“I guess what makes us different is probably our approach as to how we would make the party bigger,” Paul argued weeks later.

In Litchfield, Cruz promised conservatives that they could win without “making the party bigger.” Just as Paul had, he embraced the trappings of the setting; his wife, Heidi, even doffed an “Armed and Fabulous” baseball cap, provided by one of the gun groups. A man wearing a shirt with the legend “Molon Labe” (Greek for “come and take it”) stood feet away from a man plastered in dragon tattoos. They were interested in libertarian principles, and Cruz was offering—unlike Paul—liberty without compromise. When a voter from Massachusetts (a “political refugee,” joked Cruz) pressed Cruz on his theory that running right would create an “uprising” against the Democrats, Cruz insisted that only pundits and strategists disagreed…

“It’s conventional wisdom that we are competing for the same voters,” said Cruz spokesman and strategist Rick Tyler in a conversation with Bloomberg, “but when you look at economic and foreign policy, I don’t see that Rand is competing for the Tea Party vote. That’s already coming to us. And if libertarians get upset with Rand, I think that the Cruz campaign is a natural place for them to go.”

In his speeches this weekend in New Hampshire, Cruz offered the GOP’s libertarian voters some ways to achieve their goals without any feints toward the center or the left. Paul has linked his opposition to Loretta Lynch’s nomination for attorney general to her support for civil forfeitures. In Litchfield, Cruz told voters of how he’d stared down Lynch and watched her refuse to buck the Obama administration’s executive orders—civil forfeitures, a libertarian nightmare, had nothing to do with it.