Ted Cruz Is the New Nixon

“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.”