Friday, March 29, 2024

A Cruz Crash in Pennsylvania?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

The latest Fox News poll shows a big gain for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, to 48 percent support, but perhaps most worrisome of all is a big slump for Ted Cruz, who has dropped to 20 percent from around 30 percent. Electorally, the Cruz campaign is moving in the opposite direction from where it needs to be, perhaps a response by voters to his campaign’s competent success in denying Trump delegates, which is perceived (not without justice) as circumventing the will of the people.

Cruz and the entire Republican Party’s biggest problem, however, remains the lack of a clear, coherent, and persuasive economic message: an explanation for why Main Street has been in an economic slump for at least a decade while Wall Street keeps getting richer.

The entire free enterprise system is now endangered by the failure of the GOP to address voters’ principal concerns.

Trump has an explanation: its China’s fault, it’s Mexico’s fault. And he has a “solution”: a big bad hombre negotiating tough things with these bad guys hurting us.

The explanation and the solution are both false, but Trump is at least addressing voters central concerns.

Bernie Sanders’ explanations and solutions are equally false — witness his most recent ignorant suggestion that banks should not be in the business of making money, they should just lend it to people who need it. But the Democrats’ campaigns are all about people’s economic pain.

Cruz needs to step up his game. First of all, to get elected, and secondly and more importantly, in order to actually fix the economy if he should win.

What is the explanation for our economic stagnation? Cruz could do worse than looking at The Scandal of Money (by the great and brilliant George Gilder).

Maggie Gallagher is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project and can be followed on Twitter @MaggieGallaghe.

More From The Pulse