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You are here: Home / 2016 Campaign / Ted Cruz Is the New Nixon

Ted Cruz Is the New Nixon

January 7, 2016 at 11:31 am EST By Taegan Goddard 71 Comments

“The lazy conventional wisdom is that Ted Cruz is the new Barry Goldwater doomed to suffer an electoral landslide defeat should he win the Republican nomination,” Rich Lowry writes.

“Not only is this wrong about Cruz’s general-election chances, it may compare Cruz to the wrong 20th-century Republican forebear. The better analogue for Cruz might be Richard Nixon, not in the crudely pejorative sense, but as another surpassingly shrewd and ambitious politician who lacked a personal touch but found a way to win nonetheless… If Cruz wins the nomination, it will be on the strength of intelligence and willpower. He will have outworked, outsmarted and outmaneuvered everyone else.”

Erick Erickson: “Months before Ted Cruz declared he was running for President, he was outlining a path to victory in private meetings with skeptical conservatives. I know very few who came out of those meetings still doubting Cruz could win. Cruz has been methodically and systematically sticking to the path he mapped out.”

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Filed Under: 2016 Campaign Tagged With: Ted Cruz

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About Political Wire

Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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