The campaign’s “narrative setting” worked too well. Cruz’s conspicuous travel schedule was meant to establish his viability as a national candidate capable of competing beyond the first four states, and as a force to be reckoned with in the South. But it had the effect — aided by early exits from regional-friendly candidates such as Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, not to mention Huckabee’s struggles throughout — of overinflating expectations for Cruz on Super Tuesday, to the point where a poor showing would shatter his candidacy. Cruz himself, the week he launched his August bus tour, told conservative donors in California that the SEC primary would be his “firewall.” And just days before Iowa’s caucuses, one Cruz official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, said: “We’ve never said we needed to win Iowa. We’ve said we need to perform well in the first four states. I’ve always said we’re going to win March 1st. Just because, well, we are. Not because I want us to, but because we almost can’t help but win March 1st.”
