In a development that’s a blow to both Republican front-runner Donald Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, stalwart conservative Sen. Mike Lee of Utah on Thursday became the first senator to officially endorse Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for the presidency.
Capping the day after word started circulating with the news website BuzzFeed, Sen. Lee made the announcement official late Thursday afternoon. He praised Cruz’s consistent support of conservative causes.
“Ted has kept those promises and every other promise he has made to the people of Texas,” Lee said, according to CNN. “It is with that trust that he’s earned that he’s going to move forward and unite our party.”
The endorsement gave a blast of positive news coverage to Cruz when he is increasingly seen as the Republican with the best chance of becoming the last man standing as a serious challenger to billionaire businessman Donald Trump for the GOP nomination. Trump’s freewheeling campaign has been a juggernaut among the party’s base but is widely distrusted among the party elites and conservative purists.
Sen. Lee’s announcement is the kind of news Rubio — who is facing a do-or-die primary in his home state on Tuesday — could clearly have used, and an endorsement Lee could have given him.
“I’ve got two really good friends in this race,” Lee said at a campaign rally for Cruz in South Carolina in February, according to NBC News. “Any one of them running alone would have gotten my endorsement a long time ago.”
As the first Cruz endorsement among lawmakers in the upper chamber, the Lee move will also weaken a major Trump line of attack against the Texas senator — that he cannot attract the support of those who serve with him and are presumably most familiar with him.
At the Feb. 25 Republican debate in Houston, Trump used Cruz’s lack of endorsements among his Senate colleagues as a cudgel.
“I got along with everybody. You get along with nobody,” Trump lectured. “You don’t have one Republican senator … backing you, not one. You don’t have the endorsement of one.”
That’s an argument Trump won’t be able to make at Thursday’s Republican debate in Miami.
It’s certainly no big surprise that Cruz won Lee’s endorsement as the two have a shared history.
Lee was the first sitting senator to endorse Cruz’s campaign for Senate, according to The Daily Beast. The two also worked closely fighting President Obama’s executive action on immigration, even to the point of angering fellow Republicans, National Review has reported.
The biggest immediate impact of Lee’s endorsement is likely to be on Rubio and his chances in the looming Florida primary.
While it will weaken one of Trump’s strongest attack lines against the man closest to him in the delegate count, one senator’s endorsement won’t turn the Texas maverick into Mr. Popularity.
Rubio could sure have used the help, though
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