Ted Cruz To GOP Establishment: You Can Trust Me

Ted Cruz isn’t supposed to get along with the establishment.

Just more than a year ago, Cruz announced his presidential campaign as a senator who was almost universally disliked by his Senate colleagues. Three months ago, prominent Republicans were openly rooting against him. Six weeks ago, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., joked, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” They don’t just dislike Cruz. They hate him.

But Tuesday in Milwaukee, after a decisive victory in Wisconsin that should earn him dozens of delegates while limiting Donald Trump to just a handful, Cruz seemed to want to assure his fellow Republicans: You can trust me. I will bring people together.

He said some version of the word “unite” several times.

That might be a hard sell for some of the more experienced heads in the party. A lot of them still see Cruz as the guy who shut down the government in 2013 in an attempt to fight back against the Affordable Care Act. Even more see him as a brash, obstructionist ultra-conservative. Cruz went into the Iowa caucuses with a grand total of zero endorsements from his congressional colleagues.

At one point, Graham said picking between Cruz and Trump would be like choosing between being “shot or poisoned,” the implication being that each would be as bad a presidential nominee as the other.

What changed? Why is there suddenly a clearer choice? Even Graham, the GOP’s anti-Trump spirit animal, is doing some fundraising for Cruz these days.

Trump’s seemingly inexorable march towards the nomination is moving into April, and the only other candidate, John Kasich, seems like a non-factor (he’s won one state). The wing of the Republican Party that wants very, very badly to stop Trump suddenly sees Cruz as a little more palatable.

And Cruz wants to be the Republican presidential nominee. But his only real chance is to stop Trump from reaching the 1,237 delegates necessary to lock up the nomination before July’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and then convince those delegates to switch their votes to him on subsequent ballots.

That means it’s time for Cruz to reach out to the GOP elite. He started Tuesday night.