Ted Cruz needs to step up his game. With the 2016 election season looming over the country like a storm on the horizon, it’s only a matter of time until Republicans and Democrats alike begin announcing their nominations for the presidency. Ted Cruz just so happened to be the first.

This could be a valuable asset for Cruz, whose evangelical conservative platform has garnered criticism from both sides of the aisle. However, the extra media attention that comes from being the first major presidential candidate of the 2016 election will not be enough to sustain his campaign. His inability to relate and appeal to a Republican party already divided between the mainstream and the Tea Party movements will be his crippling factor in the primaries, and if he were to receive the nomination, an ever-moderate voting base will surely block his yellow brick road to the White House.

With the Bush and Obama administrations having left rife amounts of people with a sour taste for American government, many are looking for a president who could unite an often viciously bipartisan Congress. The most incriminating example of such irrationality being the government shutdown of 2013, of which Ted Cruz was undoubtedly the co-orchestrator, along with many of his radical Senate Republican colleagues.

Their continued efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act through federal budget cuts eventually led the nation into its third-longest government shutdown in history. In fact, it is this very instance that gained Cruz the disdain of Republican party leaders, whose support is all but required if a presidential candidate wishes to make a realistic bid for the nomination. Without the support of the party elite, Cruz is doomed to fall into obscurity when a candidate such as Jeb Bush enters the fight with the full support of Republican party leaders.

Cruz’s evangelical conservative platform simply does not represent the vast majority of Americans who would rather see compromise and progress than the continuous gridlock of the 21st century. This constant impasse is what has led much of America toward the center of the political spectrum.

Data collected by the Benenson Strategy Group and Public Opinion Strategies, pollsters for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, respectively, found a large percentage of the population’s position on the ever-tilting seesaw of political thought lies majoritively in the center. Although many people identified themselves as leaning to either side of the political spectrum, the reality was that their beliefs were not firmly planted in liberalism or conservatism.

It is this moderate political climate that is vital to a budding presidential candidate’s campaign, and it is exactly why Cruz cannot and will not clinch the Republican nomination, nor the presidency. His campaign relies too heavily on a niche section of the Republican party that does not have the numbers to support him in the coming months.

If Cruz really wishes to make his way to the White House come next November, he has to make a serious shift in the direction of his campaign, and if that means sacrificing some aspects of his ultra-conservative platform, then so be it. After all, all the world’s a stage, and a governmental election is the biggest of them all.