I’ve interviewed Cruz a few times and he’s clearly a gifted politician with courage of conviction. Yet those pluses alone wouldn’t have created such a fuss around a freshman senator who’s been in office for only nine months. The ruling class in both parties sees Cruz as a singular threat to a failed status quo. That means he’s a viable champion for conservatives and libertarians in the Republican base that utterly loathe the ruling classes in both parties.

That also makes Cruz a viable general election candidate.

As I have previously written, Republicans win presidential elections when they do two things: unify the base in the primary and run on a credible, right-of-center populist economic message in the general. Neither McCain nor Romney was able to accomplish either of those things, and thus both lost.

Cruz already has the base unified behind him, as evidenced by the success the defund Obamacare effort has had dragging the leadership kicking and screaming across the finish line in the Republican-controlled House. The Republican Party establishment foolishly made Cruz the face of the grass-roots effort to fight one of the most unwanted and unpopular pieces of legislation in recent memory — further endearing him to a public desperate for leadership.