Republican Ted Cruz Announces he is Running for President

Ted Cruz will reportedly become the first Republican presidential candidate to announce a run for 2016. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a firebrand Republican, will become the first declared candidate in the 2016 presidential race on Monday morning when he announces his candidacy with a speech at Liberty University in Virginia.

Cruz, who has been in the Senate just two years, announced his plan to throw his Stetson in the ring with a short campaign video posted online overnight.

“It’s going to take a new generation of courageous conservatives to help make America great again,” Cruz says in the video. “And I’m ready to stand with you to lead the fight.”

Cruz is one of as many as 20 Republicans expected to declare a campaign for the 2016 White House. The first primary voting starts in about 10 months with the Iowa Republican caucuses next January.

One of the most dynamic figures to emerge on the national political landscape since Barack Obama, Cruz quickly rose to fame as a freshman senator by pursuing a plan to block the president’s healthcare policy that resulted in a 16-day partial closure of the federal government in October 2013.

Many Republican colleagues resented the move, which did not work and which they saw as politically costly. But the conservative base loved it, and sharply anti-Obama, small-government partisans remain the core of Cruz’s support.

Cruz came in third in straw-poll voting at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual conference in Washington earlier this year, trailing Kentucky senator Rand Paul and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.

“He is a viable candidate,” one former critic of Cruz, Arizona senator John McCain, said on Sunday. Back in early 2013, shortly after Cruz’s arrival in the Senate, McCain had deemed him and colleagues with similarly flamboyant conservative plumage “wacko birds”.

“It’s a time for truth. a time to rise to the challenge, just as Americans have always done,” Cruz says in his first campaign video.

As former solicitor general of Texas, Cruz, 44, argued nine cases before the US Supreme Court, winning five of them. He is a graduate of Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard law school. He was born three days before Christmas 1970 in Calgery, Alberta, but has said he has revoked his Canadian dual citizenship. His father is a Cuban immigrant.

Cruz’s stub campaign site highlights his views on foreign policy, family values, the economy and the Constitution – that last heading an umbrella for some of the issues the senator has gotten his most political mileage from, including opposition to gun control and support for keeping the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance.

He would be the first Hispanic president in US history.