In the aftermath of the Republican National Convention, one big name keeps coming up that’s entirely separate from those of the other people that were on the speaking rosters for each day — that of Ted Cruz.
The former presidential candidate and senator from Texas drew boos when he got onstage to speak, and during his time at the podium, he explicitly did not endorse the party’s nominee, Donald Trump.
While Cruz was a second fiddle at this year’s convention, running far behind Trump, it’s clear from the former’s ambition and from his recent efforts that he’s far from through with presidential politics.
In fact, behind the scenes, his organization appears to be working overtime to try to gain him advantages in two races: the first when he runs for another term as senator in 2018 and the second with a renewed presidential bid in 2020.
In fact, it’s this latter race that Cruz appears to be focusing his efforts on the most, attempting to change some delegate rules and laying early groundwork for a second run.
Unlike other perennial GOP candidates (Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, George Pataki), Cruz is much more focused on hindsight, learning and applying the lessons of what went wrong in the past to being able to retool and rebound.
Many observers of Cruz say that he’s almost obsessive in studying details, on a macro- and a micro-level, assessing where he made missteps and how he can tweak his message and his marketing to appeal to an ever-larger audience in his next potential runs.
As an educated conservative candidate with a strong initial base of evangelical support, Cruz was highly confident coming out of the gate that he would do well.
Looking back at the primaries, there were likely no candidates on stage at the early GOP debates who thought Donald Trump had a real shot at being the last man standing.
They weren’t prepared for the whirlwind persuasive powers of Trump’s direct speaking and addressing the new emerging demographic of the Republican Party.
A demographic that’s grown more and more frustrated with the elite of the GOP establishment, a solid core that’s clung to power over the last two decades and has always been represented by political insiders such as the Bush family.
But now that Cruz has seen the light in terms of this seismic demographic and psychographic shift, he’s turned a laser-like focus to the whys of how he ended up in second place in the 2016 race.
Although Cruz and his wife went to Mexico for an ostensible timeout after his loss in the Indiana primary, they didn’t go alone; Cruz campaign chairman Chad Sweet, his national campaign manager Jeff Roe and his finance chairman Willie Langston came along for the ride.
Does that sound like a vacation, or does that sound more like an offsite strategy session?
Cruz has shuffled around his staff in the wake of his loss, but at the same time, he’s helped allies get two new nonprofit political groups off the ground and given some TLC to big donors who are still likely smarting from their candidate’s loss to the less-well-organized Trump.
In late June, Cruz invited 100 of his top donors and bundlers to a retreat near San Diego where he indulged them in a cruise, meals and a presentation breaking down his campaign’s expenditures and what his potential next steps are.
Cruz has ordered his organization to take a top-to-bottom look at all the decisions his campaign made in the primaries — from large ones, such as where it advertised and where the candidate traveled, to small ones, like whether his campaign was right to book dormitory halls for his campaign volunteers in New Hampshire and Iowa instead of hotel rooms.
Cruz is nearly alone in studying data as closely as he has after a campaign has finished. “Most campaigns treat data as an afterthought, and they don’t invest in it, and they’re not willing to have decision-making follow the data,” Cruz told Politico’s Off Message broadcast recently. But, he cautioned, “Most wars are not won in a single battle.”
Several members of Cruz’s upper-tier staff have been placed in new roles in the wake of the candidate’s 2016 loss. David Polyansky, a trusted Cruz senior advisor, has been made chief of staff of the candidate’s Senate office.
Paul Teller, Cruz’s former chief of staff; Brian Phillips, his rapid response director; and Bryan English, his state director for Iowa have all been moved to the aforementioned political nonprofit groups, which will focus on Cruz’s grassroots base and come up with new platform ideas.
“These groups are important to keep that movement intact,” declared a Cruz aide. At least one Cruz watcher has likened these efforts to those of Ronald Reagan when he lost a delegate floor fight at the 1976 GOP convention to then-incumbent President Gerald Ford.
At the 2016 convention in Cleveland, when it was Cruz’s turn to address the delegates on the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena, Cruz congratulated Trump on his victory but quickly began talking about problems around the country.
He attempted to finish his speech by saying, “If you love our country and love your children as much as I know that you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience. Vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”
At the phrase “vote your conscience,” the audience erupted in boos and jeers, with shouts of “Go home! Go home to Texas!” drowning out the rest of Cruz’s words.
This was in contrast to a Cruz rally held earlier in the day where supporters chanted “2020!” and were urging the candidate to run again at the end of either a presumed first term for Trump or (heaven help us) Hillary Clinton, whose stature in the polls has been weakening lately in the face of Trump’s gains.
In the end, Newt Gingrich rode to Trump’s rescue immediately following Cruz’s speech, saying to cheers, “Ted Cruz said you can vote your conscience for anyone who will uphold the constitution. In this election, there is only one candidate who will uphold the constitution. So, to paraphrase Ted Cruz, if you want to protect the constitution of the United States, the only possible candidate this fall is the Trump/Pence Republican ticket.”
Cruz was vilified after the convention was over, but his protest speech was likely very calculated; if Trump loses, he will appear as having been prescient about voters’ convictions and their aspirations and will look that much stronger if he runs again in 2020.
If Trump wins, it remains to be seen if Cruz’s campaign post-mortems will yield enough for better results in 2020 (or for that matter in 2018 in Texas), but political observers would be wise not to take their eyes off this scheming senator from the Lone Star State in the meantime.
~American Liberty Report
