Ted Cruz knows how to twist the knife. Cruz has long been positioning himself to pick up Donald Trump and possibly Ben Carson voters should those leaders of the Republican presidential primary crash and burn, and now he’s setting up a nasty, nasty contrast between himself and Marco Rubio, the likely beneficiary of establishment Republicans looking for an alternative to a flailing Jeb Bush:
“As I look at the race, historically, there have been two major lanes in the Republican primary. There's been a moderate lane and a conservative lane,” Cruz told CNN on Thursday. “Marco is certainly formidable in that lane. I think the Jeb [Bush] campaign seems to view Marco as his biggest threat in the moderate lane.”
I mean, calling Rubio the moderate to his own conservative might not seem like a vicious attack on the surface, but in the context of a Republican primary, it surely is. Is it true? Well … depends what you’re looking at. In the Senate, where Rubio represents Florida and Cruz represents Texas:
Rubio has scored a rating of 90 percent from Heritage Action, 93 percent from the Club For Growth, and 98 percent from the American Conservative Union, three conservative groups that grade Republicans on purity. By contrast, Cruz's ratings are 98 percent, 96 percent, and 100 percent—not a huge difference. Both are far above the GOP average and rank among the most ideologically conservative senators.
But Rubio went bipartisan—at least temporarily—on the high-profile issue of immigration reform, and he has not accumulated Cruz’s record of shutting down the government and posturing against Washington politics and the supposedly wimpy Republican congressional leadership. If it’s going to come down to outsider vs. establishment, it’s clear which sides Cruz and Rubio represent. And given where Republican voters are giving their support so far in this campaign, Cruz is the one who stands to benefit from his outsider status.