Ted Cruz dropped out of the presidential race on Tuesday night, ending one of the best-organized campaigns of 2016 after a series of stinging defeats left Donald Trump as the only candidate capable of clinching the nomination outright.

Cruz had appeared eager to go all the way to Cleveland to contest the Republican convention, but a string of massive losses in the Northeast and his subsequent defeat in Indiana convinced his team there was no way forward.


“From the beginning I’ve said that I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory,” Cruz said, with his wife Heidi by his side. “Tonight I’m sorry to say it appears that path has been foreclosed.”

“With a heavy heart but with boundless optimism for the long-term future of our nation, we are suspending our campaign.”

From the start, Cruz had premised his candidacy on the idea that 2016 would be an election driven by resentment toward the established GOP order. It was a strategy that looked prescient as Cruz steadily rose in the polls throughout 2015 and broke into the top tier in Iowa in early 2016.

But what Cruz did not expect is that he would be outmatched in outsider anger by Trump. Cruz had maintained a fragile truce with Trump all of last year, but by the time he turned on the front-runner, the Manhattan businessman had already captured the voters Cruz was hoping would fuel his candidacy.

As he bowed out, Cruz did not even mention the presumptive nominee.

"The challenges we face today remain as great as ever," Cruz told his supporters as he suspended the campaign. "Americans are deeply frustrated and desperately want to change the path that we're on."

Campaign Manager Jeff Roe stood alone in the back of the room, watching Cruz speak. Chad Sweet, Cruz’s campaign chairman, quickly walked by a table of reporters with a sober expression moments before Cruz’s speech, and left immediately after. Others stared at their phones.

Some staffers had flown up from Houston last-minute on Tuesday to watch the conclusion of the race.

The room held only a small crowd, but it was an emotional one.

“No!” some in the audience yelled as Cruz announced that he was exiting the race.

“You’re a great man, Ted!” another attendee shouted.

One man appeared to wipe tears from his eyes after the speech concluded, and audience members across the room embraced.

Despite being mathematically eliminated from the outright win a week ago, Cruz had appeared eager to take the fight all the way to the convention. His team executed a delegate selection plan that looked ready to ensure Cruz loyalists would deliver a win on a second or third ballot. But his losses in the Northeast last week followed by a bruising in Indiana on Tuesday convinced his team there was no way forward.

Cruz had a miserable final 48 hours on the trail in Indiana. His new running mate, Carly Fiorina, slipped and fell off stage in a moment that went viral online. He confronted a Trump supporter on camera and told him in a heated exchanged that, “He is playing you for a chump.” And Cruz interrupted a young heckler to scold him that, “In my household, when a child behaves that way, they get a spanking.”

Rick Tyler, Cruz’s former communications director, said, “There’s a psychology that’s beginning to take place with these three videos playing that demoralizes his supporters.”

Then on Tuesday, as voting was underway, Cruz eviscerated Trump in his harshest and most desperate terms yet, calling him a “serial philanderer,” a “pathological liar,” and a “narcissist.”

“The man is utterly amoral,” Cruz went on, comparing him to the fictional bully character in Back to the Future, “We are looking, potentially, at the Biff Tannen presidency.”

The fresh attacks came as Cruz’s image nationally had plunged to new lows in the Gallup poll, putting him underwater for the first time, with 39 percent favorable and 45 percent unfavorable ratings, on the eve on Indiana’s election.

Indeed, while Cruz had hoped to consolidate the Stop Trump movement behind him after winning in Wisconsin, he netted few new endorsements. Almost a year after he announced his candidacy, Cruz still had the backing of only four of his Senate Republican colleagues, less than 10 percent of the conference, and one of them (Lindsey Graham) likened it to picking poison over being shot and another (Jim Risch) wasn’t even sure his tepid approval qualified as an endorsement.

Josh Holmes, who served as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s chief of staff when Cruz arrived in the Senate in 2012, said Cruz was perhaps the lone top Republican politician in America who couldn’t rally congressional Republicans against Trump, a bombastic outsider whose heated rhetoric and unpredictability has turned off many GOP elites.

“They would vote for almost anybody other than Donald Trump,” Holmes said. “Unfortunately, almost anybody does not include Ted Cruz.”

In early 2016, it had appeared that Cruz had executed masterfully his plan to consolidate conservatives and emerge as Trump’s main rival. In Iowa, he drove Govs. Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker out of the race before the caucuses — and then crushed the two reigning winners, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, on caucus day.

Even as he exited the race, Cruz had far surpassed most expectations in 2016, particularly in fundraising, as he tapped both big donors and an army of small ones and became one of the race’s best-financed candidates. His constellation of super PACs raised the second most to Jeb Bush among Republicans last year. And ahead of super Tuesday, his campaign bragged about more than 200,000 volunteers nationwide.

For a 45 year old only halfway through his first term in the Senate, those could be the building blocks of the future, especially for a Republican Party that, until 2016 at least, had long rewarded candidates seasoned by previous losing campaigns.

But this year, after Indiana, it simply was not clear where Cruz could have knocked Trump off his stride. Even anticipating a win in Nebraska, a state where Cruz might have fared well, Trump’s path to the 1,237 delegated needed to win the nomination was clear.

Cruz executed every available political maneuver in Indiana, hoping to turn his fortunes in a Midwestern state whose makeup he likened to his past landmark victories in Iowa and Wisconsin. The Kasich non-compete pact backfired, as the Ohio governor still told his supporters to vote for him even though he wasn’t campaigning there, limiting its impact. Trump, meanwhile, hammered his opponents as typical opportunistic politicians.

Cruz had entered Indiana on the decline, after losing six straight states in the northeast by unexpectedly large margins — and finishing behind Trump in every county in those six states.

Republicans with tracking polls in Indiana said Trump’s decisive New York win on April 19 — he topped 60 percent statewide — eroded Cruz’s support among Hoosiers. One Republican tracking the race said Cruz had led Trump in their Indiana poll, 33 percent to 32 percent, in the first week of April. But that as of a week ago, Trump had opened up a 12-point lead, 43 percent to 31 percent, over Cruz.

Notably, at the 2016 campaign’s most crucial inflection point, Republican insiders have pushed Cruz aside in favor of Trump.

Former Speaker John Boehner called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.”

Former Sen. Judd Gregg declared himself a “never” Cruz voter, calling him “a demagogue’s demagogue.” Two House committee chairman endorsed Trump in the last week, as seasoned Washington hands from John Feehery, a former top House GOP aide, to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have embraced his inevitability.

In his final rally on Monday in Indiana, Cruz wrapped up his speech with a rare bit of public introspection. “This has been a strange and long journey,” he said. “It hasn’t been boring.”

The next morning, on primary day, Cruz warned that Indiana was “the one thing that stands between us and the abyss."

And so now, in Cruz’s own telling, there is just the abyss.