Ted Cruz’s announcement Monday that he will run for president is unlikely to affect the timetables for other candidates to make their intentions known.
“Nothing Ted Cruz does impacts what we do : ),” an aide to Sen. Rand Paul wrote in an email. “We have been set for a while. I am guessing Ted jumped in now because of that.”
With his speech Monday at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., Cruz became the first Republican to officially declare his candidacy for president. But some likely candidates, including Ben Carson and Sen. Lindsey Graham, have formed fundraising committees to officially explore bids, while many others have not been coy about their intentions to launch campaigns soon.
Paul plans to announce his candidacy on April 7 at a Louisville hotel, according to reports. An online invitation posted by Paul’s team to a “special rally” in Louisville on that date appears to confirm those plans, although Paul’s campaign would not confirm its authenticity.
“Join Senator Rand Paul for a very special rally,” the invite reads. “You won’t want to miss this historic event.”
Other potential candidates appear also to be sticking to their previously publicized timetables. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will make a decision in June, after his state’s legislative session concludes, the Associated Press reported Monday.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is also in no hurry to announce sooner than planned.
“The governor has been clear that his timetable is sometime in the spring, and that hasn’t changed,” said Huckabee’s spokesman Hogan Gidley.
Timetables have been scuttled and moved up in the past to respond to early announcements. In 2007, Hillary Clinton decided to move up her official announcement when Barack Obama gained early momentum following his February speech in Springfield, Ill., to declare his candidacy.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush might have had a comparable effect on the so-called invisible primary among Republican contenders for the presidency, when Bush said in December that he would begin to raise money for a potential bid for president. The surprise announcement sparked a short-lived exploration by Mitt Romney and kick-started fundraising efforts among other Republicans.
Cruz, however, will likely have no such effect on other Republicans, even those in the Christian-conservative sphere that he appears to be courting. Cruz has so far not proven to be a dominant fundraiser, and he continues to poll in the low single-digits nationally.
More telling, 38 percent of respondents in a recent Wall Street Journal-NBC poll said they could not see themselves supporting Cruz, compared with 40 percent who could see themselves supporting him — a measure by which Cruz ranked eighth among potential Republican candidates for president.
