GREENLAND, N.H. — Sen. Ted Cruz picked a huge evangelical Christian college to launch his bid for the White House. He spoke at length of his faith and the role the church has played in his life and politics.
Days later in New Hampshire — a state with the first presidential primary and the second-lowest rate of religiosity — he emphasized a more secular message.
“There are a lot of Republicans in Washington who are resigned to Obamacare remaining a permanent feature of our economy,” he told 200 Republican activists over brunch Saturday at the Portsmouth Country Club. “It’s my intention in 2016 to make this election a referendum on abolishing the IRS and repealing Obamacare.”
Cruz’s initial focus on the evangelical vote made tactical sense. In a large, splintered Republican field, having a base to build from could be critical. But there’s a pitfall: By focusing so tightly on social conservatives, he could alienate others, ending up with a very enthusiastic sliver of the electorate.
“People I’ve talked to are excited about him. And yet there are some who are nervous, because of what he’s saying,” said Kathleen Lauer-Rago, chairwoman of the Merrimack County GOP.
After hearing him Saturday, she didn’t foresee much problem for Cruz expanding his appeal.
“All the things he talks about aren’t concerns of just evangelicals,” she said. “He talks about ISIS [the Islamic State], about the budget. I don’t think he’s pigeonholed himself at all.”
Privately, a number of leading New Hampshire Republican activists predict that just as Cruz announced early, he’ll burn out early, too. Though he paints himself as a uniter in the mold of Ronald Reagan, he’s irritated colleagues in both parties through relentless, uncompromising and often futile fights that, by his own telling, have left him estranged from leaders of his party.
But those who love him really love him. And they’re an especially ardent subset of the GOP.
“Look, Sen. Cruz has been very clear that he’s trying to get the conservative wing of the conservative wing of the Republican Party,” said Steve Duprey, a member of the party’s national committee from New Hampshire. “It’s who he is and why he’s running.”
Significant obstacles
Cruz and his strategists say their best shot at the nomination starts with a strong claim on evangelicals, then builds from there. He’ll face stiff competition from Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 with support of evangelicals, among others.
“I don’t think he’s boxing himself in,” Duprey said. “He’s smart to do whatever he can to lock it down early and then go look for other groups.”
The obstacles are significant, though, especially in New Hampshire.
Undeclared voters can cast ballots in either party’s primary, and they’re the biggest bloc of voters in the state. The stronger Hillary Clinton looks on the Democratic side, the more centrists will flow into the GOP primary. That could only hurt someone as conservative as Cruz.
On Thursday, the Suffolk University Political Research Center released a poll showing Cruz as the top pick of just one in 20 New Hampshire Republicans, with one in four still undecided.
With 10 months to go, polling so poorly doesn’t spell doom. Six months or so before the 2008 primary, Mitt Romney led John McCain by about 30 percentage points. McCain won, and won the nomination.
Cruz came in third in the Suffolk poll among self-described conservatives, behind Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite.
That’s clearly his niche, so it made sense for him to kick off his campaign with a focus on that segment of the electorate.
“But there are repercussions,” said poll director David Paleologos.
Bush, the current front-runner, would benefit if conservatives remain splintered. That dynamic helped Mitt Romney, another centrist favored by the party establishment, in 2012.
The Suffolk poll offers some clues to a way forward for Cruz. National security and jobs are the top two concerns of GOP voters in New Hampshire, followed by the federal debt and deficit. These are all issues Cruz focuses on.
“The country is changing, and if the people would only open their ears and listen to what this man says,” said Joan Gittlein, 69, who serves as a leader in the Rockingham County GOP.
At Cruz’s appearance Saturday in Greenland, she liked his advocacy for lower taxes, repeal of Obamacare and a host of other issues, including protection of gun rights and religious freedom.
“It’s the values that I value,” she said.
Fewer born-agains
Exit polls in 2012 showed that just 22 percent of GOP primary voters in New Hampshire identified themselves as born-again Christians. The numbers in Iowa and South Carolina are more than double that.
About the same number described themselves as “very conservative.”
So for Cruz to launch his campaign at Liberty University, said Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political scientist, “you’re not starting with the sweet spot of the Republican primary.”
And, he said, “Once you start at Liberty University, one thing you can’t do is change issue positions easily. But you can soft-pedal some issues and emphasize others, depending what state you’re in.”
Cruz’s attacks on President Barack Obama play well. Moderates and conservatives alike view Obama as overly dovish on foreign policy. Cruz, like many contenders, has been a relentless critic of the president’s policies toward Iran, Israel and Russia.
“Being a fiscal hawk is never a bad thing in New Hampshire,” Scala added.
In three public appearances over two days in New Hampshire, Cruz didn’t go out of his way to remind voters that he’d chosen an evangelical Christian university for his campaign launch.
There was nothing of the testimony of faith he offered at Liberty, though for a handful of voters who turned out to see him, that and everything it represents were clearly a draw.
“We are very conservative. We are conservative Christians,” said Suti Wirogo, a 47-year-old engineer from Grantham, N.H., who drove with his wife and kids more than an hour to see Cruz on Friday in Merrimack. “We look for someone who shares our values and policies. His values and policies are really universal, unless you’re a Democrat.”
For others in the crowd of 150 or so at the event, hosted by the Conservative Business League of New Hampshire, Cruz’s religious pitch was a nonfactor.
“He’s an unabashed Christian. Too many of our politicians have not committed to anything. That is who he is,” said Paul Gauffin, 64, a retiree from New Ipswich wearing a jacket with an “Old Glory Guns & Ammo” logo.
Gauffin is more concerned about Cruz’s relative lack of experience compared with the many governors in the 2016 GOP race.
“There’s no substitute for management experience. It’s an executive job,” Gauffin said. “It’s a big leap.”
More than religion
On Friday night, speaking to a conference of young conservatives from around the country at a hotel in Nashua, Cruz offered tips about using humor and social media in campaigns.
He blasted “Washington elites” and “Obama-Clinton foreign policy. … Our friends and allies, they don’t trust us, and our enemies don’t fear us.” And he lamented the shortage of job opportunities for recent graduates.
“If you were to sit down and try to design an agenda to hammer the living daylights out of young people, it would be difficult to come up with a more effective agenda than the Obama economic agenda,” he said.
Lynndy Smith, 20, an Amherst College sophomore from Glendale, Ariz., was among the young activists thrilled to hear from Cruz.
“Obviously he’s a politician. … Every politician has a target audience,” she said, adding that his detractors “are going to pigeonhole him no matter what.”
But, she said, “He stands for much more than just the religious crowd — his foreign policy, and his health care, that appeals to a lot of people. And this ‘great reform’ idea is something that can appeal to a lot of people.”
Follow Todd J. Gillman on Twitter at @toddgillman.
