Dissecting the Vampire...

Inside Cruz’s Crumbling Campaign

He sold himself as trustworthy. Rivals made sure voters didn’t buy it.

By Shane Goldmacher and Katie Glueck

It was only a cruel twist of fate that they were even watching CNN.

Three months ago, Ted Cruz’s senior advisers were gathered around the makeshift bar at the Iowa state fairgrounds, where the Texas senator was set to hold what would soon be his Iowa caucus victory party. They’d been informed earlier in the day that the venue wouldn’t be able to stream Fox News, the preferred network of Republican events, but CNN had offered to hook up its feed.

So campaign manager Jeff Roe, chief strategist Jason Johnson, senior adviser David Polyansky, then-communications director Rick Tyler and others were watching as Jake Tapper and Dana Bash broke in with surprising news minutes before the caucuses were set to begin. Ben Carson, one of Cruz’s rivals for the affection of religious Republicans, wasn’t headed straight to New Hampshire but Florida for some rest.

“Very unusual,” Bash said. “Very unusual,” Tapper agreed. “Very significant news,” added Wolf Blitzer.

With their adrenaline pumping in what was expected to be a razor-thin race against Donald Trump, Cruz’s top operatives quickly sprung to action, scrambling to tell their vast network of supporters about Carson’s plans. “CNN is reporting that Ben Carson will stop campaigning after Iowa. Make sure to tell all of your peers,” said the message pushed to users of the Cruz mobile app. An email read: “Carson is taking time off from the campaign trail.”

“It wouldn’t have had the impact it did if CNN wasn’t on,” said Tyler, who was among the Cruz aides watching in awe at the televised report, which did not mention that their own reporter had also tweeted Carson was staying in the race. “It absolutely wouldn’t have happened because we’re all staring at the screen saying, ‘Did you all hear what they said?’”

The Cruz messages about Carson seemed benign enough, especially in a rough-and-tumble 2016 campaign that has seen Trump encourage violence at his rallies, mimic the disabled on stage, and mock his one female rival’s physical appearance.

But Carson was deeply aggrieved. He would stay in the race through Super Tuesday, dividing the religious right. And after he quit, Carson would continue to hold the Iowa messages against the Texas senator, questioning Cruz’s ethics and morals. He would later endorse Trump, a man who once suggested Carson was a child molester. So deep was Carson’s disdain for Cruz.

For Cruz, the episode opened the door to questions of trustworthiness that would dog him for the duration—and it helped birth one of Trump’s most damning epithets: “Lyin’ Ted.”

Cruz would go on to win Iowa that night but the episode with Carson, fairly or not, fueled the characterization of Cruz long disseminated by Washington Republicans: that the gentleman from Texas was too slick, too ambitious, too unlikeable to ever be the nominee, let alone president.

But Cruz, powered by the most organized, adept and strategic campaign of the cycle, would go on to win hundreds of delegates and nine states. He began the race as an afterthought, and went on to outlive Jeb Bush, outlast Marco Rubio, and outmaneuver Trump at the arcane shadow game of selecting individual delegates who might be loyal.

He surpassed all expectations for a candidate who few gave much of a chance at the start. Cruz paired a distilled brand of pure conservatism with an instinct for the depth of anger in the electorate that few others saw. He raised millions from small donors and built a big-money operation, too.

There was even a brief moment, almost exactly four weeks ago in Wisconsin, when Cruz’s inner circle truly believed they had a clear path to victory, forcing Trump into a contested convention and winning on a second or third ballot. In his Milwaukee victory speech, Cruz hailed Wisconsin as a “turning point.”

He was right about that. He was wrong about the direction the race was about to turn.

Just when Cruz had emerged as Trump’s sole serious challenger, he needed to win over the same Republican Party insiders he had built his career running against; he needed them to rally around him. Their problem wasn’t with Cruz’s hard-line conservative principles. It was his hard-edged personality and political practices. They all had Carson stories of their own.

“The idea that there’s ever been a spokesperson less equipped to make an argument for party unity — I don’t think there is anybody,” said Josh Holmes, who served as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s chief of staff when Cruz arrived in the Senate in 2012.

So many of his congressional colleagues and mainstream Republicans stayed on the sidelines. Some embraced Trump. Others attacked Cruz, including former Speaker John Boehner, who called him “Lucifer in the flesh.” A few endorsed half-heartedly.

