As Ted Cruz toured Indiana looking to resurrect his ailing presidential bid, he went all in on the 2016 potty talk to win over Hoosier voters. He pressed the predation angle of so-called “bathroom bills” outside a ‘50s diner in Plainfield.
“There is no greater evil than predators,” he told a troop of reporters, “and if the law says that any man, if he chooses can enter a women’s restroom, a little girl’s restroom and stay there and he cannot be removed because he simply says at that moment he feels like a woman, you’re opening the door for predators.”
In South Bend, he conjured up freak show imagery. “If Donald Trump dresses as Hillary Clinton, he still can’t use the little girls’ restroom,” he told a crowd. “And I apologize for putting that image in your mind.”
It was a next-generation culture war refrain he began just as soon as Donald Trump suggested that Caitlyn Jenner could use whichever bathroom she wished to in Trump Tower, and then she did. Cruz pounced on it immediately. “In the last 48 hours,” he said, “Donald Trump has come out for grown men going into the bathroom with little girls.”
But in one of the more reassuring developments of 2016, Cruz finally flushed his presidential hopes down the toilet Tuesday, dropping out of the Republican race after overplaying his social conservative hand.
The cautionary tale of a fellow one-time 2016 hopeful was right in front of Cruz’s nose if he had stopped to look. A year earlier, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence had thumped his Bible straight out of national contention when he signed the state’s anti-LGBT “religious freedom” bill in a closed-door session. The nationwide outcry and resulting economic blow quickly blunted any Pence for President talk.
But the message wasn’t plain enough for Cruz. Just six months ago, his hometown voters in Houston had fallen prey to the “No men in women’s bathrooms” trope when they repealed a pro-LGBT nondiscrimination ordinance. Now, the candidate’s own internal polling suggested the bathroom issue might push him past Trump in Indiana.
It was familiar territory for Cruz, who made “religious liberty” the cornerstone of his appeal to the Iowa evangelical voters that delivered the GOP’s first primary contest to him.
But just like Pence and, more recently, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, Cruz misjudged the complexities of an issue that is evolving before our very eyes. As McCrory observed in an interview on the very same day that Cruz suspended his campaign: “Society is changing quickly and anybody who gets in the way is in trouble. And I might be in trouble.”
Indiana Republicans, already burned once by getting on the wrong side of that moral arc, weren’t eager to trod the path again. “Today, vast swaths of the state’s Republican electorate, from Indianapolis to West Lafayette, have retreated from the culture wars,” wrote Indianapolis Monthly editor Adam Wren. “And like the 50s-era diner itself, Cruz’s dogged socially conservative message seems anachronistic—and perhaps a little tin-eared.”
Wren was specifically talking about Indiana’s “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” Republicans, but they clearly weren’t the only voters turned off by Cruz’s message.
Even among white evangelicals—who account for more than half of Hoosier voters—Trump bested Cruz, 48 to 45 percent in exit polls. Although Cruz won majority support from voters who attend weekly religious services, Trump’s take of “white evangelicals” suggests that just because people associate with a religion, it doesn’t mean they find social conservatism compelling at the polls anymore.
In fact, it’s telling that the executive director of Indiana’s American Family Association, Micah Clark, read the Hoosier electorate all wrong. Clark was a strong supporter of Indiana’s original “religious freedom” bill and objected to the partial “fix” that eventually mitigated some of the law’s damage.
Though Mr. Clark said bathroom access was not at the top of voters’ concerns, he predicted that Indiana Republicans would reject Mr. Trump on the matter because “Hoosiers have common sense.”
“Common sense” is no longer on the side of social conservatives. And the sooner opportunistic politicians realize that, the longer their political lives will thrive.