Aside from Donald Trump, no candidate appears better positioned than Cruz as Republican primary voters prepare to cast their first ballots. He is favored to win Iowa; he has surged to second in New Hampshire, frustrating the hope of mainstream Republicans that a more acceptable candidate could consolidate support in the traditionally moderate-friendly state. Through canny co-optation of the right-wing counterestablishment, and a methodical and strategic campaign, Cruz stands on the brink of a goal that the GOP’s grassroots activists have spent decades trying to achieve. These are not the elephant-brooch Republicans who populate party meetings. They are the seething fringe of Tea Party rallies and talk radio, of antigovernment email lists and small-town committees for individual rights. If Cruz succeeds in riding them to the nomination, it will mean more than one man's candidacy; it will mean the right wing has succeeded in completing its hostile takeover of the Republican Party.

The audience laughed and cheered Cruz’s joke, which he also laughed at, lips stretched thin over perfect teeth, his whole body shaking silently. “Listen,” he continued, “if you think things in Washington are doing great and we need to keep heading in the same basic direction—just kind of fiddle around the edges—then I ain’t your guy. On the other hand, if you think Washington is fundamentally broken, that there is a bipartisan coalition of career politicians in both parties that get in bed with lobbyists and special interests and grow and grow and grow government, and we need to take power out of Washington”—at this, he crouched and reached forward as if to physically snatch something from an unseen foe—“and back to We the People”—leaped up and hurled his clenched fist backward—“that is what this campaign is all about!”

This kind of routine, which Cruz delivers with choreographed precision at every campaign stop, makes the D.C. elites gnash their teeth. It seems so phony, so theatrical, so contrived. But here on the campaign trail, the people do not hate Ted Cruz at all. Here, they love him.

“Ted Cruz is the only committed conservative I’ll have a chance to vote for in my lifetime,” said Rick Zaino, a 50-year-old electrical-service worker. He’s never been involved in a campaign before, but now he spends two hours every night making phone calls and knocking on doors for Cruz. “Republicans and Democrats are both for the government, not the people,” he added. “All our freedoms are being usurped every day.”

Cruz was accompanied in New Hampshire by members of the local GOP insurgency: Bob Smith, an odd duck who managed to get himself elected to two terms in the U.S. Senate before being drummed out by his fellow Republicans in 2002; Jack Kimball, a Tea Partier who became chairman of the state Republican Party, drove it into penury, and was ousted by an establishment cabal in 2011; and William O’Brien, a former speaker of the state House who lost his post a year ago after Democrats joined with moderate Republicans to elect a more congenial GOPer instead. This is the fate that normally awaits renegades. Cruz is betting that times have changed.