GILBERT, S.C. — Ted Cruz emerged the evangelical favorite in Iowa, but Marco Rubio is maneuvering to elbow him aside in the race for conservative Christians in South Carolina.

Rubio’s campaign has turned a spotlight on the candidate’s faith here. He has been attending church with popular South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and meeting with local pastors. He has declared he would rather lose an election than soften his anti-abortion position. And, in conversations with voters, Rubio is speaking openly and eagerly about God — winning over deeply conservative Christian gatherings.


“The whole premise of Cruz’s campaign is, he‘s the choice of evangelicals,” said a Rubio adviser granted anonymity to speak freely about the opening the campaign sees with conservative Christian voters. “The reality is, multiple candidates in this race have evangelical bona fides ... of all of them, Marco is the one I think has really stood out to people, maybe because they weren’t expecting him to be able to so powerfully and articulately describe his relationship with Jesus and how it impacts his life.”

The evangelical electorate is larger and more diverse in South Carolina than it was in Iowa, and religious leaders here say it is fractured in the final days before Saturday’s primary. Cruz and Rubio are both courting evangelicals aggressively, while Donald Trump basks in support that cuts across the Republican ideological spectrum.

“The vote is split between Trump, Cruz and Rubio,” said Glenn McCall, the Republican National Committee member from South Carolina, of the evangelical vote. “I think Rubio and Cruz, though, are really making a hard push.”

Cruz, the Texas senator, is widely regarded as the best organized among candidates in the race for South Carolina’s evangelical voters — repeating the ground game that propelled him to victory in Iowa last month. He has been building out a conservative infrastructure here longer than anyone else, and continues to lead Rubio in most polls here.

But where organization was critical to turning out voters for caucuses, it isn’t enough on its own to win in South Carolina, where, in 2012, 65 percent of the 600,000 Republican voters who participated identified as evangelical. Iowa’s record-setting turnout included only 180,000 voters, many of them the most committed Christian conservatives, willing to spend a night caucusing.

The Rubio campaign is trying to break Cruz’s hold on these religious voters by arguing the Texan is not the conservative Christian who can win in a general election.

“They want someone who crosses the threshold of faith, but after that, they want someone who can win,” said the Rubio adviser while describing the Florida senator’s intensified outreach.

Meanwhile, Trump is still outpolling both of them and on Monday received the endorsement of a prominent televangelist. Taken together, Trump and Rubio appear poised to effectively cut into the base Cruz has spent months cultivating.

“If everyone that was an evangelical in South Carolina, say, were members of the Family Research Council, if everyone was aware of some of the legal groups that work for Christian values, if they were all oriented that way, I think it would be a slam dunk for Cruz here,” said Oran Smith, head of the Palmetto Family Council, an evangelical group that hosted most of the GOP candidates at a gathering last week. “There just would not be any question, if everyone were a movement evangelical. But among more nominal or casual evangelicals, the Cruz message doesn’t resonate quite as strongly.”

Certainly, Cruz can already point to success in courting evangelicals: He is expected to roll out the names of at least 300 supportive pastors this week. He is campaigning hard, in person and on the airwaves, on social issues; and he has for months been building relationships with key Christian leaders, sometimes dispatching his father, Pastor Rafael Cruz, as well. He has zeroed in on religious conservative activists — who are also likely to vote.

But tactics Cruz has been accused of using in Iowa against rival Ben Carson have sullied his candidacy in the eyes of some evangelical voters. His campaign falsely but strongly implied that Carson was exiting the race in the final hours before the Iowa caucuses. Carson, a onetime evangelical favorite, has seen his numbers slide over the past several months, largely to Cruz’s benefit. But he is still well-liked by conservative voters — and he has not been particularly forgiving.

“People sure don’t like the ‘holier than thou’ attitude while all the while you’re employing some of the nastiest campaign tactics of the entire bunch. That’s what’s hurting him in South Carolina among evangelicals,” said Hogan Gidley, a Columbia, South Carolina-based GOP strategist who was previously working for Mike Huckabee, who was highly critical of Cruz before losing to him in Iowa.

At a Rubio rally held in a barn here near Columbia on Monday night, several voters mentioned they were considering both Rubio and Carson — but not Cruz, signaling that some of the negative attacks on Cruz appear to be breaking through.

“I’m not sure if he’s the liar they say he is or not,” said Bonnie Bogwell, a nurse who said faith is “everything” to her—something that might have otherwise made her a natural fit for Cruz.

Even Cruz’s allies don’t dispute that Rubio is finding some support among evangelicals.

“We’re seeing the same thing we’ve seen in the [broader] race: that you have evangelicals really being drawn to Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio,” said Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council and a prominent Cruz backer. “What happens, though, is as we saw in Iowa, and New Hampshire to a lesser degree, we see evangelicals ... in the last 72 hours, really begin to think through some positions. That’s why Iowa broke for Ted Cruz overwhelmingly.”

The Cruz campaign is confident that its ground organization will deliver, especially in the deeply conservative Upstate region. And in the wake of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, Cruz, a former solicitor general of Texas, has been especially focused on campaigning on the importance of electing a president who will appoint conservative justices, a critically important issue to pastors and religious Christians.

“We do not have any votes locked down,” Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said. “That’s why we have more volunteers than anybody else. ... We have a candidate out there every single day, we have 10,000-plus volunteers in South Carolina, knocking on 10,000 doors a day, making 20,000 calls a day. ... That’s how we did it [in Iowa] and that’s how we’re going to win."

Or at least, he added, “try like heck to win.”

