The 2016 election officially began with a tweet.

Shortly after midnight on Monday morning, Ted Cruz confirmed on Twitter that he will run for president, making him the first official candidate of the 2016 race and kicking off a season of campaign launches, with several other candidates expected to jump in in coming weeks.


“I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!” the tweet read, with a link to a slickly-produced 30-second campaign video.

“It’s a time for truth,” Cruz says in the clip, which is paid for by “Cruz for President.” “A time to rise to the challenge, just as Americans have always done. I believe in America and her people, and I believe we can stand up and restore our promise. It’s going to take a new generation of courageous conservatives to help make America great again. And I’m ready to stand with you to lead the fight.”

A full announcement is scheduled for Monday morning around 10 A.M., two advisers confirmed, when the Texas Republican and his family are expected to unveil the campaign at Liberty University, a conservative Christian college in Lynchburg, Va. The Associated Press photographed the Cruz family’s walk-through on Sunday, complete with a spousal kiss on stage.

Cruz, a tea party-aligned Republican who was elected to the Senate in 2012, will become the first formally announced candidate of the presidential campaign. Over the next few weeks, nearly 10 months before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, he will be joined by several other candidates — including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky on the GOP side, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side — who are also expected to kick off their campaigns.

An early April launch allows them to take advantage of the full second fundraising quarter to rack up their cash figures as part of an attempt to project campaign strength after the June 30 filing deadline.

Cruz’s announcement comes with the Senate still in session. With a two-week recess scheduled to begin the following week and run through April 10, that window has created an incentive for candidates in federal office to formally announce. Cruz, by launching Monday, will get a head start on Paul, who is expected to announce in Louisville, Ky., on April 7, before embarking on a four-state tour the day after, with stops in New Hampshire, Charleston, S.C., Iowa City and Las Vegas. Paul’s campaign also confirmed a speech in Mount Pleasant, S.C., on the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier.

Rubio’s camp is also looking at the same time frame.

Clinton, the presumptive Democratic frontrunner, is preparing for an April launch while working to finalize a broad slate of hires for the expected Brooklyn campaign headquarters and in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.

Her schedule contains no public events after this week, ratcheting up speculation that she will officially announce her bid around the beginning of next month. As Cruz rolls out his campaign, she will be in Washington at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, for an event co-hosted by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union that’s designed to highlight her ties to organized labor.

Cruz, 44, will bypass the traditional exploratory phase of the campaign — reflecting a calculation that there’s little point in prolonging the process and that in being first out of the gate he can draw greater attention. The news of the announcement was first reported by the Houston Chronicle on Sunday.

By Sunday night, TedCruz.org was live as the senator’s presidential campaign site. The campaign failed to secure TedCruz.com, which features a pro-Obama message.

By starting early, Cruz, a grassroots favorite, could crowd out the half-a-dozen other potential candidates who will be playing for the most conservative segment of the GOP base. Those likely opponents, such as Ben Carson and Rick Santorum, aren’t planning to announce until later in the spring. Yet Cruz could also be opening himself up as a target to other potential rivals, some of whom already haven’t shied away from criticizing him. Likely candidates such as Santorum, Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham have all publicly jabbed him in the past, even before he was officially running.

Cruz is likely to face stiff headwinds in the Republican primary, with many of the party’s biggest donors throwing their support to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and many of the party’s conservative voters getting behind Paul and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

His own colleagues in Washington have frequently been disdainful of Cruz since he helped instigate the 2013 government shutdown. And his hardline views and uncompromising style have disqualified him even in the eyes of more conservative elements of the political class who are concerned about electability.

Ted Cruz ad: 'Ted Cruz for President'

But Cruz is embracing that outsider status, just as he did in Texas, where in 2012 he beat out the presumed Republican Senate nominee, former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, and became a hero to that conservative state’s tea party. He frequently compares the 2016 election dynamics to those of 1980 —the year Ronald Reagan was elected.

“In 1980, Washington, D.C., despised Ronald Reagan,” he said at the Texas GOP convention last summer, an implicit nod to his own standing, and a theme he has returned to as recently as at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. “The only way we turn this country around is the American people.”

Cruz also relishes his reputation as an uncompromising conservative — in his campaign launch video, he refers to himself as a “courageous conservative.” In his view, the GOP has lost the last two presidential elections because the party has nominated candidates who are too moderate.

“If we nominate another candidate in that same mold, the same voters who stayed home in 2008 and 2012 will stay home in 2016, and Hillary Clinton is the next president,” he told POLITICO in December, after Jeb Bush announced he was considering a presidential bid.

In starting his campaign at Liberty University, a private Christian college founded in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Cruz is signaling that he will aggressively seek out the support of the party’s socially conservative voters, a bloc with some degree of overlap with the tea party.

His father, Rafael Cruz, a pastor, spoke at Liberty in November 2013 about his experiences as a Cuban refugee and the need for Christians to be involved citizens. Ted Cruz himself spoke at Liberty in April 2014 about threats to religious liberty in America. The school’s newspaper reported Sunday that the university president, Jerry Falwell (the elder Falwell’s son) received a call from Cruz’s camp only last week about the event. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who is close to the Clintons, was initially scheduled to speak on Monday, the report said, and he declined the offer to share a stage with Cruz or remain the only speaker and push Cruz’s event to the afternoon.

While Cruz will have some competition for the social conservative vote from potential candidates including Santorum and Mike Huckabee, he is well-positioned to compete in states like Iowa and South Carolina, where Christian conservatives are an influential bloc. The senator, who is comfortable using religious language, is slated to appear next month at the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators’ “Homeschool Day at the Capitol” in Iowa. Later in the month he will be at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kick-off in the Hawkeye State.

Aides said his announcement on Monday would highlight Cruz’s oratorical skills, one of his chief strengths. During his two years in the Senate, Cruz — a former Texas solicitor general who has argued nine times before the U.S. Supreme Court — became best known for his pre-shutdown, 21-hour speech on the Senate floor in September 2013 in which he spoke of the need to defund Obamacare.

He has long been building contact lists for his leadership PAC, the Jobs, Growth and Freedom Fund, often asking people attending his speeches to text words such as “growth” to a designated number, which gets them signed up. On Sunday night, a text from the PAC promised an “exciting announcement soon” and urged recipients to keep an an eye on Twitter. And with one 81-character missive, the presidential cycle was on.

Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.