But in the state that will kick off voting for presidential nomination with its Feb. 1 caucuses, they’re both being bested by Donald Trump, the thrice-married celebrity billionaire.
Cruz jumped out ahead of Trump in Iowa polls last month, largely on the strength of evangelical voters he poached from Carson. But with voting just days away, the New York businessman has surged back into a competitive position in Iowa.
Trump is now making overt moves to court evangelicals, most recently by making two high-profile appearances campuses known for their conservative brand of Christianity: Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
On Friday, Trump’s campaign cut a radio ad that will begin playing in Iowa and South Carolina, another evangelical stronghold and early-voting state, featuring a portion of a speech by Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of the Liberty University, delivered to introduce Trump.
Falwell is named after his father, the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, who founded Liberty University, along with the politically powerful “Moral Majority” in the 1980s. Falwell Jr. showered Trump with praise — though he stopped just short of an endorsement — while introducing the billionaire.
“Donald Trump has stunned the political world by building an unlikely coalition that crosses all demographic boundaries of age, sex, race, religion and social classes and all party lines,” Falwell said in the portion of the speech excerpted in the ad. “Donald Trump is a breath of fresh air.”
Faith-based voters are traditionally an important component of the Iowa Republican caucus vote: In a Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll this month, 57 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers said they attend church at least once a week. In the December edition of the same poll, half of likely Republican caucus-goers identified themselves as “born again” or evangelical Christians.
Though Trump has begun to allude to his Presbyterian faith in speeches, he has not made religion a central part of his campaign in the same way some of his rivals have.