23:54
US Republican candidate Ted Cruz on Tuesday dropped out of the Presidential race and ended his campaign after losing to Donald Trump in the Indiana polls. “We gave it everything we’ve got. But the voters chose another path,” Cruz said to his supporters. Notably, Cruz dropping out of the race has made Donald Trump the 'Presumptive' Republican Presidential nominee.
INDIANAPOLIS — Less than a month ago, Senator Ted Cruz seemed to have done it.
He had won Wisconsin. Former rivals were holding their noses to support him. He was dominating delegate elections, positioning himself for what seemed increasingly likely to be a floor fight at the Republican convention in July, as the campaign of Donald J. Trump fell into internal disarray.
“Tonight is a turning point,” Mr. Cruz said on primary night in Milwaukee. “It is a rallying cry.”
It was neither.
On Tuesday, Mr. Cruz ended his campaign, his loss in Indiana extinguishing any chance of denying Mr. Trump the nomination.
“Together we left it all on the field in Indiana,” Mr. Cruz told supporters here as cries of “Nooo!” rained from the crowd. “We gave it everything we’ve got. But the voters chose another path.”
Yet to dismiss Mr. Cruz as an also-ran would diminish his unlikely feat in outlasting nearly every rival: His calls for conservative purity were, for better or worse, the most consistent message in the field, his rage against the “Washington cartel” a signal of the nation’s ever-dimming view of its leaders.
In a year when many voters flocked to the candidate they hoped could startle Washington into submission, Mr. Cruz galvanized millions of supporters drawn to his more ideological conservatism, quoting founding documents and free-market texts. He was the most right-leaning candidate to even sniff the nomination in at least a half-century.
Long before Mr. Trump careered into the race, Mr. Cruz staked perhaps the loudest claim to the boiling national anger among hard-line conservatives in the age of President Obama.
He was half-right.
“Ted Cruz’s theory of the race was that conservatives were angry,” said Ben Domenech, the publisher of The Federalist, a conservative online journal. “It turns out that everyone was angry.”
For a candidate who appeared, just a few weeks ago, to have a plausible path to the nomination, the descent came quickly. The calendar did not help.
Hours after his Wisconsin victory, he charged headlong into New York City, earning Bronx jeers that foretold a hostile reception across a half-dozen Eastern states that were never a natural fit for him.
“Manhattan has spoken!” Mr. Cruz joked bitterly in Indiana. “Everyone give up and go home.”
But the problems ran deeper.
Given an opening to unite the party in opposition to a man many see as an existential threat to it, Mr. Cruz was unable to consolidate support, leaving Republican leaders lurching toward a fateful bet: Live with the risk of a Trump nomination rather than elevate a figure they loathe.
His advisers insisted that he was a more versatile candidate than past Iowa caucus winners like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, but he failed to sufficiently expand his appeal much beyond the party’s most religious and ideological voters. His surrogates in Indiana looked much the same as in Iowa, with faith-inflected testimonials from the radio host Glenn Beck and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas.
“Conservatives are uniting,” Mr. Cruz said often on the campaign trail, long after it felt true. But his efforts were undercut, in large measure, by his toxic relationships with Senate colleagues and a manifest indifference to repairing them.
Soon, the indignities mounted. He named Carly Fiorina his prospective running mate, despite trailing by several hundred delegates, briefly rousing a partly full Indianapolis pavilion
He earned scorn in Indiana for referring to a basketball rim as a “ring.” He was heckled by a young boy in La Porte and several middle-aged men in Marion.
“Sir, with all respect,” Mr. Cruz pleaded, after approaching one of them for a chat on Monday, “Donald Trump is deceiving you. He is playing you for a chump.”
On Tuesday morning, he at last unburdened himself in full, promising to tell reporters “what I really think of Donald Trump” for the first time.
“This man is a pathological liar,” Mr. Cruz said, ticking off Mr. Trump’s distortions, his infidelities, his penchant for conspiracy theories. “The man is utterly amoral.”
It is possible there is nothing more Mr. Cruz could have done.
Mr. Trump has proved immune to political gravity. He has been largely impervious to attacks, once Mr. Cruz backed away from his monthslong embrace and began hammering him.
Most critically, Mr. Trump’s success in early states across the South, thought to be Mr. Cruz’s firewall, forced a rewrite of the Cruz campaign playbook on the fly.
But while few politicians have better absorbed the lessons of the party’s rightward tilt in recent years, Mr. Cruz found himself outmaneuvered on issues like trade and national defense by an outsider whose political antenna had a crisper signal.
