The North Pole may get all the attention this month, but for politicians, it’s the “South polls” that matter. In a fiercely competitive race for the GOP presidential nomination, candidates are counting down the days to more than Christmas. In less than two months, a shrinking field will test their mettle in the first big test: the Iowa Caucus. From there, it’s on to the South, where the Republican Party decided to hold half of its 12 March 1st primaries, after the first in South Carolina.

The more compact primary is a handicap for campaigns with limited resources, which — in past years — had more lead time too build off of an Iowa victory. Under the revised schedule, the successful candidate will need to run a much more expansive campaign, which means they need more money.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) apparently understands this, as evidenced by one of the best ground game since Barack Obama in 2008. “Those people [who] stayed at home in the last election, he’s bringing those folks out,” said one supporter in Tennessee. Others, like church leader Julie West, are hinting at the excitement surrounding Cruz’s campaign. “I have friends who have not even voted in past elections, and they want to volunteer for Ted Cruz.” Thanks to his dad, Pastor Rafael Cruz, the team is making significant headway into a voting evangelical bloc that the Wall Street Journal explains makes up roughly half of GOP primary voters. The fact that Cruz isn’t liked by Establishment types is even more of a plus for conservative voters, who are tired of the party’s continual capitulation.

Going deeper into the grassroots than most campaigns have done in eight years has paid off for the Texas senator, who’s watching his lone star rise in the national polls. After a slow and steady climb, Cruz finally vaulted into second place this week — just for the first time in the race. Passing Ben Carson, who fell to third place, Cruz’s bump took him to 16 percent. That may just be the beginning for the senator, who picked up a major personal endorsement [yesterday] in Iowa from Bob Vander Plaats, president and CEO of The Family Leader.

The campaign’s intentional effort to win over social conservatives is paying off, as Cruz pieces together a formidable army of support from evangelicals, whose causes he has never failed to champion. While Ted has been effective on an array of national issues, he hasn’t strayed from his theme — which is that 2016 is going to be a “religious liberty election.” That continues to resonate with Americans, who open their newspapers every day to a new story of religious hostility — whether it’s the Air Force Academy football team or the University of Tennessee’s censorship.

Unlike the ghosts of candidates past, Cruz is not only unafraid of the tough issues — he’s fearless in tackling them. Just this week, the senator blasted the most disliked commander-in-chief in generations, telling a group of black pastors that it’s no wonder President Obama has a pathetic level of support (15 percent) from American service members. “You look at the military,” Cruz told FRC’s E.W. Jackson, “and one of the things we’ve seen is morale in the military under the Obama administration has plummeted, and it has plummeted because you have a commander-in-chief that doesn’t support our soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines.” He won’t even name the enemy “radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz went on, and is “more interested in promoting homosexuality in the military” than in “defeating our enemy.”

Perhaps that’s why, the latest surveys show, Cruz is surging as the “most trusted” Republican in Iowa on national security. Once again, he’s one of the handful of candidates who manages to do what the Establishment rarely has: champion big-ticket issues without losing his principled stand in the process.

O, Come and Protect Ye Faithful

Twenty-sixteen may be the “religious liberty election” in a lot more than presidential politics. Several states are already gearing up for major legislation on the subject — including Georgia, where the Left is desperately trying to sabotage a bill that would protect Christians like Kelvin Cochran. The longtime Atlanta Fire Chief was sacked for writing a personal book on biblical morality — and he could have filed a complaint under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

There’s just one problem: Georgia doesn’t have one. But it isn’t for lack of trying. Conservative state senators passed SB 129 earlier this year, and according to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, “Republican conventions in 11 of 14 congressional districts adopted resolutions urging lawmakers to adopt SB 129, and the state party unanimously endorsed it at its annual convention in May.” Now, it seems a handful of moderate state leaders are trying to sabotage the push with demands for special LGBT rights. Senate Majority Leader Bill Cowsert ®, who tried in February to ambush the bill, is telling reporters: “If the House does pass it, I hope it includes that anti-discrimination clause to make sure we are protecting people’s religious freedoms but not using that as a shield.”

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as the “compromise” Cowsert suggests. Indiana tried it, and so has Utah. The result is a meaningless piece of “anti-discrimination” propaganda that does nothing to protect the real victims of persecution: Christians. Like others, Cowsert is claiming that RFRAs are a cloak for the state to refuse services for homosexuals.

That is “100-percent not true,” State Senator Josh McKoon lashed back during debates. “The critics of this legislation are using it to scare very good people, to try and raise money for their radical, far-left agendas. Thirty states have this legislation in place, the federal government has had this legislation in place for two decades, and the opponents can’t cite to a single case of discrimination that has been shielded by a religious liberty defense.” Still, liberal forces in the state are on the move to dilute the measure — even going to Indiana to study how opponents toppled the original RFRA there.

Speaking of the Hoosier bill, our friends at the Indiana Family Institute aren’t giving up on the issue, which was hijacked by far-Left extremists last spring. In a new lawsuit announced [yesterday], IFI is challenging the idea that the state’s mishmash of LGBT protections “contradicts the constitutional protections for religious liberty.” Curt Smith, a longtime friend of FRC’s who’s leading the charge, explained that the “fix” agreed to by Governor Mike Pence (R) “deprives many of faith of the protections all Hoosiers should enjoy under the Indiana and U.S. Constitutions.”

“We further believe that equating sexual preference with the most cherished rights of freedom of conscience and religion erodes those founding freedoms while creating special, new rights for the favored group, namely homosexual Hoosiers. That is not the Indiana way.” Nor is it the American way. We applaud IFI for going to court to prove it!

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.