I have no doubt that Cruz will be running again, but his window has probably passed him by. His best shot was in 2016, had Trump not ran. Even then, I think he still loses to Bush... I go into much more detail about this in some other thread that I'm not gonna bother searching for right now, but the long and short of it is- Cruz was a factional candidate that was never going to get establishment support. This was obviously not a problem for Trump, but Trump was a dynamic candidate in a way that Cruz is never going to be.
And that's going to be his problem going forward- he's still a factional candidate, except now that faction has only decreased in relevance/power, and on top of that, he's become yesterday's news. Add in the fact that a lot of people find him very unlikeable- not unlikeable as in Trump (i.e. being a dick), but unlikeable as in "he gives me the creeps." Which is about 100x worse. I expect he'll do, at best, as well as 2016, but probably a lot worse.
As far as Haley goes, no, her problem is not what Icespear mentions. Which is obvious chest-thumping and I assume most people are savvy enough to recognize that as opposed to being misled into thinking it's serious analysis, since Haley emerged from SC and was not exactly a liberal Rockefeller-style Republican from MA or anything. Of course, the rather childish insistence on using her given name there was a nice little touch, I'm sure SC voters called her exactly the same thing and it was an oh-so paramount concern when she won her last primary by over 20 points.
No, the problem RINO Tom- is more along what Indyrep says. She's a product of a particular era of the GOP, an era that is coming (perhaps already came) to a close. The timing was just never right for her- by the time she emerged on the scene, the party was clearly moving on from that... at least in style, if not in substance, and I'd argue that by now, it's moved on in terms of both. Now I understand this is to your chagrin Tom, but the longer you ignore reality, the harder this is going to be for you.
Now, to be fair, maybe she's a skilled enough politician to rebrand herself and pick up some signature issue that will be particularly relevant in 2024 (we'll see)... I have my doubts, simply because candidates that try to do this always fail- if your moment has passed you by, you are not going to become the next in-vogue candidate, no matter what you do- it's out of your hands. But who knows, I could be wrong. We'll see.
