When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s allies proposed that only registered Republicans be allowed to vote in presidential primaries, Republican National Committee leaders decided they had a problem.
“We didn’t care about the rules,” one Trump campaign aide told the Washington Examiner. “RNC made us carry all that water in exchange for unbind. The RNC had about a third of the members, we had about a third of the members, and they had about a third of the members, so the RNC said, ‘Hey, if you carry all the water on the stuff we want, we’ll back you up on the unbind stuff.'”
It’s typical of the Trump campaign, perhaps, not to care about the minutiae of the party process. But as an ally of Ted Cruz proposed the rules change, which was generally perceived as an effort to ease the Texas senator’s path to the White House in 2020.
In that sense, the fight reflected a belief in various factions of the GOP that Donald Trump will not beat Hillary Clinton — and that the convention week served as an important time for presidential contenders to think about their future.
At no time was this clearer than when watching the 2016 also-rans’ decisions of whether to come to Cleveland and how to talk about Trump. The 2016 Republican National Convention cemented a new political litmus test that could define GOP politics for the next four years: Were you with Trump or against him? And what should you have done?
Cruz’s presidential campaign manager Jeff Roe told reporters on Thursday that Cruz supporting Trump would be “good for everybody” and said he didn’t see a political advantage to taking the principled stand. Asked about whether Cruz would run again four years from now, Roe said, “2020? Who knows, man, that’s way too long.”
Others were more forthcoming in their belief that Cruz had taken a gamble that could have a significant influence on his political future.
“If [Trump] loses close, there will be a lot of, ‘Oh, Ted Cruz stabbed him in the back’ and, ‘If we’d only done a little better in a few states,'” GOP strategist Rick Wilson told the Examiner.
“I don’t think that’s legitimate, honestly, but I think that’s how it’ll work. I don’t think anybody can change Trump’s destiny. It’s going to come down to the fact that Hillary Clinton is going to spend money and he’s not. I’m convinced that he’s going to lose spectacularly.”
If Trump does lose in a landslide, there’s a silver lining for Cruz. “If his electoral map looks worse than John McCain’s, and I think there’s a good chance it will, Cruz will look like the smartest, most attuned fortune teller in politics, and that will stand him in good stead heading into 2020,” said GOP strategist Liz Mair in an email.
But Cruz’s opponents will not allow him to define conservatism for a post-Trump GOP without a fight.
“Ted has said that Donald is terrific,” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton noted understatedly on Thursday. An Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran and Harvard Law graduate, Cotton has also sparked presidential buzz. He negotiated the Trump conundrum by speaking at the convention, but only mentioning the GOP nominee once in a passing reference to a prospective “Trump-Pence administration.”
Standing against Trump would not singlehandedly propel Cruz to victory in a GOP primary contest next time around, much less the White House. One way or another, the time of the Tea Party — the backlash against the 2008 bank bailouts and Obamacare — is going to change, if not come to an end, and Cruz will have to change with it.
“There is an element of reengineering and recreating yourself that’s required to come back, because America is always about new and next,” said Boyd Matheson, former chief of staff to Utah Sen. Mike Lee, the original Tea Party senator. “It makes it harder to do that and get all the way to the White House.”
Cruz won’t be the only Republican with aspirations of winning the White House who kept his distance from Trump. Ohio Gov. John Kasich hosted the GOP convention in his home state but refused to set foot inside the convention hall.
Another potential 2020 presidential candidate is Sen. Ben Sasse, who similarly skipped the convention. This is no surprise, given that the freshman Nebraska senator announced months ago that he wouldn’t vote for Trump.
Several of Trump’s 2016 competitors have offered public shows of affection, however.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who backed Cruz after quitting the 2016 race, delivered a speech at the convention in support of Trump; after Cruz’s public non-endorsement, Walker tweeted that he feels conscience-bound to keep Hillary Clinton out of the presidency. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio skipped the convention, but then recorded a short video praising the nominee.
“Rubio probably came out the cleanest,” Matheson said, before adding that the other prominent Tea Party senator will also have to “reinvent” his political brand.
“He’s going to have to convince people that he’s not just a smart wimp,” he explained. “What they really detest is a smart wimp, and unfortunately, a lot of the consulting class — that’s what they create. Safe, no risk, all of those kinds of things. That’s where Rubio will have to reinvent himself, as a conservative fighter as opposed to just a great speaker and orator.”
If Hillary Clinton does win the presidency, every ambitious Republican will have plenty of opportunities to pick a battle of their choosing. But those fights will come with risks.
“Hillary would definitely give a reset button to a lot of folks, but with great risk, because everybody already has written their ‘sky is falling, treachery, intrigue’ [fundraising emails],” Matheson said. ‘If conservatives fall into that trap with staying on that message, then it doesn’t matter who the candidate is in 2020.”
