The end of Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz understood the potential of the "doomsday scenario" well before much of the rest of the Republican party. The GOP has long desired to be able to play offense on the electoral map and not rely on surviving from attacks in Ohio and Florida every four years and the strategy for doing so has always been obvious from a mathematical perspective.

The problem has commonly been diagnosed as the GOP lacking Hispanic votes in a nation where Hispanic share of the population is on the rise. However, that analysis can be demonstrated to be fatally flawed by simply examining the "turn Texas blue!" attempts by Texas Democrats. Hispanic population surges are largely focused in places where Republicans aren't really at any risk of losing ground politically, like Texas, and the reasons are twofold.

One is that Hispanics simply don't vote in great numbers. I remember sitting in a Texas history class at UTSA back in 2005 with a professor who was a seasoned veteran of in-state politics that had a wife who was the city manager of San Antonio. Amongst our required reading was a book called "the life and times of Willie Velasquez" who was a Chicano leader that made it his mission to register Latinos to vote. Simply getting his people to the polls was a very difficult struggle in the effort to improve their lot in life.

This reality has been largely lost on white liberals nationally that have perceived immigration as a pathway to electoral dominance and perhaps conveniently ignored by establishment Republicans pushing for an outreach campaign to Latino voters and immigration policies that happen to benefit the major corporations that love to donate to their campaigns.

Anyways, the last effort to take down Texas Republicans was in the 2014 gubernatorial election when the insulated Democrats in Austin put forth Wendy Davis as their candidate. I'm not sure why they thought that a Ivy-league educated blonde woman famous for standing up for abortion was going to be a hit with the Hispanic voters they were counting on but it backfired spectacularly.

The Republican Greg Abbott crushed Davis 59.3% to 38.9%. Hispanic voters only went to Davis by a 55-44 margin, which is nothing compared to the 71% that Obama got nationally, and Texas turnout was low.

The other reason the emphasis on Hispanic voters approach doesn't work is that down south, the Republicans generally get support from both evangelicals and working class white families (obviously in many instances, there is considerable overlap whereas in the north they are more distinct). With white voters over represented at the polls and marching behind a single banner politically they are pretty hard to beat.

Getting aggressive with the electoral map doesn't require that Republicans do a better job of reaching out to a group that is more naturally inclined to the Democrats and naturally disinclined to participate in the first place.

The key is uniting white working class families across the entire US with evangelical voters. That was Ted Cruz's plan but Donald Trump is the one that actually pulled it off.

Trump is now continuing to try and build that coalition, ultimately choosing Mike Pence to try and shore up the evangelical community rather than looking to project more strength by choosing Gen. Flynn.

As for Cruz, he accepted an opportunity to speak at the Republican National Convention and he had a major choice ahead of him. He could either

A) Make peace with the coalition of voters he had intended to represent and champion by nominally endorsing Trump and then biding his time to see if it became necessary to wait him out or else try to fully hop aboard later.

B) Try to make peace with the establishment by refusing to endorse Trump.

It seems that Cruz thought that if he used lawyerly terms like "don't stay home in November" and "vote your conscience" perhaps he could fool the voters into believing he was still on their side but it didn't work. The "Lyin Ted" moniker had already ruined any chances of that. He was booed off the stage by the delegates.

Meanwhile, Cruz has no realistic shot of making real headway with the establishment either, who largely despise him and will only use him as a tool to the extent that he's useful. He might have been useful for appealing to anti-establishment voters before but certainly not now.

By refusing to acknowledge the choices of the very group of people he hoped to champion, Cruz has now eliminated his chances of successfully running for president in the future. Either Trump will win and he'll be left bitterly watching from the sideline or Trump will lose and voters won't forget Cruz's part in helping to take him down. His best chances at major relevance now are as a career Senator or perhaps finding his way to the Supreme Court where his disagreeable nature would likely be perceived as less of a liability.

American evangelicals have just lost a talented and effective politician, machiavellian and ambitious as he may have been. The 2016 election continues forward like a wrecking ball through the status quo political landscape.