As he, Wilson, and Polyansky chatted this week, they were quick to revisit some of the momentous decisions that led the way to Cruz’s withdrawal after Indiana. Wilson lamented having stopped his polling calls the final weekend before March 15, which he thought led to having Cruz spend too much time in Illinois and not enough in North Carolina and Missouri, where Trump’s eventual margin of victory proved much narrower. Roe regretted having five weeks later effectively yielded New York state to his rivals with the hope that John Kasich would have better success poaching delegates from Trump there than Cruz would.
But Roe treated those episodes as counterfactual trivia, with little didactic merit beyond second-guessing. Instead, he was fixated on what the postmortem would teach him about some of the more “granular” choices he had made. Would the campaign have been smarter to negotiate the lease-purchase of a jet rather than pay for a mix of chartered flights and last-minute commercial itineraries? Was it smart to have built in-house data and fundraising departments instead of outsourcing the work to consultants? These were the choices he knew he would confront when he wrote his next campaign plan or budget for a presidential candidate, in a Trump-free world.

Re-election looms in 2018, followed immediately by the next presidential season. “We were definitely the leader of the movement in this campaign, and we definitely intend to position ourselves to continue to be,” said Roe. “You can have someone who does a particularly effective job of communicating their message on their behalf, you can have someone who has the passion of a group of people who believe in the same philosophical beliefs and can exercise that muscle better than others,” said Roe. “But leaders don’t pick movements, movements pick leaders.”

Then he added an actuarial reminder about the man who said that he never fails to plan: “He’s 45.”