WASHINGTON -- U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas plans to announce today that he will run for president, becoming the first high-profile Republican to enter the 2016 contest.
Cruz will formally get into the race during a morning speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., choosing to begin his campaign at the Christian college founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell rather than in his home state of Texas or the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. The entry of Cruz, a 44-year-old Tea Party darling, into the 2016 campaign drew cheers Sunday among fellow conservatives.
"The official Republican pool of candidates will take a quantum leap forward with his announcement tomorrow," Amy Kremer, the former head of the Tea Party Express, said Sunday. Cruz's announcement, she said, "will excite the base in a way we haven't seen in years."
Elected for the first time just three years ago, when he defeated an establishment figure in Texas politics with decades of experience in office, Cruz has hinted openly for more than a year that he wants to move down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Senate and into the White House. His plans were confirmed Sunday by one of his political strategists, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to preclude the announcement.
Cruz posted a Tweet early this morning confirming his plan to run.
Cruz is the first Republican to declare his candidacy. Other possible GOP contenders include former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and two Senate colleagues, Kentucky's Rand Paul and Florida's Marco Rubio.
The Houston Chronicle first reported details about Cruz's campaign launch. His move puts him into pole position among those whose strategy to win the nomination counts on courting the party's most conservative voters, who hold an outsized influence in the Republican nominating process.
"Cruz is going to make it tough for all of the candidates who are fighting to emerge as the champion of the anti-establishment wing of the party," said GOP strategist Kevin Madden. "That is starting to look like quite a scrum where lots of candidates will be throwing some sharp elbows."
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 Republicans alike. He won praise from Tea Party activists in 2013 for leading the GOP's push to partially shut down the federal government during an unsuccessful bid to block money for President Barack Obama's health care law.
In December, Cruz defied party leaders to force a vote on opposing Obama's executive actions on immigration. The strategy failed and led several of his Republican colleagues to criticize Cruz. "You should have an end goal in sight if you're going to do these types of things, and I don't see an end goal other than irritating a lot of people," said Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch.
One of the nation's top college debaters while a student at Princeton University, Cruz continues to be a leading voice for the health law's repeal and promises to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and scrap the Department of Education if elected president.
Last weekend in New Hampshire, one voter gave Cruz a blank check and told him to write it for whatever amount he needed.
The decision to announce his campaign at Liberty indicates how critical evangelical voters will be to his prospects. The school, founded by Falwell in 1971, declares its mission to be "training champions for Christ," and its graduates can be found in many roles in conservative organizations across the country.
Evangelicals form a key voting bloc in many Republican contests, particularly in Iowa, which holds the first voting of the campaign.
Cruz will face intense competition for evangelical voters. Walker has had strong support from religious conservatives in his campaigns. Paul has courted evangelical leaders in Iowa and elsewhere. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry also has had strong evangelical support in the past, as have former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
The son of an American mother and Cuban-born father, Cruz would be the nation's first Hispanic president. While in New Hampshire this month, Cruz told voters his daughter, Caroline, had given him permission to join the presidential race in the hopes that the family puppy would get to play on the White House lawn instead of near their Houston high-rise condo.
"If you win, that means Snowflake will finally get a backyard to pee in," Cruz said his daughter told him.
Cruz is set to release a book this summer that he said would reflect themes of his White House campaign, and said in a recent interview he will use it to counter the "caricatures" of the right as "stupid," "evil" or "crazy."
"The image created in the mainstream media does not comply with the facts," he said.
The Tea Party seized on the news in a statement Sunday, praising Cruz for his departure from the typical presidential process and for not "monkeying around" before announcing. Cruz is skipping the exploratory committee phase of a pre-campaign, instead diving headfirst into an aggressive fundraising goal of between $40 million and $50 million.
"The consultant playbook says that a presidential candidate must hint around for months," the Tea Party Nation statement said. "That candidate must at first deny that but be 'persuaded.' There must be the obligatory leaks about the candidate's family and friends trying to talk them into the run."
John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona who ran against Obama in 2008, said he will support Cruz if he wins the nomination.
"He is a valued member of the Senate Armed Services Committee," McCain said on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday. "He and I are friendly, and I think he is a very viable candidate."
McCain said he wasn't endorsing Cruz and that South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham is still his pick for the Republican nomination, and that Graham "knows best about national security."
California's Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday said Cruz's views on climate change make him unfit to run for president.
Host Chuck Todd asked the governor to respond to a video clip of Cruz telling Seth Meyers of Late Night last week that science and the snow he had just encountered in New Hampshire undermine the warnings of global warming "alarmists."
Brown labeled Cruz's comment as false and countered that 90 percent of the scientists who study climate change believe it is real, human-caused and producing extreme weather of all kinds.
Cruz "betokens such a level of ignorance and a direct falsification of existing scientific data, it's shocking, and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office," he said.
Meanwhile, former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said that, in 2016, his party's candidates need to do much better than he did at communicating to minority-group voters what the GOP is offering them.
"I think we have a real difficulty in the party, and myself included, communicating to Hispanic voters and minority voters generally why it is that conservative principles are better for them and their families than those that are being promoted by the liberals, by the Democrats," he told Yahoo's Katie Couric in an interview that went online Thursday. "That's something I didn't do very effectively," he said, calling it "without question the biggest mistake that I made in the campaign."
The former Massachusetts governor, who challenged Obama in 2012, said he wants to see the Republican "nominee do a better job communicating to Hispanic voters that we love legal immigration" and want to stop illegal immigration. "I will be talking to our nominee about the mistakes that I made," he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Steve Peoples and staff members of The Associated Press, by Lisa Mascaro and David Lauter of Tribune News Service, and by staff members of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 03/23/2015