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U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz ’92 plans to announce a presidential bid on Monday, according to a Houston Chronicle article published on Saturday. Cruz did not respond to a request for comment. Cruz will officially declare his candidacy at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia on Monday, according to the Chronicle. He is scheduled to make an appearance in New Hampshire this Friday and in Iowa in approximately two weeks. Cruz was elected to the Senate as a Republican candidate from Texas in 2012 and is one of three Latino Senators currently serving. Liberty University, which was founded by...

With the formal announcement of his presidential run on Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz officially kicks off his 2016 rivalry with fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul.Sen. Ted Cruz will not only become the first person to officially enter the 2016 race to the White House on Monday—he will also formally kick off a new rivalry: Cruz v. Paul. When the Texas Republican launches his campaign for president at Liberty University, he will do so ahead of an upcoming electoral confrontation with Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. Cruz and Paul are vying for the same post—the insurgent Republican frontrunner—who will eventually face...

It’s the worst kept secret in politics this weekend. Of course, when you’ve been in the eye of the media for more than a year as a possible POTUS candidate and you suddenly summon the Beltway paparazzi to your secret fortress at Liberty University on a Monday, it was going to be a tough cat to keep in the bag. Unless this is a stunt and the media elite have entirely missed the boat, Ted Cruz will skip the exploratory committee process entirely and announce his run for the White House tomorrow. Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce Monday that...

Once again, the firebrand senator is betting that his best shot to win is breaking the old rules.Ted Cruz’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Monday breaks all the customs of a typical candidate announcement. Presidential hopefuls tend to kick off the quest for the White House on home turf, after forming an exploratory committee and at the beginning of a new fundraising period, which allows them to maximize the amount of time they can spend raising money before filing their first report. In contrast, the Texas Senator will declare his intentions during a convocation speech at Liberty University...

He’s going to skip the exploratory committee and go straight for the jugular. Ted Cruz plans to run for president. The Houston Chronicle broke the news just before midnight Saturday evening, citing senior advisers speaking on the condition of anonymity who said that Cruz, the Texas Tea Party Republican elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, would pursue the presidency. The announcement would make Cruz the first Republican to officially declare his candidacy. Cruz will announced his candidacy at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, the Chronicle reported. The senior advisers cited by the Chronicle said Cruz aims...

An good example of opposition foot soldiers getting out the propaganda. Someone on the Walker team seems to be monitoring this opposition work:Scott Walker presidential campaign, 2016 "Note to administrators: this article has content on its talk page which should be checked before deletion. [A defense of the offending, deleted Wiki page.] An interesting dynamic going on. If I've characterized this incorrectly or inadequately, please help flesh this out.

Sure, he’s a bit of an eccentric. He ran for the White House as a sitting vice president and lost. His finances are complex, his cable news venture failed, and his storybook marriage ended in divorce long ago. But he’s a single-issue candidate, and it just happens to be an issue that appeals to progressives perhaps more than any other. What’s more, the Draft Al Gore movement had some influential backers in the progressive community. “Gore cares enough about what comes next that he literally titled his last book The Future,” wrote Vox.com founder Ezra Klein. “But if he is...

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Out on the presidential campaign trail, Gov. Scott Walker has left “Wiscahnsin” back home in Wisconsin. He now wants to strengthen the economy, not the “ecahnahmy.” And while he once had the “ahnor” of meeting fellow Republicans, he told one group here this week that he simply enjoyed “talkin’ with y’all.” The classic Upper Midwest accent – nasal and full of flat a’s – is one of several Walker trademarks to have fallen away this month after an intense period of strategizing and coaching designed to help Mr. Walker capitalize on his popularity in early polls and...

Deep in the Haitian countryside, peanut farmer Wismith Moricette epitomizes the success of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s charitable work: Through an innovative program backed by the Clintons, the 23-year-old has doubled the yield from his one-acre plot. Along with all those peanuts, Moricette said, have come visions of a brighter future for his wife and young son. Fifty miles away on Haiti’s Caribbean coast, Anelle Germinal exemplifies another reality of the Clintons’ work here: disappointment. The 33-year-old mother of four has been standing in the baking sun every day for months waiting for work in the struggling Caracol Industrial...

Democrats in a New Hampshire focus group want a third-party arbiter to examine Hillary Clinton’s private emails and would not mind Jeb Bush as a “consolation prize” because of his moderate views on amnesty and Common Core, which may explain why not one Republican in the focus group said they would vote for Bush in the first-in-the-nation primary if it were held today. According to Bloomberg News, Democrats in the focus group reportedly “contradicted claims by Clinton’s team that voters aren’t worrying about her e-mails,”–they reportedly said how Clinton handled the email scandal “disappointed them and made her more vulnerable...

