Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) will headline the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention this month, joining a pair of other potential presidential candidate also weighing bids to enter the 2016 field.

Cruz is listed as the “featured speaker” on the group’s website. The roster of speakers also includes former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who ran for president in 2012, and Ben Carson, the Tea Party favorite and former neurosurgeon who’s debating entering the fray.

{mosads}Joe Dugan, the convention’s executive producer, told Breitbart News that the event gives the potential candidates a forum with active GOP voters just a year before South Carolina’s primary.

“I think true conservatives like Senator Cruz are very astute in reaching out to the grassroots at this early stage,” he said. 

“These are the people who will control the ground game before the all important South Carolina GOP Presidential primary. These are the people who will knock on the doors, and man the phone banks with a zeal and persistence that Establishment big money cannot buy.”

Whether by causation or correlation, the winner of the South Carolina primary has gone on to secure the Republican nomination in every year except 2012, when former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) won. The primary, which began in 1980, is typically an important early momentum-builder for presidential candidates.

Cruz, Santorum and Carson are all popular presidential picks for the Tea Party and staunch conservative Republicans. Cruz and Carson placed fifth and sixth respectively in an ABC News/Washington Post poll of Republican leaning voters from December. Santorum finished 14th.

The freshman Texas senator won the Value Voters Summit’s presidential straw poll in September, and Carson won the Conservative Political Action Committee poll in August.

Reps. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) will also speak at the Jan. 18 event.