One of these days, and maybe soon, Ted Cruz just might have to endorse Donald Trump.

But he’ll never concede Trump could have beaten him in a fair fight — and he’ll never accept that Trump’s me-first philosophy represents a sustainable future for the GOP. Above all, Cruz wants to use the big stage in Cleveland to present a non-Trump alternative vision for his party’s future, one rooted in constitutional conservative principles and competent campaign management modeled, oddly enough, on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 White House runs.


“In this election I am where a great many voters are, which is that I am listening and watching and coming to a decision,” Cruz, the highest-profile Trump holdout heading into this week’s convention, told me when I asked him if he intended to throw his support behind the former reality TV star imminently.

Cruz, speaking to POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast on the eve of the Republican National Convention, was in a reflective mood about his second-place finish (“I don't know that I'm in a position to give campaign advice to Donald Trump, given that he just whipped me in a primary,” he said with a rueful laugh), but there was an unmistakably defiant edge to his pre-Cleveland mind-set, and his criticisms of Trump were veiled but vivid.

When I asked him whether Trump’s selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence — a fellow faith-and-values conservative who endorsed Cruz in the primaries — would make any difference, he offered only generic praise. “I think very highly of Pence,” he told me. “He’s a good man. I think he's been a good governor. He did a good job in Congress. And so, you know, I certainly congratulate him on being named.”

On Wednesday, the fiery but fine-tuned Texas senator is set to deliver a prime-time address to a party that rejected his candidacy, at the invitation of a nominee who savaged his family in the most personal way possible, in an attempt to reassert his core values and — in the eyes of many supporters and aides — lay a foundation for a second run in 2020.

Cruz wouldn’t talk specifically about what he plans to say — it’s sure to include a healthy portion of attacks on Hillary Clinton — but he made it clear that his goals extend well beyond getting Trump elected.

“Most wars are not won in a single battle,” said Cruz, who is still paying campaign staff to plan and to create a detailed post-mortem of the 2016 primaries (one thing he’s looking at, I’m told: whether his “New York values” quip about Trump was a blunder).

“What I’m looking forward to is changing the course this country is on. I don’t know if that happens in this election cycle or not,” he added.

When I asked him what message his supporters have been sending him in the three months since Trump became the party’s de facto nominee, he answered: “There’s a lot of despair.”

Cruz himself doesn’t exude bitterness or regret — he literally calls himself a “happy warrior” — but he has a deeply jaundiced view of the process that ended with him suspending his campaign after Trump’s big victory in the Indiana primary in May. He sees collusion, if not an outright conspiracy, between the reality TV candidate and the titans of cable news: Their goal, he told me, was to elevate a hard-to-elect Republican nominee while shoving aside more appealing candidates like himself.

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“[Trump would] lose state after state after state and the media would say that he can’t be beaten ... and the media liked to paint me as some whacked-out theocrat,” Cruz told me on Friday, sitting at a table in the common area of his Washington, D.C., apartment building as his 5-year-daughter tried to coax him upstairs for supper.

“Four weeks before we dropped out, we were winning the race,” Cruz told me. “Eighty percent of [Marco Rubio’s] supporters came to us and the party was unifying behind us. ... In the 30 days before Indiana primary, Trump got $500 million in free media, 90 percent was positive. What the media said on every station is, ‘Trump is unbeatable, he can’t be beaten’ — while he’s losing.”

It’s no secret that Cruz’s team and his allies have a beef with Fox News for what they believe to be pro-Trump bias (one person in Cruz’s orbit said he’s so disgusted with Fox he hasn’t watched the network since he dropped out in May). But he sees a more insidious hidden hand behind the media’s Trump obsession: liberal news executives who elevated Trump in the primary because they think he’s the only candidate Hillary Clinton can actually beat in a general election.

“I think many of the mainstream media players are liberal Democrats,” Cruz explained. “They intend to vote for Hillary. They believed Donald was the easiest candidate for Hillary to beat. And I think many of them wanted him to win the nomination. I don't think it was innocent decision-making behind this.”

He also thinks Bernie Sanders got the same shaft from a news media that declared him prematurely dead. “I think Hillary’s nomination and I think Donald Trump’s nomination, I think the media played decisive roles in both of them,” said Cruz, a media-accessible guy who has often run against media elites, as I pointed out to him. “We saw media as decision makers in primaries in a way we have never seen before.”

The odds are that Cruz will have to endorse Trump sooner or later, even if he holds out beyond this week, simply because no Republican can afford the perception that they didn’t do everything in their power to stop the hated Clinton from winning the election.

Yet one of the reasons Cruz has held out this long (apart from his curdled-milk relationship with a man who falsely linked his father with JFK’s assassin, insulted his wife and all but accused him of womanizing) is leverage. Trump needs “Lyin’ Ted” a whole lot more than Cruz needs him as this point, which is why he ceded a central prime-time slot to someone who is so lukewarm to him. There weren’t enough Cruz supporters to put him over the top, but his numbers are simply too good for Trump to ignore. The first-term senator won 8 million votes, 600 delegates and 12 states. He raised nearly $92 million — a record for a GOP primary candidate, much of it from small online donors. He ran by far the best ground operation of any GOP campaign this year, with more than 325,000 volunteers flocking to Cruz’s call for a grass-roots Republican renewal.

