Sen. Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses thanks to an unparalleled turnout machine and an adherence to principle that won over voters in a state reliant on big government programs, according to former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a fierce Cruz ally.
On Tuesday, Cruz defied the final polls and won the GOP caucuses with 28 percent. Previous front-runner Donald Trump finished second at 24 percent and Sen. Marco Rubio finished a close third at 22 percent. All other candidates failed to reach double digits. Cruz leaves Iowa with eight delegates. Trump and Rubio won seven each. Ben Carson earned three and Rand Paul and Jeb Bush each secured one.
Heading into the caucuses, all of the final polls showed Trump with a lead of five to seven points. Even the entrance polls at the caucuses predicted a narrow Trump win.
Cuccinelli was in Iowa making calls and knocking on doors to get Cruz backers to the polls. He says the pollsters and the pundits got schooled by the people.
“Going into Iowa, every single pundit I saw on CNN and Fox, every single one was wrong. Every single one. Everybody hearing that clearly? Every single one,” said Cuccinelli, who says the political “experts” suffer from group think and reinforce each other’s conventional wisdom.
“They don’t know any more about this than you or I or anybody else do. Most of them have never worked on a campaign. They just get caught up in the same narrative and they spit it back out,” said Cuccinelli.
He’s also stunned by the overthinking among the pundits, particularly the narrative that Marco Rubio is somehow the big winner for coming in third as opposed to Cruz who won.
“What you’re hearing with the Rubio piece after the fact is just more media narrative. They all say it to each other and then they turn to the camera and say it. Ted Cruz won last night,” said Cuccinelli. “When Marco Rubio wins a state somewhere, then we’ll have something to talk about.”
So how did Cruz not only win but win comfortably when record turnout was supposed to spell victory for Trump? Cuccinelli says it all came down to the grassroots.
“I am a grassroots guy and I can tell you, they had a well-oiled machine running there in Iowa. They did a great job,” said Cuccinelli, noting the Cruz campaign spent weeks and months building relationships with voters.
What encourages Cuccinelli even more is that Cruz has the same approach in all of the upcoming states.
“No other campaign on the Republican side can match that kind of institutional infrastructure, and Ted has been building it all the way into the March states. So this is not, like for (Rick) Santorum and (Mike) Huckabee a one-shot wonder where they put all their chips on Iowa and weren’t ready for anything beyond that. Ted is ready,” said Cuccinelli.
Cuccinelli believes Cruz ought to be commended for other aspects of the campaign as well, most notably refusing to embrace ethanol mandates and subsidies.
“Ted Cruz is the first candidate in the history of the world for either party to oppose ethanol subsidies and win the Iowa caucuses,” said Cuccinelli.
Instead of pandering, Cruz called for an end to all government favors in the energy sector.
“His explanation of no mandates, no picking of winners and losers by Washington, really resonated with Iowans. Of course, corn is a big deal to them but they understand that Washington is broken and that if you’re going to give goodies away, like sugar subsidies in Florida for instance, then you’re never going to fox the problem. It’s got to be all or nothing,” said Cuccinelli.
In visiting with Iowa voters over the weekend, Cuccinelli says even the people who didn’t Cruz respected his stand. He used the story of a Jeb Bush supporter as an example.
“She said, without me prompting her, ‘I’ll tell you what I like about Ted Cruz is he does what he says he’s gonna do and he sticks to his principles,'” said Cuccinelli.
Now that Cruz and Rubio are getting the post-Iowa buzz, voters will be looking even more closely at both of them. Other than their high-profile battles over immigration, what are the major differences between two candidates who describe themselves as constitutional conservatives.
Cuccinelli sees a couple major differences, starting with the people who surround the two senators.
“[Rubio] doesn’t have movement conservative staff when you compare it to Senator Cruz, who has wall-to-wall movement conservatives in his office. Personnel is policy,” said Cuccinelli, who also sees differences in how passionately the two candidates pursue the issues they ran on.
“Of all the other things Marco talked about on entitlements and everything else when he was running for the Senate, it was all so inspirational but he hasn’t tried to do any of it. Ted, running for the Senate, addressed a number of issues. He has followed up with those positions and pursued them aggressively, even when it cost him, even when it made him unpopular with the leadership,” said Cuccinelli.
