Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) won’t be surprised if Mitt Romney runs for president against the Chris Christie, the New Jersey Republican who angered conservatives with his embrace of President Obama when Hurricane Sandy struck just days before the 2012 election.
“There’s one bucket that, for lack of a better word, I’ll call the ‘moderate establishment’ bucket. It’ll be some combination of Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney,” Cruz told a group of potential donors, according to the New York Observer. “My guess is two of the three will run. And my view is whoever’s in that bucket will raise tons of money. A lot of donors will rush to write them checks. And yet if the nominee comes from that bucket, the same voters who stayed home in 2008 and 2012 will stay home again and Hillary’s the winner.”
Cruz’s prediction that “two of the three will run” seems to be the behind-closed-doors conventional wisdom in Republican circles, with the secondary premise that if Jeb Bush runs, Romney will stay out of the race. Christie is less of a deterrent, in this scenario.