EASLEY, S.C. » The GOP presidential contenders stepped up the tempo ahead of South Carolina’s first-in-the-South primary on Saturday, a contest that could prove pivotal.

A win for front-runner Donald Trump will make him hard to stop. He got sidetracked Thursday by a spat with the pope, of all people.

An upset win for Ted Cruz would upend the race. But he’s locked in a fight for second place with Marco Rubio, which explained the flurry of jabs they’ve traded in a state known for bare-knuckle campaigns and for being the graveyard of White House ambitions.

For Jeb Bush and John Kasich, a weak showing could hobble or even end their campaigns.

As in Iowa and New Hampshire, this is a game of expectations and performance. Cruz won the first of those, Trump the second.

“Usually the candidate that wins South Carolina goes into that SEC primary Super Tuesday with some juice. That mojo, that momentum — that’s what they look for coming out of South Carolina,” said U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., who supports Cruz.

Cruz has long eyed the March 1 contests in Texas and other states across the Southeastern Conference to catapult him toward the nomination. But a win for Trump on Saturday would accelerate the billionaire builder’s march.

“We just can’t let Trump win,” said Dean Anderson, 84, a Realtor and retired advertising executive from Greenville who supports Cruz. Like other voters in the state, he’s a veteran of presidential politics and, therefore, an amateur pundit.

“Bush has got to hang it up. He doesn’t have any support. It’s going to get to a three-man race — Rubio, Cruz and Trump. Someplace down the road Cruz and Rubio may have to make a decision to join forces,” he said.

For now, Cruz and Rubio are locked in battle.

Rubio aides spent the day bashing Cruz as unethical and dishonest.

They’re still pointing to erroneous reports that Cruz spread ahead of the Iowa caucuses that Ben Carson was dropping out. They also drummed up complaints about a fake Facebook page purporting to show that South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the congressional Benghazi investigation, had defected from Rubio to Cruz.

Gowdy is popular upstate, the evangelical heart of South Carolina, which Cruz is counting on. So such a defection would be significant.

“It’s a pattern of personal destruction and it’s rooted in falsehood and it’s dirty pool and people are sick of it,” said Rubio supporter Jason Chaffetz, a Utah congressman, in a call with reporters.

The Cruz campaign denies any involvement in the Facebook incident. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry blasted Rubio for “feigned outrage.”

Rubio strategist Todd Harris conceded there’s no direct evidence of a link.

“What we do know is that there is a culture of dishonesty that goes from top to bottom in the Cruz campaign where telling lies is not only tolerated but seems to be encouraged,” he said.

Cruz accuses Rubio and Trump of crying “liar” at every turn because they’re afraid of voters looking closely at their records. His allies rallied to his defense.

Jack Kingston, a former Georgia congressman who supports Cruz, vouched for the senator, calling him and his wife “Christians of great integrity.”

“This is a very tough family discussion,” and the toughest primary fight he can recall, Kingston said. “Of course elbows are sharpening. If you think about the Rubio camp right now, they’re in a must-win situation.”

For the second day straight, Cruz basked in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that showed him pulling ahead of Trump nationally, nosing into first place by 2 percentage points. A half-dozen other recent national polls still show Trump with a solid lead, and the RealClearPolitics rolling average puts him in first by 14 points.

In South Carolina, all recent public polling shows Trump with a comfortable lead, averaging 15 points, with Cruz and Rubio locked in a fight for second.

Cruz stayed focused on the one poll that shows him in the lead.

He cited two factors: Justice Antonin Scalia’s death focused attention on the Supreme Court and the need for a conservative president with a track record. Second, he said, voters are thinking hard about who has the temperament to be commander in chief. The crowd tittered a bit.

“It says something that you say that and everyone knows what that means,” said Cruz, who has hammered Trump as intemperate and impulsive.

At Mutt’s BBQ in Easley, Utah Sen. Mike Lee stumped with Cruz and vouched for his likability, pushing back against Trump’s assertions that Cruz is so “nasty” and disliked that he could never get anything done as president.

In a luncheon speech to the Greenville County Republican Women, Cruz jabbed at Trump as the punch line to a story about his grandmother. She feigned insanity to avoid the Cuban regime’s demand for teachers to indoctrinate children with communism.

“In the 1950s, being deemed a lunatic was not a good thing. Nowadays it’s a requisite for running for public office,” Cruz quipped.

Afterward, as he shook hands, Greenville resident Martha Franks, 78, lamented Trump’s popularity.

“There are a lot of people that are misguided in our country and they want change so badly,” she said. “There’s no comparison. One is smart and the other is a braggart and arrogant. One looks presidential and the other doesn’t.”

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