Evangelicals LOVE Donald Trump:
We Are Known By The Company We Keep
Why Evangelicals Won't Save Ted Cruz
The religious voters Cruz was counting on are ditching the Bible thumper for Donald Trump
For once, Ted Cruz might not be Christian enough.
The Texas senator was once considered a lock to win South Carolina, thanks to his unimpeachable religious credentials: a pastor father, a lifetime commitment to the Southern Baptist Church, and a seamless ability to weave the prosperity gospel into his political rhetoric. Days before the state's critical Republican primary, however, Cruz finds himself sandwichedbetween Marco Rubio, who has also proven adept at capitalizing on his faith, and Trump, an unrepentantly foul-mouthed exemplar of “New York values” with a tenuous grasp on Christianity who is nonetheless crushing his competition in the polls, with twice the support of either Cruz or Rubio. Even worse, Trump leads Cruz among self-described evangelical voters, according to a new Monmouth University poll—the same group that Cruz won in Iowa by a landslide. Now, as Cruz prepares to face off against Rubio and Carson in a CNN town hall Wednesday (airing opposite a one-man Trump “town hall” on MSNBC), his campaign has to be asking: What went wrong?
Cruz’s fatal error may be his fundamental misunderstanding of the diversity of South Carolina’s evangelical voters. Oran Smith, head of the evangelical Palmetto Family Council, told Politico that Cruz had tried to position himself as a “movement evangelical,” with deep connections to Christian activist groups that comprise only one portion of the religious right. “If everyone that was an evangelical in South Carolina, say, were members of the Family Research Council, if everyone was aware of some of the legal groups that work for Christian values, if they were all oriented that way, I think it would be a slam dunk for Cruz here,” Smith said. “But among more nominal or casual evangelicals, the Cruz message doesn’t resonate quite as strongly.” Indeed, while 65 percent of South Carolina’s voters identified as evangelical in 2012, they are also diverse in age, income, and perhaps most crucially, devotion to their faith.
Cruz has also suffered from a string of blistering attacks on his moral character. Ever since Saturday’s debate, Trump and Rubio, assisted by Ben Carson, have upped their criticism of Cruz’s alleged dishonesty—first in Iowa, where Cruz staffers allegedly tricked caucus-goers into believing that Carson had dropped out, and now in South Carolina, where Trump threatened to sue Cruz for running an ad claiming he was pro-choice. (Cruz, in response, said he would relish the opportunity to depose Trump should a lawsuit occur.) A South Carolina TV station pulled another ad, made by a pro-Cruz super-PAC, that suggested Rubio’s immigration record was responsible for the San Bernardino shootings.
Ultimately, Cruz’s biggest mistake may have been in misjudging the appeal of Trump, who has repeatedly trampled over Republican orthodoxies with few repercussions. If a solid third of South Carolinians—supposedly among the most military-friendly voters—can enthusiastically support Trump after he lurched into Michael Moore territory by accusing George W. Bush of lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, why should Cruz suppose that evangelicals wouldn’t throw in their lot with Trump, too? In South Carolina, it seems, the boundaries between once-dependable conservative coalitions have broken down, leaving pollsters and strategists scratching their heads. Donald Trump is rewriting the rules of political calculus in real time.
Tina Nguyen is a political reporter for VanityFair.com. Follow her on Twitter @Tina_Nguyen.
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Alan: Despite Trump's encouragement of the worst angels of our nature, I want him to win the Republican nomination
in order to reveal the terrified face of American conservatism.
Remember: If you're terrified, the terrorists won.
And you made their victory possible.
Alan: Despite Trump's encouragement of the worst angels of our nature, I want him to win the Republican nomination
in order to reveal the terrified face of American conservatism.
Remember: If you're terrified, the terrorists won.
And you made their victory possible.
And you made their victory possible.
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