From Public Policy Polling:
Ted Cruz is now the top choice of Republican primary voters to be their candidate for President in 2016. He leads the way with 20% to 17% for Rand Paul, 14% for Chris Christie, 11% for Jeb Bush, 10% each for Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, 4% for Bobby Jindal, and 3% each for Rick Santorum and Scott Walker.
Another way to read those numbers is as an aggregate of hard-right preference--i.e., the percentages for all the candidates minus Jeb Bush's and Chris Christie's--which totals 67 percent. A full two-thirds of GOP primary voters prefer to either go down in idealogical flames with a Cruz or Cruz-lite, or, more amusingly, believe that only a "true conservative" can retake the White House.
This belief, as you know, is now among the base's holiest of pieties. Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bob Dole and G.H.W. Bush (Part II)--all, according to the base, were congenital losers because of their inherent conservative apostasies (and G.W. Bush was so swiftly defrocked as a big-government conservative that his name among the faithful is now little more than an unmentionable). Only a real conservative can win back the White House, say the devout, by which they mean some breed of Cruzian critter.
Equal to this myth is the prayerful bitch that It's never been tried. According to Limbaughlike scripture, ye of eminent right-wing faith hath been deprived every four years like celestial clockwork of an authentically Reactionary One. This is, of course, just not so. All one must do is look back a bit farther, to '64, when the eminently reactionary Barry Goldwater--with an electorate much whiter and more rural than today's--gathered up all of 52 Electoral College votes against LBJ's 486.
And 67 percent of GOP primary voters now pray to give that another go, God bless 'em.