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.
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.
“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 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 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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