Cruz lands first Senate endorsement: Mike Lee The nod comes as the Texas senator is trying to make nice with the GOP establishment.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — Utah Sen. Mike Lee endorsed Ted Cruz on Thursday, making him the first U.S. senator to back the Texas senator's presidential bid as he also "encouraged" Marco Rubio to get out of the race.

"If Sen. Rubio were asking me that, I would encourage him, and I do encourage him to get behind Ted Cruz," Lee told reporters.


It's a blow to Rubio, whose campaign is on life support as he seeks to avoid a knockout blow in his home state Tuesday. Lee made the announcement in Coral Gables, Fla., near Rubio’s hometown of Miami ahead of Thursday night’s GOP debate.

"I’m sending the signal that it’s time to unite," Lee said. "We as Republicans need to unite behind one leader."

"The overwhelming majority of Republican senators have not endorsed anyone, I expect that will change," he went on to say. “I expect I’ll be the first of many Republican senators who will endorse Ted Cruz. I'm confident more are on the way, and I welcome others to join."

The announcement comes as Cruz seeks to emerge as the consensus Republican alternative to Donald Trump. In recent days, donors and operatives aligned with the GOP establishment have come out in support for Cruz, seeing him as the candidate best positioned to take on Trump after winning seven primary contests, to Rubio’s two.

But the Senate, where Cruz has long been roundly reviled by many of his Republican colleagues, remained until Thursday a near-uniformly unfriendly holdout. Lee said he would be encouraging his colleagues to back Cruz as well.

"He is the only Republican candidate who can defeat Donald Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton," he said of Cruz.

Lee is close with both Cruz and Rubio, and he had resisted jumping into the race and potentially alienating one of them. He sat down with Rand Paul, Rubio and Cruz as the presidential campaign got underway one year ago and told them: “Look: I’m in an awkward spot because I’m really close to all three of you guys.”

“One of the weirdest things that can happen to a person is to have his three favorite co-workers all running for president of the United States at one time,” Lee said during a December interview. “It’s just weird.”

But that neutrality waned as Trump rose and Rubio faltered. With crucial primary votes in just five days, the chairman of the Senate GOP’s conservative Steering Committee still has a chance to make a difference in the race.

Lee missed both a Senate vote and a rowdy Judiciary Committee discussion about the Supreme Court vacancy — precisely the type of debate the conservative Lee has reveled in. Those absences were not lost on his colleagues.

“Something’s up,” one GOP senator said.

Cruz has in recent days appeared to make some overtures to his Republican colleagues in the Senate. In an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Cruz praised Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — whom he once referred to as a “liar” on the Senate floor — for having “drawn a line in the sand on behalf of the American people” in not agreeing to consider any Supreme Court nominee replacements for the late Justice Antonin Scalia until the next president is inaugurated.

And on Wednesday, Cruz heaped compliments on Rubio.

“Let me take a minute to sing Marco’s praises,” he told reporters, as he also directly urged Rubio's supporters to join his campaign if they wanted to beat Trump. “Marco is a colleague of mine, a very, very talented leader, an incredible communicator. What does it say about our nation, that the sons of two Cuban immigrants who came penniless to this country, one a bartender and a maid, and the other, his dad, a dishwasher, that right now their sons would be among the handful still running for president?”



Amanda Carpenter, Cruz's former communications director in the Senate, said Cruz is wise to extend olive branches as he makes the case that the party should unite around him.

"He is on Team Republican," she said. "He wants people to unite around his candidacy. It's not going to happen if he's ignoring them. He wants to be the guy to unite the party. They all believe the same things, he would do well to remind people of that. Just because they've fought for those things in different ways, doesn't mean they don't share a lot in common."

But Lee's endorsement may come too late to make a difference, said Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the most-senior Republican senator.

“I don’t know that anyone’s one endorsement is going to make a difference unless somebody came back from the dead or something like that,” said Hatch, who has backed Jeb Bush and Rubio but seems to be warming to Cruz. “But I don't think it’s going to hurt anybody. Any senator’s endorsement is important, and Mike’s would be important, too.”

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has endorsed Trump, agreed with that point. "Most people are laying out of it. So if they haven’t endorsed by the time they’re state got involved, I don’t think many will," he said.



Eliza Collins contributed reporting.