Ted Cruz is getting crushed. He’s got his back against the mat, and he’s scrounging for delegates any way he can, whether it’s by flinging campaign resources at the forgotten U.S. territories, trying to convince America that Indiana is important or even exploiting transphobic fear.
On Thursday, after Donald Trump indicated that it maybe wouldn’t rip the fabric of America apart if public bathrooms were inclusive of all gender identities, Cruz flipped out.
“Let me ask you, have we gone stark raving nuts?” Cruz said while campaigning in Maryland, according to the Texas Tribune. Cruz’s campaign took things one step further when it released this ad attacking Trump’s not-bigoted stance:
Look familiar? That’s because the ad is nearly identical to the fear-mongering anti-HERO ordinance commercials that ran here last year:
The ad campaign worked in Houston, where voters, swayed by fear, shot down the non-discrimination ordinance in November. Whether the tactic will work for Cruz on a national stage is unclear; whether it even matters at this point in the GOP presidential candidate race is perhaps the better question. According to the Associated Press‘s math, Cruz has no chance of clinching the party nomination before the Republican Convention.
But Cruz can still play spoiler to Trump. To do that, he’ll first have to pick off any delegates he can get, and this week is do-or-die for Cruz. The new ad shows that he’s already scraping the very bottom of the campaign barrel.
This article appears in Apr 21-27, 2016.