The Slatest

Ted Cruz Names Carly Fiorina as His Running Mate

Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina at an event in Orlando on March 11.

Gerardo Mora/Getty Images

Update, April 27, 2016, 5:45 p.m.: It’s official: Ted Cruz named Carly Fiorina as his running mate on Wednesday. The early word from the Donald Trump camp was this:

Original Post: Ted Cruz is promising a “major announcement” at a Wednesday afternoon rally in Indianapolis, but it appears as though the suspense is already gone: He’ll name Carly Fiorina as his running mate.

WMUR was the first to land the scoop, which was later confirmed by National Review. (In between, NBC News cameras spotted Fiorina in Indianapolis.) It’s unclear exactly what language Cruz will use this afternoon, but National Review’s source says Cruz will be presenting himself and Fiorina as “a ticket.”  

Cruz had previously floated Fiorina as a possible running mate, so the surprise isn’t the who (Carly) but instead the by whom and when (a candidate who currently trails the front-runner by a whopping 390 delegates and who was recently mathematically eliminated from clinching the nomination ahead of the convention).

It’s hard to see this as anything other than a desperation play from Cruz. Yes, it will temporarily steal the spotlight away from Trump, who got himself back on track to win the GOP nomination by sweeping five state contests on Tuesday. But that attention is likely to be fleeting. Voters already got a long look at Carly last year, and they weren’t all that impressed. To wit, here’s a reminder of how she fared in the national polling while she was still in the race:

Huffington Post

Her high-water mark—roughly 8 percent—came at the end of September, roughly a week and a half after she appeared to get the better of Trump during a prime-time debate. Her relative popularity, however, was short lived. She finished in a tie for seventh place in Iowa (with less than 2 percent of the vote), and followed that up with another disappointing seventh-place finish in New Hampshire (with a little more than 4 percent of the vote). She called it quits soon after.

Cruz’s gambit comes at a cost, too. As it stands now, his only chance at winning the nomination is at a contested convention. And by naming his VP pick now, Cruz is giving up a potential bargaining chip he could have used to round up the support he’d need to win the nomination in the event Trump can’t close the deal on the first ballot. The fact Cruz is willing to make that trade-off now suggests that he believes if he waited to use the VP chip at the convention it might already be worthless. While that might be true, it’s unclear it has all that much value now, either.

Read more Slate coverage of the Republican primary.