Ted Cruz to announce presidential bid Monday 
 
 Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce Monday that he will run for president of the United States, according to his senior advisers, accelerating his already rapid three-year rise from a tea party insurgent in Texas into a divisive political force in Washington. 
 
 Cruz, scheduled to speak Monday at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, will not form an exploratory committee but rather launch a presidential bid outright, said advisers with direct knowledge of his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement had not been made yet. They say he is done exploring and is now ready to become the first Republican presidential candidate. 
 
 Over the course of the primary campaign, Cruz will aim to raise between $40 million and $50 million, according to advisers, and dominate with the same tea party voters who supported his underdog senate campaign in 2012. But the key to victory, Cruz advisers believe, is to be the second choice of enough voters in the party's libertarian and social conservative wings to cobble together a coalition to defeat the chosen candidate of the Republican establishment. 
 
 The firebrand Texan may have few Senate colleagues who will back his White House bid, but his appeal to his party's base who vote disproportionately in Republican primaries could make him competitive in Iowa and beyond. 
 
 Yet critics of Cruz argue that he will have trouble raising high-dollar donations from traditional contributors, will land few endorsements from the nation's political establishment and be unable to escape comparisons to President Barack Obama, who also ran for president in his first Senate term. And if he advances to a general election, Cruz trails likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton solidly in early public opinion polls. 
 
 "I don't consider him a mainstream candidate, and usually to win you've got to be inside the 45-yard lines," said Greg Valliere, a political adviser to Wall Street firms who believes that if Cruz did earn the nomination, he would not win more than a dozen states in the general election. "The enthusiasm for him will be tremendous in maybe a third of the party, but another third of the party will be strongly opposed and another third of the party will be wary." 
 
 Senior advisers say Cruz will run as an unabashed conservative eager to mobilize like-minded voters who cannot stomach the choice of the "mushy middle" that he has ridiculed on the stump over the past two months in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. 
 
 "Ted is exactly where most Republican voters are," said Mike Needham, who heads the conservative advocacy group Heritage Action for America. "Most people go to Washington and get co-opted. And Ted clearly is somebody that hasn't been." 
 
 Upon arriving in Washington, D.C., Cruz discarded the expectation of deference that accompanies a freshman senator, launching frequent one-man stands to stymie congressional Democrats and Republicans alike. After Cruz led a shutdown of the federal government in October 2013 as part of an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, conservative activists flocked to their new hero even as Republican leaders excoriated him. 
 
 For Cruz, 44, Monday's planned announcement will culminate two years of open musing about running for president that began nearly the moment voters elected him to the Senate in 2012. Only a month later, as senator-elect, Cruz established a political action committee to back conservative candidates nationwide. During his first congressional summer recess, he was already visiting Iowa. 
 
 And over the past seven months, the Jobs, Growth and Freedom PAC has added a coterie of nationally experienced political operatives to the 2012 team of Texas strategists who engineered the surprise dethroning of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the Republican primary. Joining the team Monday will be Cruz's wife, Heidi, a managing director at Goldman Sachs in Houston, who will take leave from the firm and accompany her husband on the campaign trail. ||||| WASHINGTON (AP) — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will announce Monday his plans to run for president, becoming the first high-profile Republican formally to enter the 2016 presidential contest. 
 
 FILE - In this March 10, 2015, file photo, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks at the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF) Legislative Conference and Presidential Forum in Washington. Cruz plans... (Associated Press) 
 
 Cruz has hinted openly at his intentions to seek the White House for months, and his intention to jump into the race was confirmed by a strategist for the first-term Republican senator, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity so as not to preclude the formal announcement. 
 
 While Cruz is the first Republican to declare his candidacy, he is sure to be followed by several big names in the GOP, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and two Senate colleagues, Kentucky's Rand Paul and Florida's Marco Rubio. 
 
 Details about Cruz's Monday campaign launch were first reported by The Houston Chronicle. 
 
 Cruz, 44, has considerable appeal among the Republican Party's base of conservative voters. 
 
 Following his election to the Senate in 2012, the former Texas solicitor general quickly established himself as an uncompromising conservative willing to take on Democrats and Republicans alike. Criticized by members of his own party at times, he won praise from tea party activists for leading the GOP's push to shut down the federal government during an unsuccessful bid to block funding for President Barack Obama's health care law. 
 
 One of the nation's top college debaters while a student at Princeton University, Cruz continues to be a leading voice for the law's repeal. He also promises to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, scrap the Education Department and curtail federal regulators, likening them to locusts. 
 
 Cruz has left little doubt about his 2016 intentions in recent weeks. He made his first trip to New Hampshire earlier this month to help lay the groundwork for a presidential campaign, having already begun to ramp up outreach to party activists and donors. 
 
 While in New Hampshire, Cruz told voters his daughter, Caroline, had given him permission to join the presidential race in the hopes that the family puppy would get to play on the White House lawn instead of near their Houston high-rise condo. 
 
 "If you win, that means Snowflake will finally get a backyard to pee in," Cruz said his daughter told him. 
 
 Cruz is set to release a book this summer that he said would reflect themes of his White House campaign. 
 
 In a recent Associated Press interview, he said he wants to counter the "caricatures" of the right as "stupid," ''evil" or "crazy." 
 
 "The image created in the mainstream media does not comply with the facts," he said. 
 
 The son of an American mother and Cuban-born father, Cruz would be the nation's first Hispanic president. While born in Canada, two lawyers who represented presidents from both parties at the Supreme Court recently wrote in the Harvard Law Review that Cruz meets the constitutional standard to run. 
 
 Cruz would retain his Senate seat through early 2019 if he fails to win the presidency.
– If it seems like it's already gone on for years, we are currently 596 (five hundred ninety-six) days away from the election that will determine the next president of the United States of America. But we are only one day away from the first official hat getting tossed into the 2016 ring by one of the many who been circling it, and the Houston Chronicle reports that it belongs to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Unnamed senior advisers say the Republican will announce his candidacy tomorrow, skipping right past the exploratory committee fun (looking at you, Jim Webb) and going right for the hat-tossing. More unnamed sources confirm the pending announcement to the AP, which notes Cruz will likely be soon joined by the likes of Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio. And if 2016 doesn't work out for Cruz, he'll keep his current day job until 2019.