Ted Cruz has to be wondering: What happened?

In the wake of his third-place finish in Nevada, Mr. Cruz’s case for himself is: Don’t forget Iowa. He has come a long way.

In the fall of 2013, the freshman Texas senator rolled the dice so boldly that the biggest congressional Texan of all time, Lyndon Johnson, would have been agog. Sen. Cruz, with the whole Republican Party raging at him, pulled off a shutdown of the U.S. government. He publicized the shutdown with a 21-hour speech on the Senate floor, attacking other Republicans for not joining his Pickett’s charge against ObamaCare, then a federal law.

Ted Cruz knew amid this GOP chaos that he was going to run for president in 2016. He had the game plan in hand.

The plan was to make a household name for himself as the Republican Party’s best-known outsider. A narrative back then held that a deep wave of anger at the party’s leadership was building in the heartland. Ted Cruz was going to personally deepen the anger and then ride it.