HOUSTON — Ted Cruz once saw the entire South as a stronghold. But ahead of Super Tuesday, he finds himself on the defensive, guarding against a humiliating home-state upset at the hands of Donald Trump.

Trump is strong enough nationally and in Texas that the senator will have spent four of the seven final days in the lead-up to Super Tuesday here, competing hard at home on days that could have been spent fighting Trump in a string of Southern states that once appeared winnable but now look increasingly challenging.


“None of that matters if you lose Texas,” said Steve Munisteri, the former chairman of the Texas GOP, of the trade-offs Cruz is making (though the senator is spending the weekend campaigning aggressively elsewhere in the South). “They have to be worried about it, because you would think normally they’d have a large lead. You can’t take a chance. If you’re wrong, your campaign is over. If you’re right, you spent extra time here, you still live another day.”

Polls show everything from a tie between Cruz and Trump to a solid Cruz lead. A Monmouth University poll found Cruz up over Trump 38 percent to 23 percent, but an Emerson survey found him ahead by only one percentage point, 29 percent to 28 percent.

Texas politicos still expect Cruz to pull off a win here, and his top surrogates have only pumped up those expectations. "It's not about winning -- Ted's going to win -- it's about winning by a large margin,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Wednesday night at a county GOP dinner, setting expectations for the senator sky-high.

In Texas, aware that a loss in his home state would be a devastating, likely insurmountable blow to his campaign, Cruz has campaigned hard with Patrick as well as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the former attorney general of Texas and his onetime boss.

But Cruz’s camp acknowledges that Trump is competitive in the battle for the state’s delegates, the largest single pot in play Tuesday with 155 up for grabs, and Patrick said in an interview that Trump can’t be dismissed.

“Look, Donald Trump is going to get his share, he’s going to work hard to try to finish a solid second over Rubio,” said Patrick, a highly influential Republican in the state who is one of the many prominent Texans going to bat for Cruz this week. But, he went on to insist, “Ted’s going to win. I don’t know what the margin of victory is going to be, but he’ll take the majority of the delegates.”

But given the strength Trump has shown in other deeply conservative states expected to be friendly to Cruz—South Carolina in particular—some of Cruz’s supporters are getting nervous that Trump will land so many overwhelming victories on March 1 that he will blunt any momentum Cruz would garner even by a strong showing in Texas--which is considered a must-win even by his most optimistic backers.

“I’m not worried in the least about Texas, but the overall election, yeah, there’s a lot of concern,” said a knowledgeable Cruz donor. “The guy’s got to win a damn state, he’s got to go and pick up some of the SEC states. If he doesn’t do well in the South, he’s not going to do well anywhere else…It needs to be broader than Texas. He needs to win at least a couple other states to have a shot at the nomination.”

Cruz is hardly abandoning the rest of the South: He was in Tennessee and Virginia Friday, and will hit eight cities in four other Southern states over the weekend in a final effort to shore up support elsewhere in the South. But he will spend Monday and Tuesday in Texas, where he also headed immediately after last week’s Nevada caucuses.

Trump, who campaigned in Texas on Friday, will host rallies in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, though so far only has one event per state scheduled, while Cruz has multiple stops slated.

Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier noted that Cruz was required to be in Texas for the GOP presidential debate Thursday, and she also said that the campaign has been organized more extensively, and for longer, in the March 1 states than have other campaigns. Even if Cruz himself doesn’t spend significant time in every one of those states before Tuesday , his campaign will keep will have a strong presence in the final days before March 1, Frazier said.

As for Texas, she said, “We’re very confident about where we are, that doesn’t mean we’re taking it for granted.”

Cruz is also boosted by Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, who is now a prominent Cruz surrogate. He and Patrick both opposed Cruz in his 2012 Senate primary bid against Perry’s then-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, so their support for Cruz now is a sign of how much institutional backing he enjoys headed into Tuesday, and further feeds the high expectations Cruz faces.

“It is certainly more challenging that folks would have thought six months ago,” said Ray Sullivan, a former longtime aide to Perry who is currently unaligned. “Texas is certainly not immune from the national trends and the media buzz surrounding Mr. Trump’s run. But Ted Cruz is a well-known individual with a very recent history of electoral success.”

He added that with the help of Perry, Abbott and Patrick, Cruz is “in very good shape in Texas.”

In addition to bringing out those heavyweights, Cruz is also banking on his own standing in the party, which is so influential that an ad Cruz ran in 2014 is widely credited with handing victory to Ken Paxton, the current attorney general. Cruz also remains a favorite of the conservative activist base that propelled him to a surprise primary victory in 2012.

“There certainly are some visible base activists that have left Cruz for Trump, but it’s a relatively minor amount, and especially when you have our governor, our lieutenant governor, who are very, very popular, I just think Cruz will remain popular among the base,” Munisteri said.

But ahead of Tuesday, there is evidence of record-high early voting in Texas. In previous states except for Iowa, which Cruz won, the trend of high turnout has redounded to Trump’s benefit.

“Here’s the wrinkle: Early-voting numbers are apparently really high across the board,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a veteran Texas-based GOP strategist who is open to both Cruz and Rubio, but opposed to Trump. “It could go up…to 2.1 [million]. That would change everyone’s analysis: Who are these folks?”

According to analysis from Ryan Data and Research, a firm that has done work for a number of clients in Texas, the numbers show that many of the people turning out have voted in GOP primaries before—which could signal that conservative activists are turning out for Cruz.

But a Texas poll released Thursday found that in some of the areas seeing high early-voting turnout, Trump is ahead—which could also signal a stronger-than-expected showing for the real estate mogul.

Cruz's backers don't buy it.

“Those votes are for Ted,” Patrick insisted. “I know they are Cruz people and I don’t think Trump has swayed very many of the Cruz people. They are loyal to him.”