Fortune

Why Ted Cruz’s Big Gamble Failed

The conservative army that Cruz promised to unleashed proved to be a myth. · Fortune
Alex Altman, Zeke J Miller, Philip Elliott, TIME
Updated

You could tell when Ted Cruz started speaking in the past tense that he had finally come to grips with the inevitable. Standing in front of a bank of flags, surrounded by family who had gathered for a final stand in Indiana, the Texas Senator dropped his bid for the White House on Tuesday night.

"We left it all on the field," Cruz told supporters with evident sorrow. "But the voters chose another path. And so, with a heavy heart, but with boundless optimism for the long-term future of our nation, we are suspending our campaign."

The roots of his regret go back to the gamble that has defined his political career. Since running for the Senate in 2012, Cruz has wagered that the way to win the White House was to run as an uncompromising conservative.

Almost every Republican strategist agrees the party's salvation depends on broadening its appeal--a move so necessary and obvious that the Republican National Committee codified it in a report after the 2012 campaign. That means running as a classic center-right conservative in the primary, then pivoting to the middle for the general election. Cruz ripped up the rulebook, running a base-turnout campaign from the start, counting on evangelical and very conservative voters who allegedly sat out elections contested by milquetoast candidates.

Cruz argued that his absolutist brand of politics would raise a hidden "conservative army," consisting of Americans who stayed home in 2008 and 2012. More than 50 million self-described evangelical voters stayed home when the GOP nominated Mitt Romney, Cruz claimed, arguing the party needed a candidate who would campaign "in bold colors, not pale pastels," a phrase borrowed from Ronald Reagan.

And so, on issue after issue, Cruz staked out stances that no one on the right could outflank. He framed himself as a true believer in God and guns, went populist to capture grassroots unrest, led the effort to shut down the federal government in a doomed bid to gut Obamacare. He painted Republican colleagues as squishes, even calling Republican leader Mitch McConnell a liar. It's de rigueur to rail against the Washington elites from the green rooms and gilded halls of the Capitol. It's another thing to try to win the Republican nomination by running against the GOP. It led to Cruz becoming the most hated man in Washington, a point of pride he touted on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.

And for a while, it looked like a canny calculation. But there was a flaw at the heart of this theory of the case. The conservative army that Cruz promised to unleashed proved to be a myth. Cruz traveled the country in 2014 and 2015 telling tall tales of the millions of evangelical and very conservative white voters who stayed home in 2012. But poll after poll, and results in state after state, failed to dredge up any evidence for the theory. Evangelicals turned out in record numbers for Mitt Romney. There were few hidden soldiers waiting to be conscripted in what Cruz fondly referred to as the flyover counties of America.

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