Chris Cilizza notes that Ted Cruz is running the best campaign in either party:
There’s many things to hate about Ted Cruz, but his brilliance should never be questioned. The man knows how to promote Ted Cruz.
In light of the many stupid things he says, I feel very comfortable questioning his brilliance, while recognizing the possibility he’s just an incredible liar.
But I’m very happy he’s doing well. Go Ted go!
Yeah, he’s not very electable, but as speed kills in sports, craftiness kills in politics. So we’ll see.
So, who is it that you LEAST want to face in a general election? You seem pretty thrilled about who is doing well, but you haven’t told us who would worry you if they got the nomination.
Kasich. He’s about the only one I fear in any way.
And he’s my favorite. So we see eye to eye, in a way.
They don’t get much stupider than Ted Cruz. A man with a complete lack of substance. He was asked last night in the debate about the budget crisis and the debt limit. Of course he had nothing to say about that. He instead railed about how unfair the questions were, and that the questions were not about anything substantive. The question posed to him was the epitome of a substantive question. A true moron, Ted Cruz.
Not after his rant about all the other candidates telling the base what they want to hear. How many minds did he sway with that? :dubious: I loved Trump’s takedown of him, early on - yes, ftr, Kasich *was *a managing director at Lehman Brothers.
Cruz *is *as smart as hell, btw, even if his positions are stupid. He’s an unprincipled demagogue, but you need a lot of intelligence to pull that off as successfully as he has. He would scare me as a nominee, since there would be a real chance of him winning, but I don’t see him getting the confidence of the Money and the Sanes on this planet. He can hope to be this year’s Santorum, the last crazy standing, but that’s it.
Shouldn’t that be “he’s still way behind Ted Cruz, much less an average Doper”? 
I’d have to disagree. I think you have to look not just at how good the moves are, but how well they’re working. And so far, Cruz is just hanging on in the second tier. Two recent polls have had him as low as 4% nationally. And sure, once the field is winnowed, his mad debating skillz (which Cillizza mentions) will have a chance to shine, but who knows when the hell that will be? There’s nothing forcing any of these guys out anytime soon.
Rubio and Carson are running the best campaigns on the GOP side right now. Rubio’s is good because he, like Cruz, is staying under the radar for the most part, and building up more support than Cruz is. Also, Rubio’s starting to look like the clear winner in the ‘Establishment candidate’ lane.
Carson’s running a good campaign because, well, look at the polls.
But Cruz is certainly running the best GOP campaign after those two.
On the Dem side, Hillary and Bernie are both running very good campaigns, with particular kudos to Team Hillary for not panicking when all the news was bad in August and September. They knew they would get their chance eventually, and when it came, they capitalized on it like gangbusters. And Bernie’s been successful in moving Hillary at least somewhat to the left, which was his real goal, let’s face it.
I heard a whole segment on the Glenn Beck show this morning extolling Ted Cruz’s “audiographic memory” for his ability to paraphrase six questions asked earlier in the debate in his rant on media bias.
Oy.
You listened to a whole segment on Glenn Beck this morning? Richard, we need to talk about the advantages of mental hygiene…
The clear *leader *at this point, anyway. Stuff can happen, as the Sad Tortoise can tell you (in his new role as the third-ranking South Floridian in the campaign, behind Rubio and Carson). Rubio did handle the quitting question pretty deftly, I certainly admit, and had the most articulate (scripted?) answers overall.
The two best campaigns in the party. 
Hell, he’s been the clear leader for weeks. But now it’s at the point where, barring something unexpected, Rubio’s the Establishment’s boy in this race.
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, but seriously: Bernie’s run a much stronger campaign than people would have figured, and he’s accomplished his real goal. And after the debate and especially the Benghazi! hearing, a lot of people who still weren’t sure about Hillary a few weeks back are now asking why we’d want anyone else. She would have been the clear frontrunner anyway after Biden made it clear he wasn’t running, but she’s done way better than that.
There’s a part of my morning commute where I only get AM radio. Very occasionally I’ll listen in on the crazy. Once a month is typically enough.
Smoking crack is a bad idea even if you do it once a month or less. Just saying.
I had totally forgotten that Cruz was even running until I saw this thread again. Is he keeping his mouth shut, or am I following the wrong sources?
Apparently you weren’t watching last night. Good decision, btw.
I’m not watching any of the debates. The interesting bits will be rebroadcast ad nauseam and the boring bits… well, they’re boring.
Ted’s the guy that campaigned for his senate seat against the other Republican as too “moderate”. That’s right, not too liberal, too moderate.
A question for the board: can Ted Cruz be stopped?
As I see it, despite being a senator he is functionally an outsider candidate. The combined polling of “outsider” candidates at this point is over 60%. That’s the tally of Trump, Carson, Cruz, Huckabee, and Santorum. (At this point in the 2012 nomination cycle, around the time Cain was peaking, the outsider candidates (Cain, Gingrich, and Bachmann) were polling around 40%.) These people are not going to say, “You know, my first choice was Ben Carson, but if he drops out I’ll go with John Kasich.” No; the Carson/Trump/Cruz voters fucking hate the establishment candidates, electability be damned. To me this argues in favor of an outsider winning the nomination, unless a) the outsiders remain persistently divided up until the end, or b) whoever consolidates the outsider vote is vulnerable to being killed by establishment money.
On a), the wildcard for me is Trump. He’s invulnerable to gaffing because almost everything he says would conventionally be viewed as a gaffe. He has money and loves the ego trip. I don’t really know what pushes him out.
As for Carson, AFAICT he’s in this thing to further his brand and book sales. As soon as the marginal benefit to his brand of being in the race is outweighed by the marginal damage to his brand of media scrutiny, he’s out. That may have already begun to turn. And if Carson drops out, the “outsider” vote could consolidate fairly quickly given that Huckabee and Santorum have been non-entities in this race.
ISTM the candidate most likely to inherit Trump/Carson supporters is Ted Cruz. That would mean the critical mass shifts to Ted Cruz, and if Trump’s stuck at #2 and loses early primary states, I don’t know how long he sticks around. Better to go out with a bang and play kingmaker while he’s still relevant than to fizzle out and leave with a whimper.
If the race boils down to Cruz vs an “establishment” candidate (likely Rubio), I see two factors working in Cruz’s favor. First, as I said above, the appetite for an outsider candidate is unusually large this cycle. Second, as much as I disagree with him on literally everything, Cruz strikes me as a fiercely intelligent and nimble politician, a demagogue of the first order, and a pretty formidable opponent against Rubio’s fundamental rigidity. Rubio is great at delivering memorized speeches, less so at thinking on his feet.
Am I jumping to too many conclusions here, or is Cruz in fact the likely nominee?
ETA: Maybe Cruz achieves critical mass, only to be brought down by an onslaught of establishment money against him. But the establishment have been trying to silence and/or make Ted Cruz go away since he came on the scene, and it hasn’t worked. Actually, it’s only made him stronger. So I’m not sure he’s that easy to knock out.