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Ted Cruz Stayed on Message Even as He Lost His Way
Ted Cruz Ends His Campaign for President
(35 minutes later)
INDIANAPOLIS — Less than a month ago, Senator Ted Cruz seemed to have done it.
INDIANAPOLIS — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is ending his presidential campaign, according to his campaign manager, bowing to the reality that his crushing loss in Indiana all but assured the nomination of Donald J. Trump.
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.
Mr. Cruz, who staked his bid in the Republican race on a message of conservative purity and religious faith, had suffered through weeks of setbacks as the primary calendar reached the Northeast, where Mr. Trump significantly expanded his lead.
“Tonight is a turning point,” Mr. Cruz said on primary night in Milwaukee. “It is a rallying cry.”
But the senator had hoped to find more favorable terrain in Indiana, dashing across the state for over a week in a last-ditch effort to unify Republicans who viewed Mr. Trump’s success as an existential threat to the party.
It was neither.
Since entering the race over a year ago, Mr. Cruz had far exceeded most expectations, energizing hard-line conservatives and casting his toxic relationships with Senate colleagues as an asset as he railed against “the Washington cartel.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Cruz’s loss in Indiana all but extinguished his chances of denying Mr. Trump the nomination. He may go on, as something of a protest candidate for the “Never Trump” cause, but even some of his allies allowed that his path forward was more quixotic than reasoned, his fleeting window in the post-Wisconsin moment virtually slammed shut.
After months spent embracing Mr. Trump as a worthy presence in the field, Mr. Cruz abruptly changed course weeks before the Iowa caucuses, where he outmaneuvered Mr. Trump to emerge as his chief rival for the remainder of the primary season.
Yet to dismiss Mr. Cruz as an also-ran would diminish his unlikely feat in outlasting nearly every rival: His calls for conservative purity have been, 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.
The rest of the calendar was less kind. Early on, the Cruz campaign bet big on the South, hoping a sweep through the Super Tuesday primaries on March 1 would boost his delegate count. Though Mr. Cruz carried his home state of Texas, as well as Oklahoma, Mr. Trump’s victories elsewhere forced an instant scramble from the Cruz campaign to rejigger its playbook.
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.
A triumph in Wisconsin last month, along with several wins in state delegate elections, briefly supplied hope that Mr. Cruz might yet best Mr. Trump in a floor fight at the Republican convention. But the tide turned quickly, beginning with Mr. Trump’s home state of New York.
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.
All the while, Mr. Cruz wavered on a pledge to support any eventual Republican nominee.
He was half-right.
In a final appearance on Tuesday morning, Mr. Cruz pleaded with voters to join him, calling Mr. Trump a “pathological liar” and “utterly amoral.”
“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.”
If Indiana voted for his rival, Mr. Cruz said, “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 has 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 has lasted this long anyway is 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 has worked harder, 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 has 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 have belied a campaign that for months followed its initial strategy to the letter.
Mr. Cruz and his advisers have often likened the election to a college basketball tournament bracket, where opponents like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio were to be muscled out one by one. (They also griped that Gov. John Kasich of 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 his Mr. Cruz’s Canadian birth, Mr. Cruz still 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 have been 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.”
