Sioux Center, Iowa -- Ted Cruz was running a few minutes late for his appearance at Dordt College, having to reply to the latest provocation from Donald Trump without angering the erratic businessman.

Earlier in the day, Trump had wondered aloud whether Cruz might be ineligible for the presidency because he was born in Canada. Cruz has sedulously avoided criticizing Trump, even as he eagerly attacks other candidates. So Cruz once again offered a kind of jocular nonresponse response. He tweeted “My response to @realdonaldtrump calling into question my natural born citizenship?" with a link to the Happy Days episode in which The Fonz strapped on water skis and, still sporting his trademark leather jacket, zipped off a ramp and flew half a football field before splashing onto the water below. "Jumping the shark" was added to the American lexicon to indicate the moment something novel or entertaining stops being so. Before his town hall, the Texas senator spoke in an anteroom, seeking to downplay Trump's troublemaking and scolding reporters for asking about the exchange.

No one in the crowd next door seemed bothered by the delay. The audience was a mix of Sioux Center locals and students and faculty from the college, which pitches itself to those interested in a "biblical, Christ-centered education." The school is located in the heart of Sioux County, in the state's deeply conservative northwest corner. If the Iowa caucuses often elevate strong social conservatives, they do so largely because of this part of the state. In the 2012 race, Sioux County gave Rick Santorum 45.6 percent of its votes, with 14.5 percent going to Mitt Romney and 14.4 percent to Rick Perry. (O'Brien County, directly to the east, also gave Santorum 45 percent of its vote, and Lyon County, to the north, was the only county in the state that gave Santorum more—61 percent.) In 2008, Sioux County gave Mike Huckabee 53 percent of its votes, 16 percent to John McCain, the eventual GOP nominee, and 14 percent to Mitt Romney.

Some 2,070 Sioux County Republicans turned out for the caucus in 2012. Probably half as many turned out to hear Cruz on January 4. As they waited for the senator, the audience watched a series of campaign videos. One touted the support of Steve King, the noted immigration hawk and popular Republican congressman from the area. Another featured endorsements from Ginni Thomas, Daily Caller columnist and wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, and Brent Bozell, chairman of the Media Research Center and a stalwart of the conservative movement. They preceded the fiery introduction of Cruz by Bob Vander Plaats, the prominent social conservative activist and onetime gubernatorial candidate, who holds considerable sway over Iowa's Christian conservatives as head of the influential Family Leader organization. It was just what you'd expect to see at a Ted Cruz rally in Sioux County, Iowa—the men and women who have led fights to ban abortion and preserve traditional marriage, sought to diminish the influence of establishment Republicans who sacrifice traditional conservative principles for business interests, and sometimes worked to marginalize libertarians who don't believe in some of those principles in the first place.

All of which made the third video at the Cruz rally that much more interesting. In that one, the campaign claims Cruz as the rightful heir to Ron Paul's "Liberty Movement" and showcases several alumni of the Ron Paul for President effort who now support Cruz.

"There are a lot of things that impress me about Ted Cruz and the way that he's really picked up the mantle of Ron Paul in a lot of ways," says Joel Kurtinitis, a regional director for Ron Paul 2012 and the founder of Liberty Iowa. He admires Cruz for his commitment to libertarian principles and for taking on the political establishment in Washington. "That's been a consistent message of his—that it's not really a divide between left and right, it's a divide between Washington and the American people. I've seen him lead against unnecessary foreign intervention when he talked about staying out of the Syrian civil war. He led on Internet freedom when net neutrality came up."

Crystal McIntyre, an Army veteran and supervisor from Warren County, recalls her introduction to the Ron Paul movement and, later, to Cruz. "There was this group of people that kept running around—just, 'Ron Paul, Ron Paul.' I'm like, 'Who is Ron Paul?' " she says. "And I remember listening to the first part of his speech and just"—here she takes a deep breath and smiles broadly—"my spirit jumped!"

She first heard of Cruz when he ran for Senate in Texas in 2012 and has been a supporter ever since. "The biggest thing about Ted Cruz was I knew that he had been endorsed by Ron Paul and by Rand Paul."

The video is audacious and aggressive, like the candidate behind it. You can watch all 5:39 of it without realizing that Rand Paul is running for president himself. Other than the brief mention of Rand Paul's support for Cruz's Senate bid, the video ignores him completely. But he's in the race, and the implication is clear: Ted Cruz is the true representative of Ron Paul's ideas in this race, not Rand Paul.

That's bold, but the broader message of the video, and the choice to play it in the heart of Iowa's Bible belt, is equally daring, at least on the surface. Cruz is attempting a forge a winning coalition in Iowa that marries two parts of the Republican party long at war with one another. For decades, off and on, libertarians and social conservatives have battled to influence the direction of the Republican party on a wide range of issues: abortion and gay marriage, tax reform and faith-based initiatives, support for Israel and funding to battle AIDS in Africa, and many more.

But in the current political environment, what separates these two GOP factions on policy is less important than what unites them politically: dissatisfaction with the establishment. "Cruz is deftly consolidating the clans of Iowa's anti-establishment right," says Matt Strawn, former chairman of the Iowa Republican party. "The Christian conservative evangelicals, the Tea Partiers, and the libertarian-leaning Republicans. The adhesive for the Cruz Iowa coalition isn't ideological so much as it is his antiestablishment style and the belief that he has the horsepower to take on the political elites and win the nomination."

The enemy of my enemy, politically speaking.

If this arrangement seems unorthodox, it's familiar to Iowans. For several years, the Iowa Republican party has been a messy tangle of internecine fighting, with insurgent groups of Paulites and Christian conservatives making runs at GOP leadership, for elective office, and in the party hierarchy. Without the muscle to effect lasting change independently, these factions have often come together as ad hoc evangelical-libertarian alliances in attempts to wrest power from establishment Republicans (or perceived establishment Republicans). Sometimes they've succeeded, sometimes they've failed, but the network remains, and Cruz hopes to ride it to a big Iowa win on February 1.

"It's an odd coalition, but it's not a new one," says an unaligned Iowa Republican strategist. "And it's ready-made for the Cruz campaign, given his views."

The social conservative vote in Iowa could be more fragmented than it has been in the last two cycles, with past caucus winners Huckabee and Santorum running again and Ben Carson remaining a factor. But neither of the previous winners has gotten much traction, with Huckabee at 3 percent and Santorum at 1 percent in the most recent Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll. That poll, taken during the second week of December, had Carson at 13 percent, a precipitous drop from the October poll, which had him at 28 percent. Rand Paul registered just 3 percent, down slightly from his 5 percent in October.

Cruz, meanwhile, rocketed from 10 percent in October to 31 percent in December. And there is no sign that support is flagging.

All of which suggests that however unconventional Cruz's strategy might appear, it seems to be working.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard .