The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Continuing his attacks on Trump, Cruz stops mentioning the polls

January 21, 2016 at 8:03 p.m. EST
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz talks to Sawyer Niemiec during a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H., on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- A week ago, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) finally ended his detente with Donald Trump, he framed it as a necessary response to a desperate man. Why, he asked, had Trump brushed off a question about Cruz's presidential eligibility four months before judging it to be a problem?

"Since September, the Constitution has not changed, but the poll numbers have," Cruz said at the Fox Business News-hosted Republican debate in North Charleston, S.C., on Jan. 14. "I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa. But the facts and the law here are really quite clear."

At the time, the poll that loomed largest in the campaign was a December survey by the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg Politics, which had found Cruz surging to a 10-point lead in the first caucus state. It was true that Trump had declined to find any fault with Cruz until that poll started a wave of speculation -- including a meme that jumped from conservative to liberal pundits, that a loss in Iowa would start an inevitable Trump collapse.

But since Cruz said that, the polls have started contradicting him. In six of the last eight Iowa surveys tracked by RealClearPolitics, Trump has led Cruz. In the most recent DMR/BP poll, released the week of the debate, Cruz's Iowa lead had shrunk from 10 to three points, with Cruz down from 31 to 25 percent support and Trump up from 21 to 22 percent -- just one point off from his August peak.

This week, while continuing to goad Trump, Cruz has been judicious about his proof that the mogul is panicking. First, he referred to a poll that hypothesized a shrunken field with a Trump-Cruz race -- a race that Cruz led decisively. Eventually he dropped the reference to specific polls, pivoting to talk about current and former Republican senators who have told reporters that they would prefer a President Trump to a President Cruz.

"Donald is publicly boasting about how all the big establishment players are getting behind him," Cruz told radio host Sean Hannity before a rally at a jam-packed pizza restaurant here.

Polls can't calculate the voter outreach advantage that Cruz has built in Iowa. But Trump, always comfortable talking about polls, has so far succeeded every time he mocked a candidate that challenged him in Iowa. In July, in Oskaloosa, he asked Iowa voters to reject Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.), whose seemingly robust lead in the state contradicted Trump's national poll lead. Two months later -- for reasons that had little to do with Trump's attack -- Walker was out of the race. In November, Trump treated a Fort Dodge audience to a pantomimed ramble about Ben Carson's much-told but incredible stories of teenage violence. Carson, who struggled to respond to voter fears after the terrorist attacks in Paris, soon went into decline.

Over the weekend, Trump took to his favorite method of political communication, Twitter, to issue 16 different criticisms of Cruz. This week, as Cruz counterpunched Trump for his history of donations to Democrats and praise for Hillary Clinton, the mogul-turned-candidate has not taken every chance to respond. That only changed in Las Vegas Thursday, when Trump briefly derided Cruz for saying he was a member of the establishment.

"Ted is starting to go down,” Trump told his audience. “Ted is getting very, very nervous."