Formal announcements that someone is running for president are fun, but they don’t tell us much about the state of the race.
The big political news yesterday was of course Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s announcement that he’s running for president. The thing to keep in mind here is that these sorts of announcements aren’t moments of important decision-making, even though that’s how the political media portrays them. Instead they are basically just giant media events that mark the transition from a presidential campaign from the stage where you act really coy when a reporter asks you if you’re running for president to the stage where you stop being coy and start doing stuff like go to pancake breakfasts in New Hampshire.
As a media event it was of a bit of a fiasco that rapidly degenerated into the conservative evangelical Christian college students in the audience getting really bored with Cruz’s speech and making jokes about how silly he is on Yik Yak. That’s pretty hilarious, but that’s not Cruz’s real problem.
Cruz’s real problem is that he’s not very popular among his own party because he keeps causing epic disasters for the Republican Party in Washington. This means he isn’t going to win the nomination because the modern nomination process is controlled by the parties and America’s two great political aren’t going to let someone who can’t be trusted have their respective presidential nominations. Jonathan Bernstein made the full argument about how this works yesterday as well.
Simply put if your own colleagues in the Senate really don’t like like you, they aren’t going to let you become their presidential nominee.
Which is how to think about these sort of presidential announcements as we go forward. The rumor is that Rand Paul is going to announce in the next two weeks and as a media event that might go well, or hilariously wrong like it did for Cruz, or maybe somewhere in the middle. This is all a lot of fun to read about, and to make jokes on Yik Yak about, but these sorts of events are not going to tell us whose going to win.
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