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The horse race for 2016 is several months old now, so it might surprise you that no presidential candidate left the gate before today. That changes with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas declaring for the presidency later today in a speech at Liberty University. He made it official this morning...

Well gang, it’s officially here. It’s Presidential primary season! The festivities got off to a real bang early Monday morning with the first hat thrown conclusively into the ring. That Stetson belongs to Texas’ junior Senator and government shutdown advocator Ted Cruz. Ending months of very little suspense, Cruz tweeted “I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!” to his 370,000 followers. In a piece entitled Ted Cruz Hopes Early Campaign Entry Will Focus Voters’ Attention, writers Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times quote longtime Republican strategist Dave Carney as saying, “It’s the...

He sure does, says Team Cruz. But the key to victory, Cruz advisers believe, is to be the second choice of enough voters in the party’s libertarian and social conservative wings to cobble together a coalition to defeat the chosen candidate of the Republican establishment… To them, the Republican primaries are a series of single-elimination brackets where the four GOP leaders who best represent the party’s libertarian, establishment, social conservative and tea party wings will survive as the field winnows. Cruz will vie for the support of the tea party electorate, his advisers say, but will fare well enough with...

By far, a Cruz VS Warren debate would likely be "The One" Conservatives would even pay to watch. Cruz VS Hillary would probably be the second choice. If it were to come down to Ted Cruz VS Elizabeth Warren come the fall of 2016, we all know Warren will be in a state of panic. Warren may even need to take a little extra medication before the three debates. So how would we interpret these debates? King Kong VS Ronald McDonald? Predator VS Joy Behar? or how about Mike Tyson VS James Carville? So many possibilities!

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is framing his presidential campaign as part of a conservative crusade against the "mushy middle" of Republican politics. However, his more immediate foes are also on the right. While former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) has increasingly been dubbed the frontrunner in the race, he's not Cruz's main concern in the GOP primary. While Bush and another top GOP contender, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, are clearly appealing to relatively moderate Republicans, Cruz is hoping to grab staunchly conservative voters who may be inclined to back a hardline candidate as an alternative. However, Cruz isn't the...

In nearly every presidential primary, a few candidates attract a lot of news media attention even though they have almost no chance to win the nomination. Sometimes they even lead national polls or win states, but invariably their appeal is too narrow to allow them to build the broad coalition necessary to unite a diverse party. Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and Tea Party favorite, who on Monday became the first major candidate to formally enter the race, has seemingly been on track for this role since he first ran for the Senate in 2012. He is the darling of...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)New York Republican Rep. Peter King, who is considering his own bid for the White House, mocked Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz's announcement that he was running in 2016 and said the Texas Republican isn't qualified to serve as president. "Shutting down the federal government and reading Dr. Seuss on the Senate floor are the marks of a carnival barker not the leader of the free world," King said in a written statement on Monday. King's statement references a Cruz speech on the Senate floor that last more than 20 hours, railing against Obamacare in 2013. The New York Republican...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Senator Ted Cruz has made his presidential wishes official, with Cruz’s speech streaming live on ABC News and other news outlets as of this writing, with Senator Ted reaching deep into the belief system that he says changed his life and included his parents’ belief in Christ. During the speech, Cruz related how his father and mother were drinking way too much alcohol when he was a young boy, and at one point, his dad decided he would leave the family — deserting his young son and wife. However, being invited to a Bible study changed Cruz’s father’s life,...

Texas Senator Ted Cruz just made it official: He's running for president. He made the announcement in a tweet, accompanied by a video, shortly after midnight, eastern time. Ted Cruz ✔ @tedcruz I'm running for President and I hope to earn your support! (VIDEO-AT-LINK)Cruz believes he has a path to the GOP presidential nomination by winning the Tea Party vote, and doing well enough with both social conservatives and libertarians to knock out potential rivals, according to a Houston Chronicle report published over the weekend: Cruz's senior advisers, however, see a path to victory that all but ignores [the GOP...

