A political year like no other

GREENVILLE, S.C.—At a tiny VFW post in Lexington, S.C., a few cars steered through a sandy parking lot for a low-key event with a onetime presidential front-runner. Near a two-lane road, cars whooshed by as a lone volunteer held a small campaign sign with a single word: “Jeb!”

At a folding table with a stack of stickers and buttons, a few dozen visitors registered with a campaign staffer at the November event, and a sign-up sheet for new volunteers held two names on a long line of empty columns.

A few days later in nearby Greenville, S.C., thousands of people formed a long line on a Friday morning outside an auditorium at Bob Jones University, where former neurosurgeon Ben Carson huddled with major news networks ahead of a packed event.

Secret Service agents assigned to presidential front-runners (including Donald Trump) watched closely as guests moved slowly through metal detectors, and police with bulletproof vests stood nearby.

At an impromptu news conference inside, Yahoo News correspondent Katie Couric craned to film Carson on an iPhone in the crowded room, as the GOP candidate told reporters: “I’m not a politician. If that hurts me, it hurts me.”

For months, it didn’t hurt him.

Carson drew thousands to campaign events across the country and had pulled even with Trump in some national polls. But in mid-November a series of foreign policy stumbles dented Carson’s momentum, just as the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris raised the urgency of national security.

It was the latest twist in one of the most unpredictable—and unusual—GOP contests in recent history.

Even as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., gained ground on Carson—and faced off against each other—business mogul Donald Trump maintained a solid lead, and the diverse Republican playing field posed an open question less than eight weeks before primary contests begin on Feb. 1: What do GOP voters want?

When Mark DeMoss considers this year’s peculiar contest, he invokes a vivid analogy. “It’s the political equivalent of a thousand-year flood,” he says. “There’s no playbook.”

The evangelical publicist has followed presidential politics—and advised GOP candidates—for nearly a decade. During this cycle, DeMoss has an unpaid role occasionally advising the Jeb Bush campaign.

Former Florida Gov. Bush—once considered a favorite to clinch the GOP nomination—now trails in fifth place behind a bombastic businessman, a retired neurosurgeon, and two freshmen senators from states with Bush family ties: Texas and Florida.

DeMoss doesn’t suggest a strategy for breaking through. “Nobody has ever seen anything like this presidential cycle in their lifetime,” he says. “All the conventional wisdom goes out the window.”

Inside the VFW hall in Lexington, S.C., an optimistic pastor told the small crowd the Bush campaign isn’t over. But he added, “It’s praying time.”

ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, the presidential race wasn’t the only subject of prayer.

On the morning after Carson appeared at a presidential forum at Bob Jones University, Sen. Ted Cruz took the same stage at the Christian school to open his own campaign event with prayer.

In the 24 hours since Carson appeared, the world had convulsed: Islamic State terrorists had slaughtered 130 people in the streets of Paris, and presidential politics instantly gained a heightened security dynamic, as Americans worried about terrorist strikes in the United States.

Cruz talked about the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism,” and he prayed: “Give us the clarity and strength of Winston Churchill in 1936 … to understand this is not an evil that will quietly slink away. … This is an evil that must be defeated.”

It wasn’t the first time Cruz had invoked Churchill.

Before staging a 21-hour filibuster in 2013 aimed at blocking Obamacare, Cruz likened his battle against the Affordable Care Act to Churchill gearing up for World War II, saying, “We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the streets” to defeat the healthcare legislation.

The Senate passed the bill, but the senator had made his point.

Indeed, Cruz built a successful career of making forceful points as a Harvard-trained attorney before his election to the Senate in 2012. As solicitor general of Texas during a Republican administration, Cruz pursued cases on guns laws, states’ rights, and religious liberty. In six years he argued nine cases before the Supreme Court, winning five of them. Even his opponents acknowledged his mastery of arguing conservative positions they disliked.

Winning arguments is central to Cruz’s philosophy in law and politics, and he has spoken of the “meta-battle of framing the narrative.” He also quotes Margaret Thatcher: “First you win the argument, and then you win the vote.”

But some critics say making a point doesn’t always equal making progress, particularly in a Senate where reaching agreement is critical to passing legislation.

For example, Cruz’s 2013 filibuster over Obamacare helped lay the groundwork for a government shutdown that some saw as more harmful than helpful to Republicans, even as the legislation went forward.

Cruz disagrees, saying the shutdown drew attention to the inadequacies of Obamacare, as the government website crashed early on, and public opinion of the law continued to decline.

Still, even conservative colleagues sometimes bristle at Cruz’s methods. Former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who retired in 2014 after two decades as a stalwart fiscal conservative in Congress, has criticized Cruz for making promises that don’t materialize. He points to Cruz’s Obamacare filibuster and the government shutdown as examples.

“What you do is you create greater disappointment in the hinterlands, because you gave them a false hope, knowing that you couldn’t accomplish it, but it was about yelling, and screaming, and waving the flag,” Coburn told a Sirius XM radio show earlier this year. “And so what happens is, there becomes less confidence in the Congress and its ability to do its job.”

