Graham, who had been ready to give a foreign policy address, hit the stage intending to debunk Cruz. “It was the way he dodged the question about how you get pro-choice people to vote for you,” said Graham to reporters afterward. “I think I’m a pro-life person. I think I can get plenty of pro-choice people to vote for me. I think if you have no exception for rape and incest, which he wouldn’t talk about, it’ll be hard to convert.”…

“Hooray for him,” said Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman who speaks frequently on the party’s need to move to the center. “One of the things that I’ve been most concerned about is that Trump is an idiot, and he’s a blowhard, but the number of people in the party who have not been willing to call out Trump or Cruz about this really hateful rhetoric is just negligible. I was never a big Lindsey Graham fan, because I thought he wanted to declare war on everybody, but I liked this.”

Graham’s lecture had meaning for candidates he did not even name. Democrats, who generally see Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as a strong potential nominee, are confident that they can turn his no-exceptions abortion stance into a deal-breaker with moderates.