Why Did Ted Cruz Announce his Bid for President the Way He Did?

Ted Cruz is very popular with Tea Party types. Ted Cruz is very unpopular with a whole big slice of everybody else. It doesn't help that besides being a bomb-throwing panderer, that he's also extraordinarily difficult to tolerate visually and aurally. Ugh. And he doesn't have a big political machine behind him. So, how to launch, and get the biggest bang?

Announce at a Christian "University," where attendance at your rally is mandatory for the student body! He was guaranteed an audience of a group of people who would be at least a little better than even-odds to be on your team.

[Excerpt]

An Evangelical Notre Dame
 
With degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law, Sen. Ted Cruz may have the most sterling academic résumé of any Republican presidential contender. But to officially announce his 2016 bid on Monday, he headed to a non-elite Christian school in central Virginia: Liberty University, the socially conservative school pastor Jerry Falwell founded in 1971. Much has been said about how Cruz’s choice of venue reflects his need to court the conservative evangelical Christian voters that propelled George W. Bush to two presidential victories, but Liberty’s importance isn’t just symbolism and optics. Since overcoming significant financial problems in the 1990s, the school has transformed itself into a conservative force in a state with a bitterly divided Republican Party. If the only people who heard Cruz’s speech today were the students sitting in the auditorium, it still would have been strategically valuable. . .

Read more at: Slate