I’ve never hidden who I like in the 2016 Presidential race. I was thrilled to enter this cycle because there were so many candidates I could support fully, including guys like Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry.

Two of my favorites are still in the race: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. My reasons for supporting Rubio I will discuss in a future post, but here’s why I like Ted Cruz. The establishment fears him, because it does not understand him, and the more they react to him with hysterical, shrieking rage, the more I know he’s a good guy to have in DC.

Ted Cruz doesn’t belong in Washington. I say that not because he’s harmful to have there, but because he’s great for the nation to have there. He doesn’t belong there though, because he’s one of the few major, national figures who doesn’t care about being liked by the establishment.

Even the conservative heroes tend to try at least to minimize the active friction with other Republicans. Tom Coburn did it. Marco Rubio does it. Mike Lee tends to stay quiet. Jim DeMint waited until he was halfway out the door before he started properly antagonizing leadership. But Ted Cruz is a honey badger on Capitol Hill. He doesn’t care about anything but standing up for his principles.

That’s a remarkably rare thing in DC. Even the good, principled guys tend to be the ladder climbers. But like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz doesn’t care about going one rung at a time, making friends along the way. He cares about his principles, and about winning to get them put into policy.

The DC establishment doesn’t understand that. They don’t understand that someone would actually put principle over being liked, or that an Ivy League-educated man would actually believe the things he says to the rubes back home in flyover country. So they assume he must have some ulterior motive. They assume he’s just putting on an act.

Rather than believe Ted Cruz has a laser-like focus on getting a conservative agenda promoted in Washington, they assume all of his hard-nosed tactics are designed to get him headlines. They think he wants to lose, because they can’t imagine the alternative. They can’t imagine he really wants to win.

But he does want to win. It’s obvious Ted Cruz wants it more than Mitt Romney did, more than John McCain, Bob Dole, and Jeb Bush. It’s not a nebulous sense of entitlement that drives Ted Cruz. No, it’s his love for his country, his strong sense of faith, and his trust in our enduring Constitution that fuel his tenacity.

Ted Cruz wants good to prevail, and that means he has to fight hard. He has to fight if he wants to win, and he’s willing to fight. Every strategic decision he’s made in this race, from playing judo with Donald Trump, to making over the top crazy attacks on Marco Rubio, has clearly been done with the belief that it’s his best chance to win the race.

It’s refreshing to see a US Senator who thinks our ideas are simply better, and deserve to have someone fighting hard to have them win. That’s why I’d be thrilled to see Ted Cruz win the nomination for President.