Ted Cruz Drops His U.S. Presidential Bid—Until 2020

In the end, Republicans didn’t much like Ted Cruz.

The party establishment hated him from the start. He had nearly single-handedly destroyed their effort to govern in Congress in the age of Obama, and he insulted GOP leaders in a way that left party elders aghast. When former Speaker John Boehner called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh,” what was most noteworthy wasn’t the barb itself but how little protest it generated in Washington. The establishment would have preferred almost anyone else as their standard-bearer in 2016. Really: Almost anyone else—including, for many of them, Donald Trump, a man who these same top Republicans viewed as a usurper, a phony who talked tough and learned just enough of the conservative language to hoodwink the party’s faithful in state after state.

And ultimately, it was the voters who chose Trump—and rejected Cruz. The first-term Texas senator came to that realization rather suddenly on Tuesday night, after a defeat in Indiana crushed his slim chances of denying Trump the Republican nomination in Cleveland. Earlier in the day, Cruz had denounced the GOP front-runner as a “pathological liar” and a “narcissist.” But when he ended his campaign later that evening in Indiana, he never uttered Trump’s name.

Surrounded by his family, Cruz reminded his supporters that he had always said he would continue his campaign as long as there was a path to victory. “Tonight, I’m sorry to say, it appears that path has been foreclosed,” he said. “Together we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it all we got. But the voters chose another path.”