Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses the old-fashioned way: he earned it. Employing a sophisticated, expansive ground game that overwhelmed the efforts of his competitors, the Cruz turnout machine was something to behold. The candidate visited all 99 Iowa counties.  He had a captain in all 1,681 precincts.  And he used an extensive network of churches and pastors to identify his supporters and then get them to the caucuses last night. In the last few days of the campaign, he had 12,000 volunteers knocking on 2,000 doors and making more than 20,000 calls every day. He out-worked, out-hustled, out-thought, and eventually out-maneuvered all of the other candidates.  It was a spectacular example of retail politics at its finest. CNN: "When he started this thing, he was nowhere," said GOP pollster Frank Luntz, standing on a chair as an overflow Cruz crowd surrounded him in Ames. "I would use this campaign to teach others how to run a...(Read Full Post)