Even on immigration — where Mr. Cruz’s grasp of the party’s id helped vanquish a foe, Marco Rubio, who came to regret embracing a pathway to citizenship — Mr. Trump managed to go bigger and louder.
That Mr. Cruz lasted this long anyway was a triumph of management guile and considerable hustle: No Republican campaign more effectively marshaled its finances, holding the most cash on hand for much of the race, and no candidate worked harder than he did, frequently dashing through six events a day in Iowa.
With a showman’s itch and a singular manner of speaking — the long pauses, the controlled twang, the easy deployment of words like “élan” and “hosannas” on the stump — Mr. Cruz registered at times like an actor playing the role of presidential candidate.
He often resorted to gimmickry, from re-enacted movie scenes to lawyerly theatrics to his grandest stunt of all: adding Mrs. Fiorina to an imagined ticket.
But these last few, flailing weeks belied a campaign that for months had followed its initial strategy to the letter.
Mr. Cruz and his advisers often likened the election to a college basketball tournament bracket, where opponents like Scott Walker and Mr. Rubio were to be muscled out one by one. (They also griped that Gov. John Kasichof Ohio failed to leave the court, despite the score.)
When Mr. Cruz entered the race, his team openly cheered its meager position, roughly 5 percent in the polls, reasoning that he could energize his core supporters first.
“You have to own a base in the Republican primary,” his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, said the day Mr. Cruz announced his run at an evangelical university last year. “If you own the base, then you can grow it.”
Mr. Cruz’s most consequential choice might have come last year when he defended Mr. Trump as a credible outsider and a force for good in the race as rivals began taking swings.
As late as December, he celebrated Mr. Trump as “terrific,” rising quietly in the polls as Mr. Trump absorbed the slings and arrows directed to a front-runner.
Even after Mr. Trump began disparaging Mr. Cruz’s Canadian birth, the senator initially resisted a full-scale barrage. Eventually, his broadsides were frequent and scattershot: Mr. Trump was too unsteady, too shifty, too consumed by social media, too much like Hillary Clinton.
Recently, as Mr. Cruz’s growth seemed to reach its outer bounds, he leaned increasingly on this sort of messaging potpourri.
He tried positioning himself as the party’s champion of women. He cast himself as the heir to President Obama’s generational promise, debuting a new slogan — “Yes, we will!” — that was quickly abandoned.
Then there was his habit of declaring as fact things he wished to be true. Mr. Cruz often described the “hard ceiling” of support that Mr. Trump would surely brush up against, estimating it to be 35 to 40 percent.
“Donald has been a minority candidate, a fringe candidate,” Mr. Cruz told reporters last week.
The next day, Mr. Trump received at least 54 percent of the vote in all five primaries.
And if Mr. Trump’s chosen moniker for Mr. Cruz (“Lyin’ Ted”) was not quite as instantly devastating as some of his others (“Low-Energy” Jeb Bush, “Little Marco” Rubio), the Cruz campaign contributed to lending it a ring of truth — not least because of his abrupt antagonism toward Mr. Trump after reams of praise.
While Mr. Cruz steadied himself, rebounding in his home state of Texas and winning several smaller contests and delegate conventions, his successes were too few.
Even in victory, Mr. Cruz spoke often in apocalyptic terms. Facing defeat, his pleas grew pained.
“If Indiana does not act,” he said hours before Tuesday’s vote, “this country could well plunge into the abyss.”
For a candidate who appeared, just a few weeks ago, to have a plausible path to the nomination, the descent came quickly. The calendar did not help.
Hours after his Wisconsin victory, he charged headlong into New York City, earning Bronx jeers that foretold a hostile reception across a half-dozen Eastern states that were never a natural fit for him.
“Manhattan has spoken!” Mr. Cruz joked bitterly in Indiana. “Everyone give up and go home.”
But the problems ran deeper.
Given an opening to unite the party in opposition to a man many see as an existential threat to it, Mr. Cruz was unable to consolidate support, leaving Republican leaders lurching toward a fateful bet: Live with the risk of a Trump nomination rather than elevate a figure they loathe.
His advisers insisted that he was a more versatile candidate than past Iowa caucus winners like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, but he failed to sufficiently expand his appeal much beyond the party’s most religious and ideological voters. His surrogates in Indiana looked much the same as in Iowa, with faith-inflected testimonials from the radio host Glenn Beck and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas.
“Conservatives are uniting,” Mr. Cruz said often on the campaign trail, long after it felt true. But his efforts were undercut, in large measure, by his toxic relationships with Senate colleagues and a manifest indifference to repairing them.
