Texas Sen. Ted Cruz may choose not to endorse Donald Trump, according to Jeff Roe, Cruz’s presidential campaign manager.
Asked whether Cruz may withhold an endorsement from the GOP’s presumptive nominee, Roe responded, “Gosh, yeah, yeah, for sure that’s possible.”
“If you learn anything from [Trump’s book] The Art of the Dea [it] is you have leverage, you have something that somebody wants, don’t ever act like you want to make a deal until you make a deal, OK?” Roe told Politico.
He continued to say that he meant Cruz’s conservative voters had the leverage over Trump.
“If, at some point in the campaign, he [Trump] believes he needs the votes and he believes that the key to him winning, then the conservatives will have leverage,” Roe said. “And I think that’s really damn important leverage if you have somebody going into the White House, on a victory, that is able to hold him accountable for things we did in the campaign.”
Roe also said he did not expect Trump, if he won, would choose to run again in 2020, and said “it’s probably a four year window here, either way.” The Cruz campaign is still producing its post-mortem account of what went wrong in 2016, but it may have designs on 2020, too.
“Is Cruz thinking about 2020 already?” Politico asked.
“Oh, I don’t — it would be very hard to think past that,” Roe responded. “I mean, we’re still in our autopsy phase on our own campaign. I mean, we’re going to figure that—we’re going to do all the dial-testing on all the things.”
Roe said that the 2016 campaign for Cruz is finished — despite talk of a coup at the convention — but that the campaign would attend and participate in this summer’s GOP convention.
