The simmering feud between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz intensified in dramatic fashion on Tuesday, as accusations were hurled between the two senators’ campaigns over “underhanded tactics” and an alleged “smear campaign” ahead of the critical South Carolina primary on 20 February.

Rubio and Cruz, senators from Florida and Texas, respectively, are locked in a heated battle to overtake the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. While they have increasingly sparred over issues such as immigration and national security, Rubio has in recent days sought to undercut one of the pillars of Cruz’s candidacy: trust.

Speaking with reporters over lunch in Summerville, Rubio said Cruz was being deliberately dishonest with the American public.



“This has been a pattern now with Ted,” Rubio said. “He has spent the last two weeks literally just making stuff up.”

“I just think it’s very disturbing [that] you can just come and make things up about people and believe no one is going to call you out on it. And it’s now become a pattern, so we have to clarify that we can’t let that stand unchallenged.”

Rubio added that Cruz had misrepresented his position on a host of issues, including immigration, funding for Planned Parenthood, and same-sex marriage. Cruz and his allies have launched a series of attacks against Rubio aimed at portraying him as insufficiently conservative – even though Rubio holds one of the most conservative records in the US Senate.

By Tuesday evening, Rubio’s campaign spokesman, Alex Conant, was blasting Cruz in a fundraising email with an aggressive subject line: “Ted Cruz is a liar.”



“First it was lying about Marco on fundamental issues like life and marriage; now Cruz and his supporters’ attempts to slander and distort Marco’s record have reached a new low,” Conant wrote.

One ad by a pro-Cruz Super Pac was pulled down on Monday after a legal review determined it to be misleading in its charge that Rubio supported so-called “sanctuary cities” while shepherding a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2013. Cruz also asserted that his Senate colleague shied away from standing at the forefront of the fight to defund Planned Parenthood, even though Rubio has voted numerous times to strip the women’s health organization of its federal funding.

Rubio’s campaign also believes members of Cruz’s team to be behind a post that appeared on Facebook this week under the guise of Trey Gowdy, the influential South Carolina congressman who is backing Rubio’s campaign. The account, Trey Gowdy Prayers, appears to falsely speak on behalf of the Benghazi committee chairman as switching his allegiance to Cruz after determining his support for Rubio was “a grave mistake”.

Gowdy, who is campaigning across South Carolina with Rubio this week, called on Cruz to formally rebuke the tactics in a statement on Tuesday.



“In the last week, we have seen a systematic effort by Senator Cruz and his allies to spread false information and outright lies in the hopes of winning votes by appealing to our lowest common denominator,” Gowdy said in reference to the Facebook incident.



“I’m demanding that Senator Cruz and his campaign repudiate these dishonest and underhanded tactics. We can have a debate about the future of our party and our country. But we need not leave our integrity behind.”

Gowdy will also feature in new robo-calls released late on Tuesday to counter what he says are deceptive tactics by Cruz’s campaign.

“I want to alert you to the fact that voters are receiving dishonest push-polls smearing my friend Marco Rubio’s conservative record,” Gowdy says in the call, which according to time.com will reach 500,000 South Carolina phone numbers.

While there is no direct evidence linking Cruz operatives to the misinformation, maneuvers of the sort are not uncommon in the rough-and-tumble of South Carolina politics. In his conversation with reporters on Tuesday, Rubio implied that it would not be out of character for Cruz’s campaign to engage in such tactics – referring back to the night of the Iowa caucuses when Cruz’s staffers spread false rumors that retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson was dropping out of the race.

“What they’ve been willing to do as part of their campaign … I think people aren’t going to like it the more they learn about it,” Rubio said.

Rick Tyler, a spokesman for Cruz, said Rubio’s efforts to undermine their campaign would ultimately fail.

“Team Rubio is coordinating a smear campaign,” Tyler said in a statement to the Guardian, citing the vast ground game that helped Cruz secure an overwhelming victory in the Iowa caucuses and chalk up a stronger-than-expected third-place finish in New Hampshire.

“Marco Rubio has resorted to name-calling and smear tactics because he can’t defend his record. He doesn’t have a similar ground game and won’t have enough money to compete in all the 1 March states like we will, so he thinks he can smear his way to winning. But it won’t work.”

Cruz is nonetheless being targeted not only by Rubio but also by Trump, who holds a commanding lead in South Carolina. In protest of a Cruz ad that highlighted the real estate mogul’s past as being pro-choice on abortion, Trump on Monday threatened legal action against Cruz while referring to him as “a totally unstable individual”.

“He is the single biggest liar I’ve ever come across, in politics or otherwise,” Trump said in a statement. “It is hard to believe a person who proclaims to be a Christian could be so dishonest and lie so much.”

It’s unclear if the knocks on Cruz, whose campaign banners bear the word “TrusTED”, will stick.

At a Cruz rally in a national guard armory in Columbia, attendees dismissed the criticism as part and parcel of politics.

Voters said they were accustomed to dirtier tricks associated with the Palmetto State’s political landscape and were unlikely to be fazed.

One ardent Cruz supporter named Steve, who declined to be identified further because he was skipping work to attend the event, said it was “shameful on Rubio” to cry foul over what he said was fairly standard practice in a tough election. “This is beneath him,” he said.

Tony Burks, an undecided voter from Columbia, said it was “just part of the game right now”.



“You gotta have your big-boy pants before you come in,” he added.

