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” (the Party leaders, especially those who have worked with Cruz, seem to despise him) and pulled ahead in the polls. If Trump had triumphed, and then gone on to win 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. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/ted-cruz-wins-trump-loses-for-now
