Donald Trump talks about the Fox debate during an event on Tuesday in Iowa. Cruz: The GOP race will be over in March

Ted Cruz took a victory lap Thursday following a strong fundraising report, repeatedly telling supporters on a phone call that he expects the race to be over by March -- but only after getting through an increasingly nasty run-up to the Iowa caucuses.

The political attacks, he warned, will get “uglier and uglier and uglier.”


“We’re winning right now, and as a result, I want to tell everyone to get ready,” he said on the call. “Strap on the full armor of God. Get ready for the attacks that are coming. We’ve already seen hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in attacks directed at us. Well I went to tell you that come the month of January, we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Still, Cruz observed at several points during the call that he expects that the race will finish well before the end of the primary season in June, saying “there’s a very good possibility that the Republican primary will be decided by the end of March.”

The call came one day after the Texas senator’s campaign announced he had raised around $20 million in the last three months of the year, an impressive haul that adds to his momentum in Iowa, where he leads in recent polls.

“I want to encourage everyone to get ready, because starting tomorrow morning, we are in a 90-day sprint to win this nomination, and then to turn around and win the general election,” he said. “To defeat Hillary Clinton in November of 2016 and to turn this country around.”

Cruz is widely expected to be among the top two finishers in the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, with many activists and operatives saying he looks on track to win it outright. His front-runner status has led to a growing number of attacks from rival campaigns and other outside groups, leading him to reassure supporters Thursday that it was better to be attacked than ignored.

“There’s an old line, if you’re not taking flak, you’re not over the target,” he said. “If we were sitting here on Dec. 31 and no one was attacking us and no one was going to be attacking us, I would be deeply, deeply concerned because it would mean we weren’t winning.”

Cruz continues to trail behind Donald Trump in national polls.

His political director, Mark Campbell, asserted, “The other thing we’re really watching with great fascination is how more and more of the establishment wing of the Republican Party is coming to our campaign as the alternative to Mr. Trump. We wish Donald Trump a happy New Year and hope he had a wonderful holiday season, but all of us believe very firmly that Ted Cruz will be the next President of the United States.”

