AMES, Iowa — He has camped out continuously for the final 10-day stretch. He is spending more on Iowa TV ads than any other candidate. He has four Iowa field offices and has been in the state more days than any of his chief rivals in the past three months.

His name is not Ted Cruz. It’s Marco Rubio.


Somehow, against all the evidence, Rubio has successfully spun that he’s gunning only for third place here. In sharp contrast, Cruz’s campaign, touting its superior ground game, has openly pined for and predicted victory.

The result: In the closing hours before Monday’s caucuses, Iowa is suddenly fraught with risk for Cruz while Rubio, who sits comfortably in third in most public and private polling, is almost guaranteed to meet or beat diminished expectations. (Donald Trump, who has violated just about every supposed rule in politics, has predicted victory everywhere.)

“I think Ted needs to win Iowa,” said Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, who opened for Cruz at a number of Iowa events last week. “Oh, absolutely, it becomes harder for Ted if he doesn’t win Iowa,” he added.

Iowa has always been about more than the final standings on caucus night. It’s about beating the political-pundit prediction market as the campaign heads to New Hampshire and beyond. Now it appears that Cruz, if he doesn’t win outright — and he trails Trump in most recent surveys, including The Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll released Saturday evening — could finish ahead of Rubio and yet still be cast as the evening’s big loser.

“Expectations, in my opinion, are far more important than one person getting first place,” Jeff Kaufmann, chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, told Politico. “Now, I don’t want to downplay that. The biggest ticket out of here is who gets first place. But there are far more tickets than that.”

The dramatically different approaches to the Iowa expectations game were on full display Saturday, with Cruz and Rubio making swings through the same college town only hours apart. Both drew big crowds, though Cruz’s was larger, as attendees jostled just to get inside the giant hotel ballroom.

Declared Jason Miller, a senior Cruz communications adviser, “Ted Cruz is playing to win.”

Rubio adamantly refused to set any kind of a bar for himself. “I’m running to get as many votes as I can,” he told reporters in Ames, brushing aside talk of even a second-place finish. His aides only speak of finishing third.

Curiously, both campaigns have embraced the other’s narratives. Rubio’s operation has pumped up Cruz. And Cruz’s team has tamped down Rubio, trying to cast the race as a two-man contest between their candidate and Trump. It amounts to one of the most strategically significant gambles of the campaign.

“This is a binary decision now in Iowa,” said Iowa Rep. Steve King, a prominent Cruz endorser. “I’m not worried about not finishing in the top two, and I don’t think it’s about maneuvering for second place. It’s about winning the state of Iowa, and I think it’s going to be close, and I think it’s going to be Cruz, Trump, and Rubio a distant third.”

On Saturday, the Register’s poll became the latest, and perhaps most important, survey to show that Trump has passed Cruz in the state. It had Trump with 28 percent, Cruz with 23 percent and Rubio with 15 percent. Ben Carson was the only other candidate to finish in double digits, with 10 percent.

The Cruz operation continues to project confidence. For weeks, its leaders have bragged about their infrastructure in the state, their “Camp Cruz” housing 80 volunteers, their precision analytics that had campaign manager Jeff Roe rattling off the fact that there were 9,131 voters still deciding between Cruz and Trump on Friday and 2,807 torn between Cruz and Rubio.

The Rubio campaign has been more than happy to play along. Its leaders have taken to calling Trump the “greatest show on earth” while lauding Cruz for “the greatest ground game we’ve ever seen,” as Rubio communications director Alex Conant put it on CNN. As Rubio’s Iowa director, Clint Reed tweeted on Saturday, “If @tedcruz can’t win in Iowa where CAN he win?”

Rubio’s team has been trying to have it both ways — declaring momentum (and #Marcomentum on social media) at every turn while smothering talk of what momentum would mean: actually moving up in the electoral standings. In January, Cruz and Rubio campaigned in Iowa on an equal number of days. And in the crucial final three months, Rubio spent more days here than Cruz — 25 to 20.





But Cruz has stuck to his two-man narrative, even as his ad buys tell a different story, with the campaign shifting all its negative ads to hit Rubio, as of Friday. The campaign thinks casting Cruz as the lone Trump alternative will pay off better than letting Rubio into the picture through inflated expectations.

Roe, the Cruz campaign manager, remains confident no matter the results on Monday. The Cruz campaign’s biggest fallback is cash: $19 million as of the end of December, likely the most in the field by a wide margin.

“Our campaign is, infrastructure wise, built out for the entire life cycle of the primary, and we're funded to go the distance,” Roe said Friday.