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US Republican Ted Cruz announces he is running for president Republican Ted Cruz announces he is running for president
(about 4 hours later)
The Texas Republican Ted Cruz has announced that he is running for president in 2016. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a firebrand Republican, will become the first declared candidate in the 2016 presidential race on Monday morning when he announces his candidacy with a speech at Liberty University in Virginia.
The conservative senator became the first candidate to declare an intention to run for the White House when he said on Twitter that he was officially in the race. Cruz, who has been in the Senate just two years, announced his plan to throw his Stetson in the ring with a short campaign video posted online overnight.
Cruz, a leading conservative who was elected to the US Senate in 2012, is slated to make a speech on Monday at Liberty University in Virginia where he will flesh out his campaign platform. “It’s going to take a new generation of courageous conservatives to help make America great again,” Cruz says in the video. “And I’m ready to stand with you to lead the fight.”
“You’re going to want to be there,” a member of Cruz’s staff told the Daily Beast website, while declining to reveal the specific nature of the address. Cruz is one of as many as 20 Republicans expected to declare a campaign for the 2016 White House. The first primary voting starts in about 10 months with the Iowa Republican caucuses next January.
Cruz apparently hopes to get the jump on several leading Republicans who are expected to enter the race in the coming weeks: former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and two Senate colleagues, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Florida’s Marco Rubio. One of the most dynamic figures to emerge on the national political landscape since Barack Obama, Cruz quickly rose to fame as a freshman senator by pursuing a plan to block the president’s healthcare policy that resulted in a 16-day partial closure of the federal government in October 2013.
Recent Republican history, however, could work against Cruz and other deeply conservative candidates as they battle through state-by-state primaries and caucuses. Many Republican colleagues resented the move, which did not work and which they saw as politically costly. But the conservative base loved it, and sharply anti-Obama, small-government partisans remain the core of Cruz’s support.
That selection process is dominated by the most conservative Republican voters and can lead to the nomination of a candidate who is not acceptable to more moderate Republicans and independent voters. Cruz came in third in straw-poll voting at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual conference in Washington earlier this year, trailing Kentucky senator Rand Paul and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.
Cruz, 44, is the son of an American mother and Cuban-born father and would be the nation’s first Hispanic president. “He is a viable candidate,” one former critic of Cruz, Arizona senator John McCain, said on Sunday. Back in early 2013, shortly after Cruz’s arrival in the Senate, McCain had deemed him and colleagues with similarly flamboyant conservative plumage “wacko birds”.
He has considerable appeal among the Republican party’s base of conservative voters. After his election to the Senate in 2012, the former Texas solicitor general quickly established himself as an uncompromising conservative willing to take on Democrats and fellow Republicans alike. “It’s a time for truth. a time to rise to the challenge, just as Americans have always done,” Cruz says in his first campaign video.
Criticised by members of his own party at times, he won praise from ultraconservative tea party activists in 2013 for leading a 16-day government shutdown in an unsuccessful drive to repeal president Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. As former solicitor general of Texas, Cruz, 44, argued nine cases before the US Supreme Court, winning five of them. He is a graduate of Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard law school. He was born three days before Christmas 1970 in Calgery, Alberta, but has said he has revoked his Canadian dual citizenship. His father is a Cuban immigrant.
Last weekend the senator was in New Hampshire, a state crucial to presidential aspirants because of its early primary. Bush and Walker were also there, as well as former governor of Texas Rick Perry. Cruz’s stub campaign site highlights his views on foreign policy, family values, the economy and the Constitution – that last heading an umbrella for some of the issues the senator has gotten his most political mileage from, including opposition to gun control and support for keeping the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance.
Cruz has also spent time in Iowa, another key early state. He would be the first Hispanic president in US history.
In an interview on MSNBC last week, Cruz said he had been getting “very encouraging” support regarding a presidential run.
The senator was born in Canada, but two lawyers who represented presidents from both parties at the Supreme Court recently wrote in the Harvard Law Review that Cruz meets the constitutional requirement to run.