When Trump pronounced the book as “Two Corinthians,” drawing laughter from the audience and spawning coverage of his manifest lack of scriptural intimacy, he was furious at Perkins, calling a day later to chew him out for the lack of clarity. But when Perkins endorsed Cruz less than a week later, Trump’s ire turned toward the candidate himself, believing the entire affair had been an orchestrated act of sabotage.
Trump grew more certain of this when Cruz’s allies began using the “Two Corinthians” mishap to mock him in the final days before the Iowa caucuses. One of the offenders, evangelical figurehead Bob Vander Plaats, president of an Iowa group called the Family Leader, used an appearance with Cruz to excoriate Trump’s lack of Christian virtue.
“You know,” Trump told one Iowa official, “these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.”
Cruz was similarly at his wit’s end with Trump. The night before the Des Moines debate, Cruz scalded his “narcissistic, self-involved” rival during a local pro-life rally. At dinner with friends afterward, the Texas senator vented his frustrations in uncommonly blunt fashion. “If you’re a faithful person, if you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, emerged from the grave three days later, and gives eternal life, and you’re supporting Donald Trump,” Cruz told his friends, “I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.”
These tensions built to a crescendo in the campaign’s final days. Trump’s decision to skip the debate placed Cruz at center stage, subject to two hours of attacks. The next day’s Des Moines Register led with a headline that summed up the weeks of persecution: “ROUGH NIGHT FOR CRUZ.”
Which made it all the more impressive when Cruz won the Iowa caucuses on February 1.
It was a testament to the campaign’s stellar organization and top-notch data analytics program, which mined the state’s GOP electorate for its most receptive voters and then swamped them with microtargeted ads, mailers, and phone calls. That said, even Cruz’s data gurus had low-balled voter turnout. Four years prior, a record-breaking number of Iowans (121,503) had voted in the Republican caucuses. All the campaigns were banking on a sharp uptick this time around: 135,000, or even 150,000, perhaps. The craziest, most bullish estimates reached 175,000.
When all the votes were tallied, nearly 187,000 Iowans participated in the GOP caucuses.12
Cruz captured 27.6 percent of the vote; Trump finished second with 24.3 percent; and Rubio took third with 23.1 percent. No other candidate reached the double digits.
For Cruz, Iowa represented more vindication than victory. Once dismissed as a quixotic candidate, only later to be told that his financial and organizational strength would be wasted because of Trump’s all-eclipsing presence, Cruz believed his caucus triumph represented a breakthrough: a win for the most hated politician in the party and a loss for the front-runner who talked of nothing but winning. On a stage inside the state fairgrounds that night, Cruz looked beyond Iowa, way beyond Iowa, going so far as to preview portions of a speech he intended to give later that year when accepting the Republican nomination in Cleveland.
But his success did not come without controversy.
Seventeen minutes before the caucuses were called to order at locations all around Iowa, a CNN reporter tweeted the news that Carson was headed home to Florida after the caucuses instead of traveling on to New Hampshire and South Carolina. The cable network immediately picked up the story and ran with it, suggesting that Carson was suspending his campaign. Having set up a sophisticated instant-alert system with their volunteers and precinct captains across the state, Cruz’s team blasted out a message informing them that Carson was quitting the race and urging them to “inform any Carson caucus-goers” to vote for Cruz instead.
Carson finished with 9.3 percent of the vote, roughly equivalent to his recent polling in Iowa, but he blamed Cruz for his defeat. On a phone call the next day, Carson asked for a public apology; Cruz issued one immediately. Carson wasn’t satisfied. Over the next week he tortured Cruz, portraying his opponent as conniving and untrustworthy. Carson knew he was not going to win the nomination. But he felt a newfound resolve to prevent Cruz from winning it.
In this, he made a powerful new ally: Trump.
The front-runner had long suspected Cruz of playing dirty tricks, and now he had solid proof. After boarding his plane at the Des Moines airport, Trump placed a phone call to Jeff Kaufmann, the Iowa GOP chairman who had just declared Cruz the winner.
“You know what the Cruz people did. They threw the vote,” Trump told Kaufmann. “I think you need to publicly disavow the result.”
Kaufmann told Trump he couldn’t do that. It would be another black eye for Iowa, four years after the party mistakenly declared Mitt Romney the winner over Rick Santorum.
A long silence. “You should disavow the result,” Trump said. “Think about it, will you?”
RUBIO WAS ROUNDLY RIDICULED FOR DELIVERING WHAT SOUNDED LIKE a victory speech after his third-place finish in Iowa. But in some ways, he had won: Presidential politics are all about narratives and expectations, and Rubio captured 23 percent of the vote, just 1 point behind Trump, in a state where polls had projected him in the mid-teens. More important, his next-closest competitor was Carson, at 9 percent. Huckabee and Santorum quit the race after Iowa, freeing up more voters, and Rubio’s rivals in the establishment lane had become afterthoughts.
The polling in New Hampshire reflected this new reality. Rubio, who for weeks had been stuck in the low teens in a five-way cluster with Bush, Christie, Cruz, and Ohio governor John Kasich, suddenly broke out. Several reputable surveys showed Rubio jumping to 17, 18, and 19 percent in the immediate aftermath of Iowa’s caucuses, establishing clear separation from the non-Trump pack.
Heading into the February 6 debate in Manchester, on a Saturday evening three days before the state’s primary, Rubio was positioned to complete step two of the process: a second-place finish that would send his centrist rivals packing and set up the three-way contest in South Carolina that Rubio’s team craved.
The governor of New Jersey had other ideas.
Christie had once been the hottest commodity in Republican politics. His upset victory in 2009 had injected vitality and personality into a party woefully short on both. His truculent style and larger-than-life aura were a perfect fit for the state; when a group of top GOP donors pleaded with him to run for president in 2012, Christie refused, saying there was more work to be done in New Jersey. He did it well, reforming the state’s pension structure and winning multiple fights with the teachers’ unions, earning himself approval ratings that topped 70 percent. After his deft handling of Superstorm Sandy, Christie coasted to reelection in 2013 by 22 points—in one of America’s bluest states—and was positioned as a top-tier contender for the presidency in 2016.
And then came “Bridgegate.” Many local Democratic officials endorsed Christie in his 2013 reelection bid; one who did not was Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee. In retaliation, a top Christie aide emailed one of the governor’s allies at the Port Authority: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” On the first day of school that September, the Port Authority unexpectedly shut down multiple road lanes on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, causing mass delays and prompting an investigation that exposed the administration’s plans for political retribution. Christie was never proved to have had knowledge of the scheme, but the scandal engulfed his second term, sinking his approval ratings and his presidential prospects.