Ted Cruz has received his fair share of criticism for various campaign moves – one being a loose pact with Kasich to divide and conquer some of the remaining primaries. His latest move was to announce his choice for Vice President, Carly Fiorina. While some of the initial response was negative – it was an unusual move to do something like this before winning the nomination himself, and it led to characterizing his campaign as desperate. Those criticisms have some basis, but I would bet a lot of money that Cruz already thought through all of that. He decided that whatever criticism he would receive was going to be outweighed by the benefit he perceived in making this move.

One of the possible benefits Cruz saw was first to try to bump the news cycle away from Donald Trump’s big win in the Northeast. He did accomplish this to some degree as Fox News’ The Five led with the story of the VP pick. On the other hand, Bill O’Reilly almost completely ignored the announcement by burying it in less than 30 seconds of discussion and wrapped it into a segment more generally on women voters. Megyn Kelly followed up on The Kelly File with a prominent interview with Fiorina. Hannity spent an hour with the team last night.

If there’s one thing we know about Ted Cruz, it’s that he is a big picture, long-term type of guy. One of the biggest positives of this move is the push to define each candidates’ campaigns. Cruz put his cards on the table to give voters more than a glimpse of what his presidency will look like. In doing so, he has put pressure on Trump to do the same.