http://www.nationalreview.com/node/434916/print The Weaknesses that Doomed Ted Cruz
By Eliana Johnson — May 4, 2016
Indianapolis — Ted Cruz’s first big victory celebration, replete with confetti, champagne, and the kind of stemwinding speech that would become a hallmark of his election-night events, came at the Iowa state fairgrounds on February 1. He’d just won the Iowa caucuses, a grueling and hard-fought victory nearly a year in the making. The political cognoscenti still loathed him, but they could no longer dismiss him.
On Monday, 91 days later, Cruz found himself 475 miles away in Indianapolis, and his chances of becoming the Republican nominee were withering. On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, an overflow crowd left supporters shut outside in the bitter cold, expressing frustration to campaign aides in the restrained argot of the Midwest. The night before the primary here in Indiana, Cruz filled just two-thirds of a pavilion at the state fairgrounds. He told those in attendance that a historic choice was at hand, but they hardly seemed to believe it.
Indiana was supposed to be friendly territory for Cruz, who burst onto the national scene in 2012 by harnessing the tea-party movement, and was the first to grasp that the simmering anger that propelled him to office could also fuel a presidential campaign. Hoosier State Republicans had traded Richard Lugar for the archconservative Richard Mourdock the same year Cruz was elected to the Senate, and as recently as a few weeks ago there was reason to believe they could revive Cruz ahead of the campaign’s final stretch. But in the end, like those in so many other states this cycle, they broke for a candidate with fewer conservative bonafides but more of a claim on the outsider status and anger that Cruz once owned.
Cruz lost Indiana to Donald Trump by 16 points on Tuesday, and with it any shot at clinching the nomination at a contested convention in Cleveland this summer. Afterward, he announced before a ballroom of supporters that he was suspending his campaign.
“From the beginning, I’ve said that I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory,” Cruz told the crowd. Eruptions of “Nooooo!” and mumbles of “Aw, s**t,” punctuated his remarks.
“Tonight, I’m sorry to say it appears that path has been foreclosed,” he said.
Cruz’s is the story of a disciplined candidate and a well-run campaign that couldn’t overcome their respective limitations. Since well before he officially launched his campaign, Cruz had worked to carve out a niche as the insurgent conservative candidate capable of uniting Evangelicals and tea-partiers under the same banner. Cruz had been eyeing a presidential bid from the time he was elected to the Senate, and his carefully crafted political brand carried a cost: He’d publicly flogged his Senate colleagues to build up a national fan base, earning himself many powerful Republican enemies. As the campaign dragged on, Cruz’s team came to believe that if he could emerge as the last man standing against Trump, even those who despised him would be forced to come on board. But in the end, they fatally underestimated Trump’s strength: Cruz occupied an enduring and powerful niche; the man who defeated him had a message for the masses and a platform to deliver it.
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