Citing a need to “appear more friendly” and avoid “legacy issues,” Ted Cruz announced his legal name change to TritonEd Cruz days before the Iowa Caucus. Cruz’s P.R. team said that this rebranding was in direct response to low poll numbers heading into Feb. 1’s caucus.

“We hope that this rebranding will help to narrow Cruz’s focus,” said campaign manager Julianne Sherry. “We’ve adopted a three-pronged approach to capturing the souls and hearts of voters: reduce, the number of people we target; reuse, soundbites so that people remember him better; and recycle, the points of other candidates since they’re doing much better at this.”

“I feel like this change has drastically improved public perception of me,” said Cruz. “More syllables means more intimidating means more votes, right?”

Following a poor showing at the caucus, Cruz and his team are researching further ways to increase voter approval outside of adding a new coat of paint. So far, early results in their internal polling of constituents point to housing or parking as more likely to appease the fickle masses.