COLUMBIA, S.C. --South Carolina was supposed to be Ted Cruz’s slingshot, catapulting him through the gauntlet of southern states that vote on Super Tuesday.

Instead, he got skunked.


A disappointing showing in Saturday's primary complicates Cruz’s gameplan for March 1, a day that he has built up as the cornerstone of his primary strategy. It also calls into question his long-held claim that he is the evangelical standard-bearer: Exit polls showed Trump beating him out for evangelical support.

“I don’t think it will end his campaign but it will definitely hurt him,” said Hogan Gidley, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party and past senior adviser to Mike Huckabee. “He’s got money and he’s got a message to go to the South. The problem is he won’t have any momentum. And you can’t underestimate the importance of having momentum because people want to be with a winner.”

Cruz has long said that the Southern-heavy March 1 contests — when Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama, among others, vote — will be an “amazing day” for his campaign. He never promised a victory in South Carolina, but he has been clear that he saw the state as friendly territory, underscoring the extent to which he fell short Saturday—and highlighting his coming challenge.

Cruz has been eyeing the South Carolina primary ever since his days as a junior staffer for George W. Bush in 2000, when he noticed the “striking” similarities between Texas and South Carolina.

“Going to South Carolina, I spent the whole week on the bus with 43,” Cruz told reporters riding with him on a flight from Greenville, S.C. earlier this month. “It was amazing how similar Texans and South Carolinians are. I’d never thought of that until seeing the bus. They’re Southerners, they’re evangelicals, they’re military veterans, they’re gun owners. There’s just a feeling that is similar. They feel like Texans.”

But on Saturday, they rejected the Texas senator, who had been tagged over and over by his opponents and their surrogates in the closing days as a “liar,” with Trump and Rubio leading the charge. Now, he must recover quickly or risk losing the biggest day circled on his campaign’s calendar for many months.

Of the dozen states that vote in the March 1 contests, the bulk of them are culturally and politically similar to South Carolina. But on Saturday, Trump—the “New York values” Cruz sought to associate with him notwithstanding—romped to a first-place win here, proving himself to be a formidable force in the South and calling into question Cruz’s oft-repeated claim that conservatives and evangelicals are “coalescing” around his campaign.

“Ted Cruz, if he does not do well on March 1, he has a big problem,” said Chris Brown, an Alabama-based GOP consultant currently supporting Jeb Bush, speaking before South Carolina’s results came in. “His whole strategy was to win Iowa, do well enough in New Hampshire and South Carolina to get to Super Tuesday and pick up a lot of delegates. I think he’s poised to do that. The only thing that can derail him is if he finishes a distant second to Trump.”

That, of course, is what happened.

Cruz still remains the only 2016 candidate to defeat Trump anywhere, and his campaign has repeatedly questioned where Rubio, who won the endorsement of popular Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott and still didn’t win here, can notch an actual victory, rather than a media-driven one.

Ted Cruz's speech in South Carolina

“Momentum is a nebulous concept, but it’s a powerful phenomenon going into a round with almost 15 states voting in a single day,” said an unaligned national evangelical leader, also speaking before results came in. “He is going to have to again capitalize on broad public opinion. The grassroots is important, but when you have a quarter of the country voting in one day, you can’t be everywhere at once. You need public opinion and media to be able to carry potential momentum. Momentum has to be there or else it’s an uphill battle.”

The Cruz campaign is betting on the organization that propelled them to a victory in Iowa coupled with money to deliver Super Tuesday wins across the country. Cruz’s campaign had $19 million in cash on hand at the end of the last fundraising deadline, and closer to $51 million when combined with super PACs—only behind Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

“You’ve got to have the money and you’ve got to have the people on the ground,” Cruz communications director Rick Tyler said. “We have to do well on March 1 and we’re prepared to do it. We’ve spent more time organizing in the South, in the March 1 states, than anybody else. It’s what we’ve invested in.”

Texas, Cruz’s home state, offers the biggest delegate prize of the day, with 155 delegates up for grabs. Cruz has 27,000 volunteers there, Tyler said, with 10,000 in Georgia and 7,000 in Tennessee—the other two states that offer the biggest delegate dump on that day. He began building organizations in those states last summer, tapping prominent local conservative activists to lead the state efforts, and doing two splashy swings through the South, one by bus and one, in December, by plane.

But the question, after South Carolina, where the Cruz campaign touted 15,000 volunteers, is whether manpower and organizing muscle is enough to catch Trump anywhere beyond a caucus state like Iowa.

Still, Cruz’s early organizing, party officials in the South say, has paid off, and could insulate him some against a poor showing in South Carolina.

“What the Cruz campaign did early on, they were hiring staff, Tennessee people—not bringing in people…the leadership team they put together on the volunteer side last summer, they got ahead of the game in grassroots organization,” said Julie Hannah Taleghani, the GOP chair of Williamson County, an influential county in Tennessee outside of Nashville. “You can still see evidence of that since then.”

She said that Trump and Rubio have also made big organizational pushes in the state, and expects all three to be competitive in the fight for delegates.

“Regardless of how they do [in South Carolina], they’re so organized in Tennessee, the grassroots has so much energy,” she said. “All three of those guys will do well.”

But Chip Saltsman, a former adviser to Huckabee, who in 2008 won Iowa but lost South Carolina and was battered headed into Super Tuesday, was skeptical, noting the importance of momentum in attracting media attention and proving viability to voters.

“Cruz is going to have to light the fire on his firewall,” he said, “And see what happens.”