Soon, the indignities mounted. He named Carly Fiorina his prospective running mate, despite trailing by several hundred delegates, briefly rousing a partly full Indianapolis pavilion
He earned scorn in Indiana for referring to a basketball rim as a “ring.” He was heckled by a young boy in La Porte and several middle-aged men in Marion.
“Sir, with all respect,” Mr. Cruz pleaded, after approaching one of them for a chat on Monday, “Donald Trump is deceiving you. He is playing you for a chump.”
On Tuesday morning, he at last unburdened himself in full, promising to tell reporters “what I really think of Donald Trump” for the first time.
“This man is a pathological liar,” Mr. Cruz said, ticking off Mr. Trump’s distortions, his infidelities, his penchant for conspiracy theories. “The man is utterly amoral.”
It is possible there is nothing more Mr. Cruz could have done.
Mr. Trump has proved immune to political gravity. He has been largely impervious to attacks, once Mr. Cruz backed away from his monthslong embrace and began hammering him.
Most critically, Mr. Trump’s success in early states across the South, thought to be Mr. Cruz’s firewall, forced a rewrite of the Cruz campaign playbook on the fly.
But while few politicians have better absorbed the lessons of the party’s rightward tilt in recent years, Mr. Cruz found himself outmaneuvered on issues like trade and national defense by an outsider whose political antenna had a crisper signal.
Even on immigration — where Mr. Cruz’s grasp of the party’s id helped vanquish a foe, Marco Rubio, who came to regret embracing a pathway to citizenship — Mr. Trump managed to go bigger and louder.
That Mr. Cruz lasted this long anyway was a triumph of management guile and considerable hustle: No Republican campaign more effectively marshaled its finances, holding the most cash on hand for much of the race, and no candidate worked harder than he did, frequently dashing through six events a day in Iowa.
With a showman’s itch and a singular manner of speaking — the long pauses, the controlled twang, the easy deployment of words like “élan” and “hosannas” on the stump — Mr. Cruz registered at times like an actor playing the role of presidential candidate.
He often resorted to gimmickry, from re-enacted movie scenes to lawyerly theatrics to his grandest stunt of all: adding Mrs. Fiorina to an imagined ticket.
But these last few, flailing weeks belied a campaign that for months had followed its initial strategy to the letter.
Mr. Cruz and his advisers often likened the election to a college basketball tournament bracket, where opponents like Scott Walker and Mr. Rubio were to be muscled out one by one. (They also griped that Gov. John Kasichof Ohio failed to leave the court, despite the score.)
When Mr. Cruz entered the race, his team openly cheered its meager position, roughly 5 percent in the polls, reasoning that he could energize his core supporters first.
“You have to own a base in the Republican primary,” his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, said the day Mr. Cruz announced his run at an evangelical university last year. “If you own the base, then you can grow it.”
Mr. Cruz’s most consequential choice might have come last year when he defended Mr. Trump as a credible outsider and a force for good in the race as rivals began taking swings.
As late as December, he celebrated Mr. Trump as “terrific,” rising quietly in the polls as Mr. Trump absorbed the slings and arrows directed to a front-runner.
Even after Mr. Trump began disparaging Mr. Cruz’s Canadian birth, the senator initially resisted a full-scale barrage. Eventually, his broadsides were frequent and scattershot: Mr. Trump was too unsteady, too shifty, too consumed by social media, too much like Hillary Clinton.
Recently, as Mr. Cruz’s growth seemed to reach its outer bounds, he leaned increasingly on this sort of messaging potpourri.
He tried positioning himself as the party’s champion of women. He cast himself as the heir to President Obama’s generational promise, debuting a new slogan — “Yes, we will!” — that was quickly abandoned.
Then there was his habit of declaring as fact things he wished to be true. Mr. Cruz often described the “hard ceiling” of support that Mr. Trump would surely brush up against, estimating it to be 35 to 40 percent.
“Donald has been a minority candidate, a fringe candidate,” Mr. Cruz told reporters last week.
The next day, Mr. Trump received at least 54 percent of the vote in all five primaries.
And if Mr. Trump’s chosen moniker for Mr. Cruz (“Lyin’ Ted”) was not quite as instantly devastating as some of his others (“Low-Energy” Jeb Bush, “Little Marco” Rubio), the Cruz campaign contributed to lending it a ring of truth — not least because of his abrupt antagonism toward Mr. Trump after reams of praise.
While Mr. Cruz steadied himself, rebounding in his home state of Texas and winning several smaller contests and delegate conventions, his successes were too few.
Even in victory, Mr. Cruz spoke often in apocalyptic terms. Facing defeat, his pleas grew pained.
“If Indiana does not act,” he said hours before Tuesday’s vote, “this country could well plunge into the abyss.”
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