If Ted Cruz announces he is running for president on Monday, you won’t read much about it here. Even if he is serious and not, as The Daily Beast believes, only interested in drawing attention to himself, the first-term senator from Texas is not going to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, much less the 2016 election. He is a political lightweight whose has managed to alienate just about everyone except the most reactionary of Republican activists with his bluster and sabotage. Cruz’ McCarthy-esque denunciations of his political opponents don’t suggest he’ll be able to persuade many Democrats to switch...

The Texan spent the last months before his presidential campaign showing off his knack for articulating the most conservative position on numerous issues.Sen. Ted Cruz will reportedly launch his 2016 presidential campaign during a speech Monday, the Houston Chronicle wrote Saturday night. The Texas Republican has been laying the groundwork for a run for months—visiting early primary states, meeting with Republican activists, and hiring political strategists to manage his campaign—and has chosen the evangelical Liberty University in Virginia as the site of his official announcement. Though Cruz is not considered a favorite to win the GOP nomination, he will undoubtedly...

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...

Sen. Ted Cruz has "rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office" -- let alone president -- by insisting that humans aren't to blame for global warming, California Gov. Jerry Brown says. Brown, a Democrat, took aim at Cruz during a Sunday appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," the day before Cruz is expected to announce his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination during a speech at Liberty University in Virginia. He blasted Cruz's comment during a late-night television appearance that climate change "alarmists" have a problem. "The science doesn't back them up," Cruz had said on NBC's...

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...

IF you’re keeping score during the endless 2016 preseason, this was a pretty good week for Jeb Bush. First, he watched Scott Walker, currently his main competitor for the Republican front-runner slot, stumble through another not-ready-for-prime-time moment, first hiring a well-liked young consultant named Liz Mair and then sacking her one day later because it turned out that she had tweeted intemperately about the sacred state of Iowa. Second, he survived Andrew Ferguson. Ferguson is a brilliant essayist and reporter for the Weekly Standard, and lately he has been an angel of death for Republican presidential hopefuls. During the last...

Sure, Republicans are playing to their base by calling for mass deportations. The years-long campaign to convince a segment of Americans that undocumented immigrants are the biggest threat to the country has had its intended effect. Witness the spectacular GOP victory in the midterms, where about one-third of the electorate voted and Republicans won a majority to sweep Congress and statehouses across the country. So no surprise that almost four months into the Republican takeover of Congress, more time has been spent on immigration -- specifically, trying to reverse President Obama's executive actions shielding 5 million immigrants from deportation --...

The country needs fresh faces, not exhausted familial dynasties like the Clintons and the Bushes. Unlike the Democrats, the GOP really does have a strong bench this electoral season, especially once you get past a hopeless Rinosaur like Jeb Bush, fringe candidates like Rand Paul and no-hoper retreads like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker has already made an impressive splash; now Texas conservative firebrand Ted Cruz may be ready to throw his hat into the ring: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is set to deliver a speech on Monday at Liberty University that is stirring speculation about a...

It is beginning to seem as though the rush beyond judgment is tilting against a Hillary Clinton presidential choice; “too much baggage” is usually the explanation. Part of what is still to be done is removing factoids from influential power, what Hillary Clinton once correctly called “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” That’s more than a mouthful. I once observed: “When she testified last week for seven hours before the congressional committee and was not swayed by the nipping of rubber teeth attempting to wound, I thought of seeing her in person at an unannounced appearance following Nelson Mandela 10 years or...

Greetings from Exeter, New Hampshire on this snowy March morning! In keeping with the New Hampshire way of letting everyone make up their own mind about things, I won’t be giving detailed opinions about the candidates for President in 2016 at this point. Instead I intend to give you a quick look at the most memorable points I’ve gleaned about each candidate thus far, then I will leave it to you the New Hampshire Primary voter to get out there and go to some house parties and town meetings, and find out for yourselves what these people are about. Just...