They might have feared Trump. But they loathed Cruz. One of Cruz’s few endorsers, Lindsey Graham, compared the choice to poison or being shot.

“Which one of Ted Cruz’s issues are they out of line with? What is it that they’re so out of line with?” asked Tyler, who resigned as Cruz's communications director in February. “It’s petulance and it’s petty and it’s small.”

It was also damaging, just as Cruz was about to run into a demographic buzzsaw. After constructing his campaign around a conservative base and religious right—he launched his bid at the world’s largest evangelical university—the race in April turned to the more secular Northeast. Cruz would lose not just the next six states but every county in them.

Then, on Tuesday, Cruz made his last, failed stand in Indiana. He lost in a landslide.

“It all really happened very suddenly,” said one Cruz source. “We were on a high after Wisconsin, fundraising was going great. We knew we were going to lose New York and the ‘Acela primary,’ not a big surprise, but when it happened, it just had a different impact. The margins of Trump’s victory hurt us. We are all still trying to come to terms with it ourselves.”

From the start, Cruz’s campaign was unusually open about the process and planning that went into running for president. The week of his surprise announcement at Liberty University, he and his team were talking openly about the four “lanes” in the race: tea party, libertarian, evangelical and establishment.

Cruz, they said, would compete to consolidate three of them—all but the traditional “establishment” Republican lane filled with familiar names like Rubio, Chris Christie and Bush. Cruz’s goal was simple: No one would outflank him on the right on policy. And no one would outflank him on anger with the Republican elites.

He succeeded on the former. But Trump dominated him on the latter.

That consolidation strategy was borne not just of Cruz’s political pedigree but also of the 2016 calendar. A spate of Southern states had jumped the line to vote on March 1, in what became known as the SEC primary. Evangelical-rich Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee would vote that day. As campaign manager Roe bragged to POLITICO last fall, “My 19-month-old daughter couldn’t color a map that’s better for us.”

But after Cruz carried Iowa, an ominous warning sign came in South Carolina, where Trump carried what was supposed to be Cruz’s base, winning evangelical voters 33 percent to 27 percent, according to exit polling.

Indeed, Trump’s Southern success would repeat itself on Super Tuesday, a day Cruz himself had once described as his firewall. Trump collected 254 of the delegates up for grabs that day, outpacing Cruz’s haul of 218, almost half of which came from Texas. Cruz’s strategists had constructed their entire campaign to push through the latter half of the calendar with the lead.

But after Super Tuesday, Cruz was running from behind. His team launched an alternative plan—to deny Trump the outright win and take the nomination to a contested convention.

And for a while, it appeared to be working. Over the course of March and April, as Trump racked primary win after primary win, Cruz’s data team shifted from targeting voters to identifying state activists who might serve as loyal delegates in Cleveland. And suddenly, Cruz looked like he was back on track—his team was able to sell the idea that keeping Trump from clinching was the GOP’s last chance to save the party from a celebrity billionaire few would classify as conservative.

Suddenly, Cruz was winning the race he thought would matter.

But he was doing something else in turn—handing Trump a claim many Republicans saw as legitimate. Cruz, Trump said, was trying to snatch the nomination away from the man Republican voters clearly preferred.

Trump wasn’t the first candidate to question Cruz’s integrity. Rubio tagged him as “calculated” (and his super PAC used the tagline “CalculaTed,” a play on Cruz’s “TrusTed” slogan). Supporters of Mike Huckabee attacked Cruz in Iowa for not tithing. Even Carly Fiorina, Cruz’s short-lived future running mate, said in January of Cruz: “He says whatever he needs to say to get elected.”

But as the 2016 field narrowed, it was the “Lyin’ Ted” label that increasingly stuck to Cruz, just as Trump’s “low energy” moniker clung mercilessly to Bush. And it deeply irked Cruz, a detail-oriented lawyer who parses his words as closely as any politician, according to those close to him.

Trump said it dates from the Iowa caucus episode with Carson. “I call him "Lyin' Ted Cruz" after what he did to Ben Carson and many other things,” Trump told Sean Hannity in late March. “You know, he lies. He really lies.”

