If you are Ted Cruz, you have spent years honing this message, telling members of the right wing to be suspicious of their elected leaders, to purge and cast out the perfidious incumbents who grease the system and make the deals. You have fed their anger and their fear. You have taken all the right positions. And all you’ve got to show for it, at this early stage of the presidential primary, is seventh place out of the 17 candidates.

What on earth do Republican voters want? The candidates, at this stage, are as clueless as the pundits, and the pundits have no idea. They certainly never foresaw Donald Trump, this election season’s flesh-colored gap in the space-time continuum. Trump has inspired horrified bouts of introspection within the GOP, as shocked party stalwarts try to figure out where the tycoon’s momentum is coming from—and how it can be stopped.

Here at last weekend’s RedState Gathering, an annual convention of the hard-core conservative readers of the influential RedState blog, you would think someone would have the answer. RedState is so influential it invited 11 presidential candidates to speak and only one, Rand Paul, turned it down. This year’s Gathering almost singlehandedly killed the decades-long tradition of the Iowa Straw Poll when the two events were scheduled for the same weekend and the candidates decided they’d rather be at RedState than sweating it out in the cornfield. The straw poll was canceled for lack of interest. RedState’s editor, Erick Erickson, may be the most powerful conservative in America. If there’s anyone who ought to have his finger on the pulse of conservative America, it’s him.

The candidates—Cruz, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker—came to RedState because it promised them a chance to address the grassroots activists who increasingly control the GOP. Trump accepted the invitation, too. RedState has been rather cool to his candidacy for policy reasons—with his embrace of government-run health care and his past praise for Hillary Clinton, Trump is no one’s idea of ideologically pure. But Erickson was sympathetic to Trump’s attacks on political correctness and his hawkishness on illegal immigration. And he didn’t like the way the media seemed to be ganging up on Trump. Anyone the establishment is that determined to stop must have something important to say.

But then, on Friday night, after the first Republican debate, Trump went off on the moderator, Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, saying she had “blood coming out of her wherever.” Erickson decided enough was enough. (He’d done this before, as when he banned commenters from the website who questioned President Obama’s birthplace. A lively segment of the far right thinks Erickson sold out the true right-wing religion long ago.) He revoked Trump’s invitation to speak, announcing the decision in a blog post and explaining it to the ballroom on Saturday morning.