Ted Cruz names Carly Fiorina as his running mate

UPDATE: Carly Fiorina is an “extraordinary leader” who has “shattered glass ceilings” in business and politics, Ted Cruz told a crowd of supporters in Indianapolis this afternoon.

Cruz announced Fiorina as his would-be vice president, evan as his rival, billionaire businessman Donald Trump, picked up a fresh round of delegates from Pennsylvania.

After a long introduction, Fiorina joined Cruz on stage and said the campaign is far from over. Repeating a line echoed by many more establishment figures in the Republican Party, Fiorina said a Trump presidency would be a disaster for the nation.

“He doesn’t represent me and does not represent my party,” she said.

While Trump won 17 of Pennsylvania’s GOP delegates yesterday, another 54 were up for grabs based on voting in congressional districts. According to the Associated Press, 33 of them plan to support Trump, giving him 987 of the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the party’s nomination. Cruz trails with 562 delegates.

As political pundits praised the pairing of Cruz and Fiorina, Planned Parenthood, a frequent target during Fiorina’s presidential bid, called the potential GOP ticket “the most loathsome pair of anti-abortion extremists in America” in a tweet to the abortion provider’s followers.

OUR EARLIER REPORT (4 p.m.): Even though his shot of winning the Republican presidential nomination is growing longer by the day, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wants voters to know who he’d pick as his running mate if he were to top the GOP ticket.

At a campaign event in Indianapolis later today, Cruz is expected to announce Carly Fiorina as his would-be vice president, a move pundits have applauded so far.

“Carly is bright, knowledgeable, brings great financial expertise, and she’s a woman,” said Gary Aminoff, the Los Angeles County co-chair of the Cruz campaign.

Although the announcement’s not official yet, several Republican leaders, including Aminoff, confirmed they’d been briefed ahead of time.

Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who ended her own presidential campaign in February, is a good strategic choice because she’s a woman, an outsider, and from California—a state where Cruz needs to pick up delegates to help prove he has a chance of winning a contested Republican convention in July.

But before California’s June 7 primary, Cruz must get past Indiana, a make-or-break state in the effort to keep Republican rival Donald Trump from getting enough delegates to secure the nomination before the convention in Cleveland. Hoosiers go to the polls on Tuesday.

“Carly has incredible appeal to so many people, especially in California,” said Doug De Groote, a fundraiser for Cruz in Southern California. “She can really help him here.”

Like Trump, Fiorina comes from the business world, starting her career as a secretary after graduating from Stanford University. She eventually earned her master’s in business administration and worked her way up the ladder at AT&T to become a senior executive. She joined Hewlett-Packard as CEO in 1999 and stayed for six years. But her tenure there was not without controversy after 30,000 workers lost their jobs to layoffs.

Democrats quickly pounced on the announcement.

“The best way to describe that ticket is mean and meaner,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who beat Fiorina in a 2010 U.S. Senate race. “He wants to throw people out of the country, and she threw thousands of jobs out of the country. Perfect match.”

Trump also assailed his rival’s big news as unjustified and “dumb.”

“First of all, he shouldn’t be naming anybody because he doesn’t even have a chance,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News. “Naming Carly’s dumb, because Carly didn’t do well. She had one good debate—not against me by the way, because I had an unblemished record of victories during debates—but she had one victory on the smaller stage and that was it.”

After a standout performance in the first so-called “undercard” debate, Fiorina rose to the main stage in September and won cheers of approval from the audience, especially after she made a withering attack on Planned Parenthood. But Fiorina failed to parlay her debate performances into popular support and dropped out of the race after several poor primary showings.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.