Most assume that if Ted Cruz had won the GOP nomination in a conventional manner– that he would have chosen an establishment candidate like Marco Rubio or John Kasich to balance out the ticket.

Apparently not.

Speaking at the Harvard IoP conference, Jeff Roe and Jason Johnson discuss the Carly pick:

JR: That was not a mistake. … JJ: People characterized it as a ‘Hail Mary’, and that’s fair…we knew we had to do something, it was do or die.

But what if it wasn’t do or die??

Johnson says he posed that very question to Ted Cruz:

JJ: ‘If you were about to make this call right before the Republican Convention, when you were about to accept the nomination, who would you call?’ And he said ‘Carly’.

In any case, that was a rough 3 weeks…