Trump has mostly succeeded in consolidating core party support behind him, but he hasn’t done quite as well in wooing the right wing as Clinton has done in winning over the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren left. Many Cruz voters (north of 50 percent in some recent polls) still won’t vote for Trump.

Cruz, who made his name by aggravating Democrats and infuriating congressional Republican leaders by leading anti-budget pitchfork revolts (former Speaker John Boehner recently called him “Lucifer in the flesh”), spent much of the interview extolling the virtues of Democratic strategy, while dutifully deriding Democratic ideas.

Obama’s 2012 campaign was, in many ways, a template for Cruz’s own his presidential run, with its focus on efficiency and channeling as much cash into direct voter contact as possible, but his political crush on Team Obama began during his 2012 Senate campaign, when he handed out copies of “The Audacity to Win,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s memoir of the ’08 race.

“The campaign [Obama] ran in 2008 was extraordinary and unprecedented and, indeed, when I ran for Senate, and in the presidential race, we very deliberately emulated what their campaign did right,” said Cruz, who began his 2016 planning with a detailed internal analysis of failed GOP campaigns, starting with Mitt Romney’s.

His goal: to spend 60 cents out of every dollar he raised on “voter contact” — either through volunteer door-knocking, email marketing, on-the-cheap candidate events (he flew Southwest for most of the campaign, quipping, “I am quite confident there will never be a plane on the face of the earth with my name on it”) and paid advertising. The penny pinching took on greater urgency when Cruz saw how much time CNN and Fox were devoting to live feeds of Trump’s empty podium and his plane idling on the tarmac. “Trump received $3 billion in free media. There is no precedent for that in the history of politics,” he told me.

The irony is that while multi-bankruptcy-seeking Trump was touting his prowess as a “businessman,” Cruz was modeling his campaign structure on a private equity fund. In contrast to Trump, who relies on his own gut — and in May infamously declared that the use of campaign data is “overrated” — Cruz carefully deferred to top aides like Jeff Roe routinely. In the middle of the campaign, the staff sent out an email pitch that included a woe-is-me declaration about how tough the campaign was on Heidi and the kids, how they spent jostling days gnawing cold pizza.

“Look, this is a pretty whining email,” Cruz told Roe.

"In the last three hours it's raised $285,000," Roe shot back.

"You know what?” Cruz replied. “Never mind."

Cruz carefully and constantly monitored not only his balance sheet but his polling and focus-group data, often making subtle adjustments to his messaging to maximize its impact in different states and disparate regions inside big states like Wisconsin, the site of his nearly campaign-changing victory.

But Cruz insists he never changed any positions after viewing analytics — he just shifted his points of emphasis.

“[Data] can tell you which messages are resonating and which aren't ... the truth of the matter is some messages resonate one place and other messages resonate another place.”

When I asked him whether Trump is making a “dangerous” mistake by eschewing the same approach, he shook his head in agreement. “Most campaigns get data wrong. They treat it as an afterthought,” he said.

As the interview went on, I noticed a barely discernible but noteworthy shift in Cruz’s tone — he wasn’t using the word “Republican” as much as he had in the late primaries when he was vying to become the party’s mainstream standard-bearer.

I asked him if that was intentional. It was.

“I think people are furious with politicians in both parties,” he said. “I care a heck of a lot more about America than I do about any political party. If the Republican Party stands for individual liberty, if we defend the Bill of Rights, if we stand for keeping this country safe, then we deserve to win, and if we don’t, we deserve to lose.”

One of the more surprising things Cruz told me was that he felt that Sanders, of all people, was on his wavelength.

True, Sanders stands for everything he hates (“Half of young people think socialism is a good idea!” Cruz said incredulously), but he sees his fellow silver medalist as a something of a kindred spirit: both screwed by the Trump-Clinton-media axis, both in touch with the ever-rising tide of anger at Washington, especially among younger voters.

“If you look on the Republican side, the two Republicans who have most energized young people in modern times are Ronald Reagan and Ron Paul,” Cruz said, pointedly excluding Trump, who polls abysmally with voters under 30.

“I’d meet Bernie's supporters and I’d say, ‘You know what? I agree with Bernie,’ and they'd look at me, startled,” Cruz said, as his daughter, tiara on head, demanded he leave for dinner. “They didn’t expect a Republican to say that. I said, ‘Listen, Bernie talks about how Washington is corrupt, both parties are in bed with the lobbyists and special interests. I think he's exactly right.’”

On the recent Air Force One flight to a memorial service for the five police officers slain in Dallas, Cruz sat in the back with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who talked about her grandkids, who live in Houston. Obama spent most of the flight in his suite fore, working, paying only a couple of brief visits back to exchange “empty pleasantries” — and to ask Cruz what he thought of the Kevin Durant, who as a free agent signed with the Golden State Warriors, one of the biggest NBA moves in years.

I asked Cruz, noting his obvious obsession with the way Obama had won his two big races, why he didn’t try to geek out with the president on how he did it.

“There's no doubt that would be an interesting conversation,” he allowed.