Jeb Bush’s nascent presidential campaign has already won over many of the big-dollar donors and GOP elites. What he needs to prove now is that he can win over the crowds. Until visits to South Carolina and other early states this month, the former Florida governor hadn’t been on the campaign trail for himself in 13 years. He hadn’t sold himself to the deeply conservative, tea party-inspired crowds that have emerged as a driving Republican force in the Obama era. He’d never snapped so many “selfies” with admirers.

Speaking in South Carolina Thursday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker alluded indirectly to the recent departure of a communications aide he had brought onto his political team after she had drawn fire over tweets she sent about Iowa, an early presidential state. “One of my clear rules is, if you’re going to be on our team, whether on the paid staff or a volunteer, what I always say is you need to respect the voters,” Mr. Walker said in Greenville, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. “Because, really, if you think about campaigns, it’s not about the candidate or the staff. It’s...

Focus group work by Bloomberg Politics suggests both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are vulnerable in New Hampshire. Democrats are questioning Clinton’s use of a private email account while she was secretary of State, while GOP voters question whether Bush is conservative enough, according to the work by Bloomberg Politics and Purple Strategies. While the voters in the focus group say they would still back Clinton, they questioned whether the perception of secrecy surrounding the email account would hurt her and said that they supported a third-party examination of her email server to put the issue to bed. Bloomberg and...

Greenville,S.C.—Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will spend a second day Friday campaigning in this crucial southern state as he looks to connect with a full spectrum of voters....After hosting events Thursday for the South Carolina Republican Party in Columbia and Greenville, the Republican governor will attend two more Friday in Rock Hill and Charleston. He'll also speak to the National Rifle Association in Charleston.The two-day blitz...is important because the state holds the third presidential nominating contest in the country. It follows recent trips to the states that hold the first two, Iowa and New Hampshire.In his Thursday speeches, Walker spoke of...

"...“Sometimes it takes a little while to warm up to a Midwesterner,” said Zee Homoki,an Aiken resident who came the Columbia luncheon with her husband, Steve, an Aiken city councilman. But Homoki liked Walker’s references to his upbringing, his focus on national security issues and his “deep love of country.”“He can appeal to a larger section of the Republican Party,” she said. Her husband agreed. “He might be the guy to actually combine the tea party types and establishment types,” he said. “We need somebody from outside the Washington establishment,someone with new ideas and the perspective of Middle America.”Some saw...

"Jeb couldn't be here today and you better be glad, 'cause it would have been $10,000 a plate. Cruz couldn't be here 'cause he's building a fence. ... Any Democrats here? You better be glad Scott Walker's not here, 'cause he would beat you up." The jokes are decent, as far as jokes about people running for president go. A little dad-ish, a little amateur, but not bad—they get at the essence of three Republican candidates, short and punchy, and not mean, per se, but also not not mean. If I was Senator Ted Cruz, and I heard myself described...

Fresh off of claiming the scalp of Liz Mair (more on that later), The Website Bearing Breitbart’s Name issued another broadside yesterday consisting almost entirely of the fact that Michelle Malkin thinks Scott Walker has a lot of problems. I’m not going to link the piece because I’m done linking to Breitbart, as I view them as summarily unhelpful to the movement. If you want to read a website that performs the function that Breitbart himself would have wanted for the movement today, read the Washington Free Beacon instead. But I think that the point of what Breitbart and Malkin...

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- At the start of Scott Walker's quest to be president, foreign policy has been a source of trouble. The Wisconsin governor has appeared shaky talking about world events and had to explain some perceived blunders. But as Walker opened his first campaign swing across South Carolina here in Columbia on Thursday, foreign policy emerged as the highlight of his stump speech. Walker's sharp, rat-a-tat critique of President Obama's foreign policy record drew a sustained and boisterous standing ovation from the crowd of 150 Republican activists at a party luncheon.

Hillary Clinton went before cameras and reporters at the United Nations last week to address the ongoing controversy over her use of a private email system during her time as secretary of state. She was terse, combative, and essentially told the American people to “trust her” when she says that she didn’t do anything wrong and isn’t hiding anything. Clinton’s visceral dislike of the media was obvious and can be summed up by three words (“Go to Hell”), which was how Politico’s John Harris put it after Clinton’s presser.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, doesn't have a lot of friends in Washington, and he's proud of it. "Politics, it ain't beanbag," the freshman firebrand told ABC in 2013, after sustaining heavy criticism from fellow Republicans for his starring role in that year's government shutdown. "I'm not serving in office because I desperately needed 99 new friends in the U.S. Senate." The shutdown episode, which saw Cruz successfully urge conservatives in both chambers to defy GOP leadership by refusing to back any government spending bill that funded Obamacare, became emblematic of Cruz's time on Capitol Hill. From the moment the conservative...