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By MATT FLEGENHEIMER and THOMAS KAPLANMarch 16, 2016
HOUSTON — After months squaring off against Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, presuming him to be the chief obstacle to a one-on-one showdown with Donald J. Trump, Senator Ted Cruz on Wednesday emerged from the latest Republican primaries with a new foe who was actually there all along: Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.
The transition seemed a bit jarring for all involved. The men had scarcely said a cross word about each other before Tuesday night’s contests.
There had been little need. While Mr. Cruz, of Texas, has moved to consolidate support among evangelical and Tea Party voters, Mr. Kasich has made a play for party moderates, outlasting establishment rivals like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Mr. Rubio, who dropped out Tuesday after losing his home state.
Now, it seems, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich will get to know each other a bit better. And their opening gambits were to argue that the other has no chance of becoming president .
“There are only two people who actually have a viable path to the nomination,” Jason Johnson, Mr. Cruz’s chief strategist, told reporters. “There’s one spoiler in the race: John Kasich.”
Mr. Johnson likened Mr. Kasich’s run to some quixotic ambitions of his own. “It’s like my dream of making the senior tour on the P.G.A. or my dream of being a Nascar driver,” he said. “It ain’t going to happen.”
Mr. Kasich countered on Wednesday by suggesting that Mr. Cruz, along with Mr. Trump, was too extreme to attract wide support in the fall.
“Neither of those guys can win a general election,” he told reporters after a town hall-style event outside Philadelphia. “So maybe they’re spoiling it for the Republican Partyand for the conservative movement.”
So far, little of the sparring has focused on substance. Late Tuesday evening, as election returns still trickled in, senior Cruz aides seemed unsure how they might proceed against Mr. Kasich.
Jeff Roe, Mr. Cruz’s campaign manager, suggested the senator stood to gain little from attacks on his unlikely rival.
“That’d be the wrong move to start engaging with John Kasich,” Mr. Roe said, before adding that he might send “a calculator” to the Kasich campaign to signal the governor’s large delegate deficit, more than 250 behind Mr . Cruz. (Mr. Cruz himself is more than 250 behind Mr. Trump.)
But hours later, Mr. Johnson hinted that a look at Mr. Kasich’s résumé might be in order.
“He has an interesting record that’s gone without examination,” he said coyly.
A spokesman for Mr. Kasich, Chris Schrimpf, welcomed an examination of the governor’s record both in Ohio and during his time in Congress. “Let’s compare Governor Kasich’s record when he was in Washington toTed Cruz’s,” Mr. Schrimpf said. “What is Ted Cruz’s greatest accomplishment?”
If Mr. Cruz does plan to escalate hostilities, he seems likely to highlight Mr. Kasich’s decision to expandMedicaid in Ohio under the Affordable Care Act, a decision that puts him at odds with many conservatives.
Mr. Kasich has largely avoided offering direct criticism of other candidates, and his positivity is now at the center of his message, so it is not likely that he will go after Mr. Cruz in a direct way. Still, he has offered hints of how he views the senator’s campaign promises. At a town hall event in Michigan last week, he asked audience members to raise their hands if they believed that a year from now, after the election, the Internal Revenue Service would not exist and the country would have a 10 percent flat tax — two planks of Mr. Cruz’s campaign.
“Not one hand has gone up!” Mr. Kasich observed.
Mr. Kasich’s team believes that Mr. Cruz’s message will not be well received in more moderate states that have yet to vote, like New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where Mr. Kasich was born and raised. “John Kasich’s story began in Pennsylvania,” read a flier at his event on Wednesday, showing the Pittsburgh skyline.
Aides to Mr. Cruz said he planned to campaign aggressively across the electoral map, despite the assumption that his message of conservative purity and religious faith could be a difficult fit in places like the Northeast. “If you think we’re ceding New York because Donald Trumphails from Queens and lives in Manhattan, that would be a mistake,” Mr. Johnson said.
First, attention will turn to Arizona and Utah, which vote on Tuesday. With Mr. Trump poised to do well in Arizona, Mr. Cruz’s hopes are higher in Utah, powered by an endorsement from Senator Mike Lee. But Mr. Kasich, who plans to campaign there on Friday and advertise in the state, could undercut Mr. Cruz’s effort to sweep the state’s delegates with a majority of the vote.
The odds of either man catching Mr. Trump before the convention are long. And now it appears both candidates will have one less chance to prove themselves against him. Mr. Trump said Wednesday morning that he would skip a debate scheduled for Monday in Salt Lake City.
Mr. Kasich’s team signaled he would not attend without Mr. Trump.
Mr. Cruz revived an attack he tried in January, when Mr. Trump missed a debate in Iowa. “#DuckingDonald strikes again,” Mr. Cruz posted on Twitter. “Tell @realDonaldTrump to debate.”
But by the afternoon, given the possibility of extremely low turnout, the debate was canceled.
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