RINGSTED, Iowa—Ted Cruz enters the homestretch weakened by attacks from all sides, lagging poll numbers and a widely panned debate performance, putting enormous pressure on the onetime-Iowa poll leader to recapture momentum.

He took the floor here at a dimly lit restaurant in Ringsted Friday to make his closing arguments, while three hours away, a picture of him onstage with rival Marco Rubio was plastered on copies of The Des Moines Register under a headline that blared, “Rough night for Cruz.”


“The front page of The Des Moines Register wasn’t comfortable this morning,” admitted Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, at a Bloomberg event in Des Moines.

On Friday and in the hours following Thursday’s debate, other campaigns seized on an off-kilter performance from Cruz to crow that he is losing his grasp on Iowa, a state where he led by double digits last month. But in the final days before the Iowa caucuses, a number of polls show him trailing significantly behind Donald Trump. Cruz and his team are lobbing a wide variety of attacks at the GOP front-runner and have been for the last two weeks, though it remains unclear whether any of those arguments are penetrating, and Cruz on Thursday lost the opportunity to spell out those contrasts in person.

“Any momentum he hoped for coming out of the final debate was blunted by his performance last night,” said Steve Grubbs, who is backing Paul and is a former chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa. “In the final weekend, a candidate wants to enthuse and motivate the base of their supporters. His performance last night did anything but that.”

At a rally in New Hampshire on Friday, Trump gloated that Cruz got “really pummeled … I’m glad I wasn’t there actually.”

And Alex Conant, Rubio’s communications director, told reporters: “This is a state where, just a couple of weeks ago, he was at 40 percent in the polls and telling people he hadn’t peaked yet, saying it was locked in. Obviously, that’s not the case any longer. He’s getting a little worried about Monday night’s results and he’s lashing out at a lot of the candidates.”

But in his Friday morning appearance in Ringsted, Cruz suggested that he was under fire because he was the conservative who most scared the establishment.

“Perhaps the question of who will stand against Washington can best be answered by asking, 'Who is Washington attacking?” he said.

Cruz will hit 10 stops across the state between Saturday morning and caucus night, taking questions and comparing himself to Trump and increasingly to Rubio.

His campaign chairman, Chad Sweet, pledged in an interview, “We are toe-to-toe, man-to-man, hand-to-hand combat daily,” in particular with Trump.

“We still have other things we look forward to rolling out in the days ahead,” Sweet said regarding criticisms of Trump, calling him a “newly discovered conservative.”

But in a sign of the two-front fight Cruz is now facing in the state, Cruz changed his television ad buy strategy from hitting Trump to hitting Rubio.

At the Bloomberg breakfast, Roe said most Iowa newspapers led with stories about Cruz and Rubio tangling over immigration — one of the issue contrasts Cruz most wants to draw. “Every minute that we can be on the stage talking about immigration with Marco Rubio is a wonderful day,” Roe said.

And he also announced a piece of good news: Cruz has $19 million cash on hand, likely one of the biggest war chests in the field. Chief strategist Jason Johnson tweeted the development, adding that the campaign is “trained & equipped for a marathon” — a comment meant to suggest that he is prepared for a long race, regardless of Monday’s outcome.

Roe, meantime, did little to manage expectations at the breakfast, predicting a victory in Iowa "outside the margin of error."

But after Thursday’s debate, several of Cruz’s prominent backers set about scaling back expectations for Cruz’s Feb. 1 performance. After months of touting their own ground game and organization — something Cruz surrogates continue to do — some also acknowledged that Trump, Cruz’s chief rival, could translate his massive crowds into a substantial turnout operation.

Asked whether he still thought Cruz would win in Iowa Monday night, Bob Vander Plaats, a national co-chair and prominent Iowa social conservative backing Cruz, replied, “I believe he will. The big question, though, is what happens with this Trump factor. If Trump mobilizes a bunch of people to the caucuses, all bets are off. If Trump doesn’t do that, Cruz wins.”

Tony Perkins, a prominent national conservative Christian leader who officially announced his support for Cruz this week, was even more noncommittal.

“We’ll see what happens,” he said, when asked whether Cruz would pull off a first-place win on Monday. “I’m here to help him because I believe in him, in his message, and I hope Iowa voters see that running into the caucuses.”

Shane Goldmacher and Eli Stokols contributed to this report.