Presidential candidates’ strategies can sometimes be hard to understand, especially when those candidates are not exactly killing it in the polls.
Take Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. According to The Hill, his campaign is currently running on two big ideas (to use that term rather loosely). One is that Mr. Cruz does not actually want to be leading right now. The other is that, despite his membership in the most insider elite group imaginable, the United States Senate, Mr. Cruz is an outsider to Washington.
This is the year, of course, in which pretty much everyone running for the Republican presidential nomination wants to act like an outsider, under the theory that the best thing the country can do right now is to elect a president without any political experience.
Mr. Cruz and his team, according to a spokesman, Rick Tyler, “don’t want to break out” of the pack of Republican candidates right now, which is lucky, since that does not seem to be happening anyway. Offering a garbled comparison between the presidential race and the college basketball March Madness brackets, Mr. Tyler said, “We are moving slow and steady.”
The Hill article points out that so-called “outsider” candidates won in the largely meaningless Iowa caucuses of 2008 (Mike Huckabee, a former governor) and 2012 (Rick Santorum, a former senator), but neither candidate did well after Iowa. So what is the Cruz outsider strategy?
Apparently to hang around long enough to be voters’ second choice if other candidates drop out. “If you look at where the Carson vote goes, the Huckabee vote eventually goes, the [Rick] Santorum vote, or the Rand Paul vote eventually goes, Cruz is very well positioned to be the default choice of supporters of a lot of other candidates,” Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based GOP strategist, told The Hill.
According to Kellyanne Conway, who runs the pro-Cruz super PAC Keep the Promise 1, (outsiders all have super PACs), the question is: “In the top six or seven, who is the outsider that can play in the insider lane?”
That matters, she said, because “Republican voters have proven that they want to send a message. But ultimately, they want to send somebody to the White House.”
So, let’s recap. First, Republicans want to send someone to the White House. Second, Republicans want to run against the Washington government, even if they’re in the Washington government. Third, voters who like that idea may settle on Mr. Cruz if everyone else more attractive drops out. Sounds like a winning plan.