How Ted Cruz could win the GOP nomination

Cruz. The senator from Texas is starting to climb in Republican polls, and he's using the U.S. Senate stage to help. "I don't think that there is a crisis at the state or local level that really you can point to", he said, that compares to what a president has to decide.

Perhaps the final gasp for some of the Republicans who have essentially moved to Iowa came Friday night at the Presidential Family Forum, as they pleaded for the endorsement of a distinctly local figure, Bob Vander Plaats, whose Christian influence has plucked winners from the depths of the field.

The crowd behind him whooped and cheered, making it hard for the candidate to hear the next question in his earpiece over chants of "We choose Cruz!".

To be sure, Cruz has reacted aggressively to the Paris attacks and he is targeting the same slice of the Republican electorate as the two front-runners. Ted Cruz - 21% (+9) 3. Unlike every other candidate, he hasn't done anything to make the party's base suspicious of him. Donald Trump - 30% (+3) 2.

First, Cruz disagreed with Trump after the New Yorker, expressed openness to setting up a registry of Muslim Americans in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks.

And an interview last week, Jeb Bush dinged Cruz for a vote that he said showed Cruz was insufficiently tough toward Islamic extremism. Deace sees three lanes, a "conservative lane" that includes Cruz, an "establishment lane", but also a separate "outsider lane" that includes Trump and Carson that Cruz doesn't need to consolidate as quickly. Noble has stated in that that his group shouldn't be supporting Rubio, though he personally is.

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"It is the height of lunacy for a government official to welcome in tens of thousands of refugees when we know that among them will be ISIS terrorists", Cruz said at a press conference last week.

"He's allied himself with Steve King", Aguilar said, suggesting that Cruz has turned his back on his immigrant roots.

The candidate's Iowa polling average, as calculated by the website RealClearPolitics, has increased more than 5 percentage points since September 7, when he was bunched together with several other GOP candidates in the mid-single digits. How's he handling it?

In fact, where Rubio team has spent months fending off Obama comparisons, focusing on his inexperience, Cruz's campaign actively encourages such talk. His campaign has launched its first major ad buy in Iowa, an initial six-digit purchase on TV and radio.

When asked by CNN, though, what exactly he was waiting for before outlining policy differences in this new "season", Cruz, in form, told the media to stop egging on Republican-on-Republican violence. In a November 13 story, the Washington Post documented "growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them". Cruz would keep winning support in Iowa, where evangelical voters are a dominant force.

Then it's on to SC, with a brief detour to Nevada, and then the South on Super Tuesday - Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia and Texas - "southern states with lots of evangelical voters where he could do very well". The candidate himself regularly brushes off questions about any state being a must-win, asserting his campaign is "all in" across the map, with the organization and resources to go the distance.