Brian Beutler of The New Republic thinks no one who’s as far to the right as Ted Cruz is can be elected president, and, to support that opinion, he enlisted (or perhaps drafted) a conservative hero, albeit one who died in 1998. In a Monday article, Beutler asserted that “if Barry Goldwater were still alive, he’d be a guest on cable news somewhere warning Republicans that Ted Cruz is too conservative to win the presidency.”
According to Beutler, Cruz’s belief that he can “win the presidency on the strength of overwhelming conservative turnout” is not only counterfactual but also irrelevant, since Cruz wouldn’t even get the GOP nomination. Moreover, the Texas senator has consciously made race a key component of his approach: “Cruz believes there are still enough white conservatives in the country to swamp a rainbow coalition of Democratic presidential election voters, but only if Republicans indulge the former unreservedly. He's thus stipulating to Republicans that they can run as candidates of and for white people without causing so much offsetting retrenchment in the middle and on the left that their gains prove illusory.”
From Beutler’s piece (bolding added):
[N]early every likely [Republican presidential] candidate has a theory of how to expand the party’s reach outside the right…
…But it isn't a universal pattern—and Ted Cruz is the tribune for those on the right who reject the premise altogether…
In Cruz' mind, the 2016 elections provide Republicans a chance—a final chance perhaps—to win the presidency on the strength of overwhelming conservative turnout. Of white voter shock and awe. Cruz believes there are still enough white conservatives in the country to swamp a rainbow coalition of Democratic presidential election voters, but only if Republicans indulge the former unreservedly. He's thus stipulating to Republicans that they can run as candidates of and for white people without causing so much offsetting retrenchment in the middle and on the left that their gains prove illusory.
But he's wrong about that. A message like Cruz’s isn’t just a loser in a general election. It isn’t even good enough to win a Republican primary…
Many conservatives trust Cruz in a way they never trusted Mitt Romney…But Romney only needed to be so conservative, because the remainder of the field divvied up and thus diluted the right-wing vote…If Cruz could somehow convince Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul not to divide the conservative vote by jumping in, he would be a formidable contestant. If, like Scott Walker, he'd established appeal among conservative activists and party pragmatists alike, he'd be very well positioned. Instead, he polls pretty poorly.
But [Cruz would] still be a sitting duck in the general election. In Cruz’s mind, the GOP’s presidential woes are entirely attributable to the party’s frayed alliance with evangelical whites. Place a movement heavyweight like him atop the ticket and those voters will come home, leaving Democrats outnumbered...[That’s] incorrect—not because of the implausible assumptions about Democratic vs. Republican turnout, but because it's possible for a conservative to be too conservative for his own good. Cruz is…too conservative to play near the sweet spot, currently occupied by Walker, where conservative orthodoxy and Republican party politics are indistinguishable. And he's thus way too conservative to win over more than half the national electorate. Cruz is so conservative that if Barry Goldwater were still alive, he’d be a guest on cable news somewhere warning Republicans that Ted Cruz is too conservative to win the presidency.
…It's one thing for a candidate to argue that his ideological leanings will make the country better for all citizens. It’s quite another to say that’s all ancillary to the question of whether or not conservative voters are happy. The quality that will make Cruz’s campaign interesting is the very same thing that will doom it.
