Ted Cruz has Two Chances to Become President: Slim and None

Many GOP pundits are expending great effort (and jeopardizing their credibility) to support Ted Cruz’ long-shot campaign to compete successfully against GOP front-runner Donald Trump. The entire effort is based on conjecture and counterfactual analysis to find a path for Ted Cruz to win the GOP nomination for President in 2016. The Pro-Cruz/Anti-Trump effort uses historical precedents, statistical techniques and lots of verbal massaging to persuade its constituency. This article is an attempt to focus on some simple facts to clarify the reality of the situation.

Ted Cruz’ plea for other GOP contenders to abandon their campaigns to give him a clear path to victory is not only arrogant but fanciful. The fact is that to date, even with most other contenders now suspending their campaigns, Cruz’ popularity with voters has barely budged nor is it clear that Cruz would have garnered the majority of votes cast for other contenders in prior primary contests. Moreover, by now it should be obvious that if Marco Rubio had not competed in the Iowa caucuses (and if Ben Carson’s Iowa campaign had not been undermined), Donald Trump might have beaten Cruz in Iowa, and that loss could have snuffed out Cruz’ campaign at inception.

Conservative Ted Cruz is not very popular with anyone, including conservatives in his own party. To date, he has secured slightly more than a quarter (28%) of GOP delegates compared to Trump’s 45%. His appeal even in the most conservative states so far is mixed at best. Although Cruz beat Trump in Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah, he lost to Trump in Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi and tied with him in Louisiana. With the exception of Texas, his home state, the remaining Cruz victories to date have been in small, generally peripheral states, including Alaska, Kansas, Maine, Wyoming and Guam territory.

Ted Cruz is either conning us or delusional about his chances for securing the requisite 1,237 delegates needed for outright victory at the GOP convention this summer. Given his standing today, Cruz must win more than 90% of the delegates at stake going forward, compared to Trump’s need to win 60%. That unlikely achievement becomes virtually impossible considering that future contests will occur in states generally unsympathetic to conservatism.

Notwithstanding what polls indicate at this juncture, the idea that Cruz can beat Trump, let alone Hillary Clinton is unrealistic at best. Trump has expanded the field of voters beyond historical norms and has proven support among some Democrats and Independents; Cruz barely gets the support of Republicans and given his strict conservative ideology is unlikely to garner meaningful votes outside his party in a general election. Forty percent of the electorate claims to be independent and the remaining sixty percent is more or less evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. How can Ted Cruz possibly beat Hillary Clinton facing an electorate with that party affiliation split?

There is something fundamentally un-American about the GOP establishment undermining its front-runner and the will of its constituency, especially doing so to support a candidate popular with only a small minority of its Party. The Republican Party has much to lose and not much to gain by betting its very existence by endorsing a candidate that has minimal party support and minimal likelihood of prevailing in the general election next fall.