The Slatest

Look at Just How Quickly Republicans Are Turning Against Ted Cruz

Sen. Ted Cruz speaks during a campaign rally at the Indiana State Fairgrounds on Monday in Indianapolis.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Ted Cruz is praying for a miracle in Indiana, where a loss to Donald Trump could bring an end to the #NeverTrump movement. But even if the Texas senator pulls out a victory in Tuesday’s primary—or soldiers on anyway—he faces another major problem: Republican voters across the country appear to be turning on him.

New polling for Gallup suggests that Cruz’s image among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents has taken a serious beating in the past two weeks. The percentage that say they have a favorable view of him has now fallen to 39 percent, while the percentage who say they have the opposite view has climbed to 45 percent. That’s good for a net-favorable rating of negative-6 percent, Cruz’s worst rating ever in the Gallup tracking poll. And remember, this isn’t his image with the general public we’re talking about, but only among GOP-minded Americans. For comparison, Donald Trump—the man the Republican Party’s establishment wants to stop so badly they were willing to team up with Cruz, a man many of them clearly hate—has a net-favorability of positive-24 percent among the same group.

Gallup

As you can see in the graph above, Cruz spent much of the campaign with a considerably better image among his party’s base than Trump did. Then between late February and mid-April—during which Cruz emerged as Trump’s main rival—their favorability ratings ran roughly in line with each other. In the past two weeks, though, Trump’s has taken a clear turn for the better while his rival’s has plunged below water.

What happened? The usual correlation-causation disclaimer applies here, so we can’t attribute the change to any one event. But the numbers certainly suggest that Cruz’s last-ditch efforts to derail Trump have not succeeded. Cruz’s downward trend began in mid-April, shortly after he posted major delegate gains in Colorado in a nominating contest that Trump complained was rigged against him. Following major defeats in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic later in the month, Cruz made not one but two desperation plays, striking a quasi-alliance with John Kasich and naming Carly Fiorinia as his running mate. While those two Hail Marys are arguably still hanging in the air—at least until Tuesday’s results in Indiana come in—it appears the first will fall well short and the second has sailed out of bounds.

The good news for Cruz? He doesn’t have the worst image among the men and women who ran during the 2016 cycle. Lindsey Graham and George Pataki both saw their net-favorable rating with GOP voters plunge in the negative-13 to negative-14 range last summer. The bad news? There’s still time for Cruz to fall even further.

Elsewhere in Slate: What Happens If Donald Trump Wins Indiana on Tuesday

Read more Slate coverage of the Republican primary.