Glenn Beck dedicated his entire television program last night to a one-on-one interview with Sen. Ted Cruz in which the GOP presidential hopeful once again declared that mobilizing right-wing Christians is they key to solving this nation’s problems, proclaiming that if his campaign can mobilize 10 million more Christians to vote in the 2016 election, he will win it in a landslide.
Beck noted that Rafael Cruz, Ted’s father and chief surrogate, is out on the campaign trail on his behalf, working to motivate pastors to mobilize their congregations to vote because supposedly “54 million Christians didn’t vote last time around” and so the key to a Cruz election victory lies in “waking the churches up.”
“Absolutely yes,” said Cruz. “Imagine in 2016, only 44 million Christians stay home. Now, if that happens, we have done a horrible job; I mean, what a miserable failure if 44 million stay home. But if an extra 10 million evangelical Christians show up on election day, we will not be up at two or three in the morning wondering what happened in Ohio or Florida; they’ll call the election at 8:37 PM. That’s the difference!”
the Texas Republican went on to assert that his father’s efforts, coupled with David Barton’s work to restore the “Black Robe Regiment,” is paying dividends because he is “seeing more and more pastors waking up and being energized.”
Cruz has been heavily courting Religious Right leaders, as Politico reported just today that he is now working with former Southern Baptist leader Paul Pressler and has been courting activists such as Tony Perkins and Bob Vander Plaats.
For more than a year, Cruz has aggressively courted social-conservative leaders such as Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, who has not endorsed yet but will appear next month with Cruz at a South Carolina rally for religious liberty. One critical movement convener, Paul Pressler, on whose ranch Christian leaders gathered in early 2012 to throw their support behind Rick Santorum, has already backed Cruz. And the Cruz campaign expects two other influential Iowa leaders — The Family Leader’s Bob Vander Plaats and Rep. Steve King, whose son is working for Cruz’s super PAC — to line up behind him. “I think it would be a stunner if they didn’t,” said a senior Cruz operative.
