The title caught my eye. I was curious to see what was identified as 'what went wrong'. Per the author many of the same things that turned off those who became Trump supporters:
arrogance, hubris, bragging about voterless primary wins, being dishonest.


What Went Wrong for Ted Cruz
3:03 AM, May 04, 2016 | By Fred Barnes

What happened to Ted Cruz? A month ago, he won the Wisconsin primary in a landslide and was poised to combat Donald Trump with a fresh burst of enthusiasm. Now he's out of the race and Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Things happened in two cycles, some in recent weeks and others that plagued his campaign from the beginning. As Trump said last night, Cruz is tough and smart. But he made big mistakes as a presidential candidate.

Cruz thought he could skip primaries in states that looked unpromising.

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Two other factors contributed to his demise. He accused Trump of being a liberal like Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee. The charge wasn't credible. Trump may not be a conservative, but he's hardly a liberal.

And Cruz talked incessantly about process. He and his campaign aides boasted about how well he was doing in putting Cruz backers in delegate slots pledged to Trump. They pointed to their success in winning all 34 delegates in Colorado, though neither a primary nor a caucus had been held.

This backfired. Voters tend to be uninterested in campaign process. Worse, Trump insisted the nomination fight was "rigged" because delegates were being chosen undemocratically, without the assent of voters. Trump exploited this issue successfully for days

Then there were Cruz's long-term problems. One was his persistent claim to be the only "true conservative" in the race. Indeed, he is a conservative. But by saying so incessantly, he cut himself off from voters who weren't interested in a right-wing candidate.

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"Trump's strategy was so simple that it's almost crude: try to win every state," Danker wrote. "He visited just about every state that had a nominating contest, and refused to concede there was any place where he couldn't do well. Because his campaign was not reliant on paid advertising, he was able to use this approach without much regard to his campaign budget."

By the way, Cruz's worst fear was realized in Indiana. He lost the bloc of "very" and "somewhat" conservative voters to Trump.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/what-went-...article/2002227

Quote: conservgramma wrote in post #2

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I still say it was the pretend Dudley do-right morphing into Snidely Whiplash personality that did him in.

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