Coburn also noted his own conservative voting record in Congress: “And yet, I compromised all the time to accomplish things that were good for the country.”

Cruz has responded to such criticism by saying he’s willing to compromise with legislators if the terms are agreeable, but that he won’t participate in making problems worse.

(Sometimes those ideas change. In recent weeks, Cruz has joined other Republican candidates in calling for a halt on all or most Syrian refugees coming to the United States, saying allowing additional Syrian refugees to enter the country would be “lunacy.” But early last year, Cruz defended admitting Syrian refugees: “We have welcomed refugees—the tired, the huddled masses—for centuries. … We have to be vigilant to make sure those coming are not affiliated with terrorists, but we can do that.”)

For now, Cruz is tapping into positions popular with many GOP voters, including a pledge to stop illegal immigration by tripling the number of border patrol agents, improving surveillance tools, and building a border wall.

Cruz uses those positions to criticize Sen. Marco Rubio, who helped craft the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill he later distanced himself from. (See “Lines of communication,” Oct. 31, 2015.) Rubio denies he favors “amnesty” for illegal immigrants as Cruz charges, but immigration policy may form the fiercest point of contention between two candidates perhaps on track to front-runner status.

Some of Cruz’s immigration proposals are similar to those advocated by Trump, the current front-runner Cruz has been careful about criticizing as he seeks to gain more votes and hopes for Trump’s poll numbers to erode.

But Cruz, the son of an evangelical pastor, may peel more votes from Carson, the neurosurgeon who has polled well among evangelicals in Iowa. As Carson faltered in recent weeks, some polls showed Cruz pulling ahead of the former front-runner in Iowa.

Cruz is unabashed in appealing to evangelicals, with a style mingling themes of political and spiritual revival. At the Bob Jones event, Cruz highlighted defending religious liberty for Christians facing legal action, particularly for opposition to same-sex marriage.

“We serve an Almighty God,” said Cruz. “The same light that spoke to Moses in the desert, that awakened Paul on the road to Damascus, lives within each and every one of us.”

It’s unclear how Cruz’s style would play in a general election, where broader appeal to a wider group of voters could prove critical.

At least one prominent Cruz supporter thinks it doesn’t matter. Steve Deace, a radio host in Iowa, says the last two elections proved that going to the political center didn’t work: “Ask President McCain. Ask President Romney.”

He also doesn’t worry about Carson, saying the candidate “doesn’t carry the presence of an alpha.”

IF CARSON DOESN’T SEEM LIKE AN ALPHA, his mild manner has appealed to enough voters to give him near-front-runner status for months. But that may be wearing thin: After the Paris attacks, Carson’s poll numbers dipped, as Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio spoke forcefully about Islamic terrorism.

(Meanwhile Rubio’s support continued to rise, and his approach to wooing evangelical voters remained low-key but deliberate: The campaign hired Eric Teetsel, a Wheaton grad and former director of the Manhattan Declaration—a traditional marriage initiative—as director of faith outreach.)

While some critics cast doubts about Carson’s grasp of foreign policy, he also faced a less-noticed criticism from the pro-life community. The controversy came as a reporter asked Carson about Terri Schiavo.

The Florida woman, who suffered from a brain injury, died in 2005 after a court ordered caregivers to remove her feeding tube. The order followed years of legal battle between Schiavo’s husband, who wanted to let his wife die, and her parents, who said the government should allow their daughter to live.

When reporters asked Carson about Schiavo’s case, he called it “much ado about nothing.”

The comment alarmed some pro-life advocates, including Bobby Schindler, the brother of Schiavo, who also fought to save his sister’s life. Carson later said he meant the media tried to make the pro-life community look as if it was going overboard in supporting Schiavo.

But his original comments didn’t mention the media, and left Schindler unsettled. He said Carson later called him, but didn’t explicitly condemn Schiavo’s death by starvation.

It’s a notable episode given another candidate in the GOP race: As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush pushed state legislators to pass a law aimed at saving Schiavo’s life. Schindler said he was grateful for Bush’s years of advocacy and noted his efforts “gave us a lot more time with my sister.”

Bush didn’t mention Schiavo during his stop at the VFW in Lexington, S.C., but he did tout other conservative positions he took as governor: cutting taxes, vetoing earmark spending, and creating the first school voucher program in the country.

Critics have called Bush a moderate for his support of Common Core and mass immigration. But others have noted the candidate embraced those positions after his tenure as Florida governor.

Dan Gelber, the Democratic leader in the Florida state House during part of Bush’s tenure, told The Wall Street Journal: “Anyone who woke up in Florida every morning knew that Jeb Bush was not a moderate. You could check every single box.”

Still, the moderate label has stuck—especially as acts of Muslim terrorism have raised the profile of the immigration issue—and Bush’s poll numbers have stuck behind the front-runners for months. The candidate continues his campaign events in places like South Carolina, where he comes across as far more forceful than he does in debate settings with other GOP candidates.

But time is running short: In the Southern state where the winner of the GOP primary nearly always wins the nomination, Bush and other lower-tier candidates have only a couple of months before this season’s thousand-year flood could sweep their candidacies away.