Cruz began the race isolated on the party’s right flank. Juxtaposed against Trump and Rubio, though, he could position himself roughly in the party’s center. To be sure, a case could be made to cast any of the three as the “moderate” or as the “extremist.” On foreign policy, Rubio has taken a rigidly neoconservative stance, and Cruz a more dovish one, with Trump too incoherent to be categorized at all. On social policy, Trump has outflanked the others to the right on xenophobic hatred, but to the left on abortion (Cruz and Rubio would ban all abortion, even in cases of rape and incest; Trump would make exceptions for those cases). On fiscal policy, all three candidates favor staggeringly large, regressive, debt-financed tax cuts and Obamacare repeal. All three have questioned climate science and oppose any efforts to limit carbon emissions.

Policy offers an inconclusive basis to compare the candidates, especially when one of the candidates makes up his policies on the fly. The candidates are easier to order on two other dimensions: their fealty to the base versus the Establishment, and their xenophobia. The two measures are somewhat related. Immigration policy, and openness to ethnic minorities, is the issue that most starkly divides the Republican Establishment from the grassroots. Rubio is the candidate who laid his credibility on the line in order to resolve the party’s immigration problem in 2013. (While he failed, and abandoned his own proposal, pro-reform Republicans have every reason to believe his heart lies with them.) Trump is the candidate whose inflammatory racism would brand the GOP as irrevocably hostile to immigrant communities. Cruz lies in between, not having sponsored major pro-reform legislation, but also having steered clear of crude Trumpist demagoguery (and, like Rubio, having a Cuban-American background to fall back upon).

Cruz may find himself best positioned to bridge the gap, and well positioned to win a three-way race divided along these lines.