The fact that Cruz had spent months and months praising Trump’s every move in 2015, only to turn into his harshest critic when it became politically expedient in early 2016 only fed into Trump’s caricature.

"When it comes to Donald Trump, I like Donald Trump. I think he's terrific, I think he's brash, I think he speaks the truth," Cruz had gushed last June. “I have been glad to praise Donald Trump,” Cruz boasted last August. In September, Cruz even invited Trump to keynote a rally he was organizing at the foot of the Capitol.

Last year, Cruz would chide the press as small-minded for their efforts to goad him into criticizing whatever Trump’s latest outlandish statement was. “The Establishment’s only hope: Trump & me in a cage match,” Cruz tweeted in December to diffuse tensions ahead of a debate. “Sorry to disappoint — @realDonaldTrump is terrific. #DealWithIt.”

But as he feuded with Trump in the final three months of the race, he blamed the same media he’d accused of stoking tensions for now giving Trump a free pass. He said executives wanted to boost ratings and revenue, or that they were secret Democrats out to help Hillary Clinton. By the end, Cruz wasn’t just lashing out at the mainstream media, as he had from the beginning, but some of the key conservative organs of the right: Hannity, Fox News and the Drudge Report, to name a few.

In January, Cruz had hailed the Drudge Report as a valuable avenue to bypass media gatekeepers. But in April, he said Drudge was in Trump’s pocket: “The Drudge Report has basically become the attack site for the Donald Trump campaign.”

Still, four weeks ago, when Cruz strode onto the stage at Milwaukee’s American Serb Hall, many in his campaign believed they were watching the likely Republican nominee. According to internal polls, Cruz had come from behind to land a victory in Wisconsin that was fueled not only by his traditional conservative base, but by a new coalition of women, more centrist Republicans and young people.

Cruz had been talking for months about conservatives coalescing behind his campaign. Now it was actually happening.

His campaign hoped that Wisconsin—a more diverse, blue-collar state—would offer a blueprint for how Cruz could break through as the race headed into rougher territory in the more moderate Northeast.

“My theory was, if we can expand this coalition the way we did in Wisconsin, we can go into the Northeastern states—it’s a Trump stronghold, we don’t have to win—but we have to be strong,” said one knowledgeable Cruz source. “Well, what a fucking disaster that was.”

Back before the Iowa caucuses, Cruz’s campaign had conceived of a clever line defining Trump as a liberal without explicitly attacking him: accusing him of “New York values.” It was straight out of Roe’s old playbook. In his Missouri days, Roe had successfully beaten an opponent by hammering her “San Francisco values.”

It worked in Iowa. But as the race actually turned to New York three months later, the line hung around Cruz like an albatross. Meanwhile, the country’s most aggressive press corps lay in wait. “Take the F U Train Ted,” the cover of the New York Post greeted him.

In the liberal Northeast, Cruz began to talk more and more about winning the loyalties of delegates at party conventions and the need to stop Trump, and less about his conservative agenda.

“Somewhere after Wisconsin, our message became, ‘We hate Trump, everybody hates Trump, I’m going to beat Trump,’ and, ‘Wow, we’ve got this awesome convention delegate counting thing because we’re so good at process,” the Cruz source said. “That’s a problem. That’s not Ted being Ted … it’s just what the story became. It seems like we weren’t able to do anything about it.”

“The Wisconsin win,” the Cruz source continued, “was the biggest day in the campaign. We all thought we were going to get it. But after the win, we started trending down in every state, state by state.”

Cruz finished third in New York with less than 15 percent of the vote, more than 35 percentage points behind Trump. The margin was devastating.

State Sen. Michael Hough, Cruz’s Maryland campaign chair, said Cruz had had a path to collecting at least some delegates in Maryland immediately after Wisconsin. But after getting blown out in New York, all momentum halted.

“For a short time there was some hope we could do something for him,” Hough said. “But I think the New York thing, the media idea that, ‘Oh, it’s over,’ I think it swung all the momentum to Trump.”

A week after New York, Cruz would lose not just Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut but every county and congressional district in those states. The only state Cruz would win delegates in was Rhode Island; he never campaigned there.

Cruz’s inner circle gathered this Monday. It was not a conversation his team had expected to have just weeks after winning big in Wisconsin. But the day before the Indiana primary, there they were, gathered in the seventh-floor offices of Cruz’s Houston headquarters, discussing the senator’s suddenly shaky future.

