Ted Cruz emerged as the front-runner in Iowa, but the Republican establishment has no clear idea of what to do with him. Photograph by Charlie Neibergall / AP

Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, has won the Iowa Republican caucus, with close to twenty-eight per cent of the vote, a result that will likely leave his party in an even more queasy state than if Donald Trump, the New York businessman, had beaten him. Until recently, a Cruz victory would not have been a surprise: he had put most of his campaign's energy into getting out the vote and appealing to the evangelical activists whose opinions tend to be amplified in the caucuses. But then Trump began calling him "the Canadian" (Cruz was born in Calgary, to an American mother) and wondering why "nobody likes Ted" (party leaders, especially those who have worked with Cruz, seem to despise him). He then pulled ahead in the polls. If Trump had triumphed, and then gone on to win in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada—he is leading in the polls in all three states—Republicans might have just told themselves that a deal-maker was better than a nobody, which is what the other candidates were looking like, and slapped some gold paint on the establishment. Now they still have Ted Cruz, the single most conservative member of the Senate, and no clear idea of what to do with him.

Cruz began his victory speech by saying that the glory was God's, and then moved on to attack the doubters. The caucus results, he said, showed that the nominee "will not be chosen by the media," which had, as he saw it, said "with one voice that a conservative cannot win." Nor would the winner be chosen "by the Washington establishment" or by "the lobbyists." Some people had told him that he must be exhausted, after fighting so many enemies, but they, too, were wrong. "We are not tired at all!” Cruz said. “We are inspired."

It is not only Cruz's victory that makes the race more uncertain. Marco Rubio, who finished third, with twenty-three per cent, almost beat Trump, who had about twenty-four per cent, with most of the precincts counted. In a speech after the results came in, Rubio, too, thanked God, and said that he would be zipping off to New Hampshire. In the most recent Republican debate, Cruz, in Trump's absence, had wilted; Rubio, and not Trump, seems to have been the beneficiary of Trump’s no-show tactic. Rubio did well in the debate, in part by calling Cruz a liar to his face. There was a general expectation among commentators that the Republican establishment would now give Rubio money, to try to beat both Cruz and Trump. The complication is that the establishment donors, before the campaigning started, gave more than a hundred million dollars to Jeb Bush's super PAC, Right to Rise. The group still has more than fifty million left, which it has been spending furiously on attacking Rubio. Jeb Bush got only about three per cent of the Iowa-caucus vote, behind not only the three front-runners but also Ben Carson and even Rand Paul. (John Kasich, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee each got less than two per cent; Huckabee announced that he was suspending his campaign.) But Bush had once been a mentor to Rubio, and now he seems to believe that Rubio ought never to have run. The last time a Bush family grudge distorted American political culture, the target was Saddam Hussein, who at least was a brutal dictator. Now the storm of pettiness is directed at a one-term Florida senator.

Then there is the matter of how Cruz seems to have won, with fraudulent mailers, xenophobic warnings, his own calls to build a wall on the border, and attacks on "New York values." He suggested that President Obama wanted to help terrorists. He appealed in ever starker terms to evangelical voters, presenting himself as the sole defender of the faith in the field. (In his speech, Cruz said that his victory was, in part, a testament to "the Judeo-Christian values that built this great nation.") About two-thirds of the Iowa caucus-goers were evangelical, by CNN's entrance-poll reckoning. The Cruz campaign had dormitories of volunteers working to turn out the vote, and the candidate himself visited each of Iowa's ninety-nine counties. ("The full Grassley," as it’s called.) But Cruz didn't sneak in with just a few activists; Iowa is small and unrepresentative, but turnout in the caucuses may have reached or come close to a record high. There is a strain in the Party that Cruz both speaks to and, with his sneering attacks on even his ideological allies, sours. And, in recent days, he threw in lines such as this one, from a rally in Sioux City, on Saturday: "Donald Trump, right now today, as a Presidential candidate, is advocating full-on socialized medicine—expanding Obamacare." Also, "Marco Rubio's position in this race is that, if he's President, he wants to grant amnesty, full citizenship to all twelve million people here illegally." Neither of those sentences is true. And neither heralds a Party that is pushing back against Trump's bigotry. Cruz didn't renounce Trumpism; he sold his own cheap knockoff.

Trump came out after learning that he'd lost and talked about how "we're just so happy with how it worked out." Despite the impression he often gives, Trump has plenty of experience with losing, and with carrying on as if he had won. Sometimes, it works for him. It might in New Hampshire. The stubborn, multifarious certainty that various candidates are unelectable—especially the ones who are winning votes—will keep the race unsettled. Cruz's victory makes a brokered convention a little more likely. In December, Frank Bruni, of the Times, quoted someone who had worked with Cruz on George W. Bush's 2000 campaign as saying, “Why do people take such an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? It just saves time.” If that is so, Cruz seems to have beat the clock in Iowa. And the Republican Party has a lot more time to waste.