Believe it or not, Ted Cruz can turn on the charm on the campaign trail

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Ted Cruz resembles a pastor at a revival meeting as he paces the room, microphone in hand. There are no notes, no teleprompter, no podium. Just the Canadian-born Texas senator, clad in a blue denim shirt and jeans, preaching a gospel of small government and interventionist social policy to hundreds of voters crammed into a middle-school cafeteria on a Saturday morning.

Elect him president, Mr. Cruz promises, and he will launch a Justice Department assault on Planned Parenthood, repeal Barack Obama's health-care reforms and his amnesty for illegal immigrants, introduce a 10 per cent flat tax and vastly shrink the size of government.

"The social safety net should be a trampoline and not a hammock," he declares, as the crowd murmurs in approval. "When my dad, back in 1957, was a teenage immigrant, he couldn't speak English, he was washing dishes making 50 cents an hour. Thank God some well-meaning liberal didn't come put his arm around him and say, 'Let me take care of you. Let me give you a government cheque. Let me make you dependent on government.'"

That his dad went on to become an evangelical preacher is evident in the son's rhetoric, which is peppered with these sorts of colourful-if-corny images.

On his solution to domestic terrorism: "Next time a jihadist shows up at a recruiting centre in Chattanooga, he's going to encounter the business end of firearms wielded by a dozen marines." On the illegal immigrants breaching the southern border: "They're not well-meaning social workers with beards and Birkenstocks; they are vicious criminal transnational cartels."

At times, Mr. Cruz strays into the downright ridiculous. When describing the dangers of a liberal-dominated Supreme Court, he asserts with complete sincerity that left-leaning justices would tear down memorials to veterans for containing religious symbols. "We're not far away from the chisels coming out to chisel off the crosses and the stars of David on the tombstones of our fallen soldiers," he says.

Religion is an ever-present theme: He exhorts his audience to pray for his success at the polls and quotes a passage from 2 Chronicles to frame his candidacy in spiritual terms.

Nearly every word of this speech in Hubbard – a speck of a town surrounded by an endless expanse of Iowa prairie – is scripted. Mr. Cruz will repeat it four more times today. But he delivers it so smoothly and naturally, you would be forgiven for thinking he came up with it all off the top of his head. It's the sort of skill that looks easy when done this well, but that very few politicians ever really master.

You have to see Mr. Cruz in action to understand his appeal. It's particularly important because the dominant narrative of his rapid rise – he was first elected to the Senate in 2012 by upsetting a far more experienced, heavily favoured candidate of his own party – has been that nobody in Washington can stand the guy.

To those on the left, he is an ideological arch rival, one of the most extreme figures in a party moving ever rightward. To his GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill, he is a bloviating grandstander, more interested in self-aggrandizement than getting anything done in Congress. Mr. Cruz has repeatedly tried to shut down the government to protest various Obama budget measures, earning the ire of everyone from Senator John McCain to former president George W. Bush along the way.

But a good many voters like him a lot. Two days after I watched him in Hubbard, he edged Donald Trump in the Iowa caucuses. He is currently running second to the bombastic billionaire in most national polls and is mounting a credible, Tea Party-fuelled campaign for the Republican nomination.

And the very things that have made him reviled in Washington – the ideological fervour, the obstructionist antics – endear him to the conservative base. They allow him to tell his audience that he stood firm as other congressional Republicans rolled over and cut deals with Mr. Obama.

It's an argument that goes over well in Hubbard.

"I'm impressed with just how articulate he is. And I'm impressed with his past records, with how he voted, he's been consistent with voting the same way," says farmer Joy Ioerger, 64. "Watching all the debates, he just still seems to be the most powerful and energetic – he knows what he wants to do."

Even Mr. Cruz's contrarian promise to abolish federal rules that mandate a certain amount of ethanol be used in gasoline earns him plaudits among his supporters. Protection for the ethanol industry is the sort of thing every pandering politician promises in corn-producing Iowa; opposing it shows his ideological consistency.

"I like the fact that he'll stand up for taking away all the government influence and subsidies," says Ted Frandson, a 52-year-old corn and soybean farmer whose livelihood depends in part on ethanol. "I'd be okay if it ended up hurting ethanol, as long as it's fair for everybody."

And if faith in Mr. Cruz's political dogmatism is part of his appeal, faith in his spiritual dimension is just as important.

Cattle farmer Blake Lehmann, a slender red-haired 22-year-old who wouldn't look out of place in a Brooklyn cafe, is drawn by Mr. Cruz's religious conviction and his staunch opposition to abortion.

"His Christian faith and values align with mine, and what our country truly needs today. My faith is the most important thing to me in my life – more than my job, more than being a farmer," he says. "Obama is deliberately attacking Christians today. He's killing life in the womb."

His wife Inga Lehmann, 22, a third-grade teacher, for her part, is drawn to Mr. Cruz's small government message.

"About 60 per cent of my students are [low-income] – I see these students coming every day and some of their shoes are torn," she says. "But giving handouts isn't going to help – you don't want to give people fish, you want to teach them how to fish."

He's a true believer, Mr. Cruz. Even when he's not talking about religion, there's something of an apocalyptic fervour that permeates his rhetoric. Grandstanding it may be; but it seems to reveal something sincere beneath the well-rehearsed sound bites.

"We are standing at the edge of a cliff," he tells his audience in Hubbard at the end of this speech. "If we keep going in the same direction another four or eight more years, we risk losing the greatest country in the history of the world."