Ted Cruz’s impressive (though predicted) win in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary will probably do little to seriously change the contours of the race. Cruz certainly did better than expected, beating Donald Trump by a very solid double-digit margin. But his victory speech, a windy and repetitive accounting of delegate math and conservative talking points, showed that the Texas senator still has a ways to go in shaping his persona and image going forward. Outliving his many rivals and pushing Trump toward a contested convention, Cruz has run an astute campaign thus far, but his message remains as narrowly tailored as it did when he started.
Cruz’s victory Tuesday night will give him the vast majority of Wisconsin’s delegates, and make Trump’s quest for 1,237 an even steeper climb. Trump has had a nightmarish couple of weeks, and although he was never likely to win Wisconsin for demographic reasons—the state is more educated than average, for example—Cruz’s margin of victory suggests that Trump may have been hurt by his recent stumbles over abortion, the arrest of his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and other issues. Add all that to Trump’s dreadful approval ratings and toxic opinions, and it seems thinkable that Republican officeholders and delegates will turn against him at a contested convention. Which means, if Cruz is going to make his move, now is the time.
Cruz has two audiences he needs to communicate with and each of them requires an overlapping, if not identical, message. The first audience consists of voters in upcoming primaries, many of which are in more liberal states like New York and Pennsylvania with fewer numbers of hardcore evangelicals and very conservative voters, i.e. Cruz’s base. And the second audience is convention delegates and members of the Republican establishment who find Cruz’s extreme conservatism and go-it-alone attitude unpalatable, and believe that his uncompromising right-wing message would not succeed in a general election. (A third audience—general election voters—waits off-stage, and will also need to hear something other than red-meat conservatism if the time comes.)
So how did Cruz send a message to these essential audiences during Tuesday night’s victory speech? He had a chance to speak to the country in primetime, and offer himself up as the person who could unite the Republican Party’s different wings, and who could plausibly rattle Hillary Clinton. And yet, Cruz alternated between his ultraconservative primary mode and uninspiring, boilerplate GOP talking points. He touted his endorsements from intensely conservative radio host Mark Levin and Sen. Mike Lee. Then he talked about reining in regulations, passing a flat tax, abolishing the IRS, and repealing Obamacare. He also discussed securing the good old border, and taking a more hawkish line on Iran. But mainly he talked delegate math, and did so at such length that he was cut off by Fox News. (CNN stayed with the speech for a bit longer.) Cruz’s campaign may be much smarter than Trump’s (or anyone else’s) when it comes to fundraising or delegate selection, but the candidate himself seems as practiced and robotic as ever, and as stuck in his own ideological bubble as any Republican in recent memory. Fox News got bored.
As Reihan Salam noted in Slate, Cruz often seems like a creature of the Reagan era who has not thought about how to solve today’s problems other than by mentioning Reaganite bromides. Cruz has sold himself to average voters and to movement conservatives as two things: a man who checks all the boxes of membership in the Reagan coalition (social conservatism, deep tax cuts, an aggressive foreign policy), and the man who could finally sell a purely conservative agenda to more than a slice of the Republican electorate. Tuesday night’s speech showed that Cruz, on one of the best and most important nights of his campaign, still hasn’t figured out how to reach that broader swath of voters and narrower slice of Republican elites.
Read more Slate coverage of the GOP primary.