“It was the first time there was any discussion about it in that senior staff meeting,” which happened every Monday, said someone close to the campaign. “The polls continued to show we weren’t going to do well in Indiana, that’s where things were going. Then the question became, ‘OK, what happened, what do you do next?’”

“It was really after the losses of last week, the magnitude of the Trump victories, the fact that he broke 50 percent, 60 percent,” said another Cruz source involved. “It destroyed our narrative that there’s a ceiling to his support.”

Chad Sweet, Cruz’s campaign chairman and an old friend, was adamant in the Monday meeting that the senator would stay in, regardless of Indiana, according to two sources. But not everyone agreed. The discussion stretched beyond 2016 to Cruz’s Senate seat and his political future.

Still, Cruz had $9 million in the bank, after all, and some of his allies saw no downside to staying in as long as Trump didn’t have the needed delegates.

But by the time polls opened in Indiana, Cruz had already pulled every political stunt he could to blunt Trump’s momentum. He’d struck a pact with John Kasich to pull out of Indiana, in exchange for Cruz abandoning two later states. And he’d named his vice presidential pick, Fiorina, less than 24 hours after he had been mathematically eliminated from winning the Republican nomination. It was a blatant play to draw attention. It didn’t work.

The New York Times didn’t even devote a separate story to the announcement for the printed edition, instead pairing it with Bernie Sanders cutting back his staff. “Failing hopefuls regroup to save their campaigns,” read the headline.

Cruz did get a spike on social media but it didn’t last. The next day, Boehner calling him “Lucifer” and a “miserable son of a bitch” drowned out Fiorina, with 82,428 mentions of Cruz and Boehner compared with 66,434 for Cruz and Fiorina, according to Zignal Labs, which tracks digital conversation.

Tyler said the Cruz campaign had been in a bind.

“Doing nothing would have been dumb,” he said. “Doing something was smart and so it was a smart move. But in terms of the timing, sometimes you don’t have a choice. You know what’s going to happen but you have to do it anyway.”

Cruz allies bristled toward the end that the so-called Never Trump movement never fully embraced him, and that those who did, did so too late. Some in the campaign blamed Kasich’s refusal to drop out for preventing a unification around Cruz. “He clearly hurt us,” said a source close to the campaign.

But Cruz’s lack of relationships loomed large. “We all know that Ted Cruz is hated by every human being in Washington that draws breath,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist who has worked in opposition to Trump. “Ted not having a lot of friends in D.C. — it adds ups.”

Ultimately, there was nothing left to try.

Cruz woke up on the morning of the Indiana primary to rain and the news that Trump was touting a National Enquirer story that claimed, without evidence, that his father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

The day would only get worse.

In a heated news conference, the usually measured Cruz unleashed. He called Trump “amoral” and a “serial philanderer,” leveling the kinds of accusations that he had proudly avoided for the entirety of the campaign. And he aimed, once again, to push back on the “Lyin’ Ted” moniker with which Trump had so effectively tagged him.

"This man is a pathological liar, he doesn't know the difference between truth and lies,” Cruz said. “In a pattern that is straight out of a psychology text book, he accuses everyone of lying."

Cruz suffered indignity after indignity in the lead-up to the Indiana primary, from a squalling child protester whom he found himself scolding, to his would-be running mate falling off a stage in a video that went viral in political circles. And on Monday, in another video that dominated the day, Cruz engaged with Trump protesters, one of whom took to simply yelling “Lyin’ Ted!” as the senator sought to make his points.

Cruz had had enough. He made the final call Tuesday in a meeting with Roe, his campaign manager, and Johnson, his chief strategist.

Some staffers had already been bracing for the news after being told to fly to Indianapolis from Houston on Tuesday. Many were informed by texts from Roe, thanking them for their hard work, less than an hour before Cruz made the announcement official. In a sign of the tight ship Roe ran, the news did not leak out until Roe himself walked over to a small group of reporters at the watch party, minutes before Cruz took the stage, and gave the Texas Tribune reporter the go-ahead to tweet the development.

Fiorina was still speaking on stage, after not even a week on the ticket. The televisions at the rally had been switched off shortly before she took the stage. CNN had been playing.