Donald Trump Wins Indiana Republican Primary, Gets Closer To Republican Presidential Nomination
Donald Trump is very likely going to be the
Republican nominee for president of the United States. As results from
Indiana’s primary election came in Tuesday night, Trump was quickly
declared the projected winner of the state's 57 delegates, putting him
just a few hundred short of the 1,237 he needs to clinch the nomination.
Indiana represented a last hope for Ted Cruz
and the Stop Trump movement in their quest to keep Trump from winning
enough delegates to secure the nomination before the Republican National
Convention this summer. Just last week, Indiana was considered a state
where Cruz was supposed to win, but polling changed and a series of wins
by Trump gave him momentum going into the Hoosier State.
Going forward, with Trump polling well in many
of the remaining primary contests, it will be extremely difficult for
Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich to stop Trump. At this point, even if he
does fall short of the required delegates, most establishment
Republicans seem to have resigned themselves
to The Donald’s candidacy, and it looks very unlikely that the few who
are adamantly anti-Trump will be able to do much to get rid of him.
Cruz has typically done well in states with conservative, evangelical voters, while Trump has been less dominant in states that lean Republican such as Indiana. As recently as April 30, FiveThirtyEight predicted Cruz would have a 65 percent chance of winning the state. But over the past few days, polls showed
Cruz losing Indiana to Trump by as much as 15 points, prompting the
Texas senator to create a shaky alliance with Kasich and make the unusual move of naming former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as his running mate.
Unfortunately for Cruz, none of his attempts
to save his Indiana operation seemed to work. His pact with Kasich to
divide Indiana, Oregon and New Mexico in the hopes of pooling their
supporters to slow Trump’s progress quickly unraveled
when the two politicians were not willing to fully throw their support
behind one another. Even Cruz’s strategy of appealing to Indiana
conservatives over the issue of bathroom access for transgender individuals failed to turn people away from Trump.
But Cruz wasn’t going down without a fight. As
he and Trump campaigned in Indiana ahead of the primary on Tuesday,
they traded perhaps their most nasty insults yet. Trump began primary
day by suggesting Cruz’s father helped Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin who killed President John F. Kennedy, and then Cruz responded by calling the New York billionaire a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” a “narcissist” and a “serial philanderer.”
“He is proud of being a serial philanderer ...
he describes his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal
Vietnam,” Cruz told reporters, citing an old Trump appearance on “The
Howard Stern Show.”
Despite these exchanges and Trump’s still high unfavorable numbers among
GOP voters, a win in Indiana sets him up to easily move toward the
target 1,237 delegates. Of the remaining states, Trump is the heavy
favorite in West Virginia and New Jersey, and is likely to do well in
several other contests, as well. A win in California, where the most recent poll
had Trump up by nearly 20 points, would surely put him over the top.
The state has 172-delegates up for grabs in the GOP contest.
If Cruz had won the Indiana primary,
it would still be impossible for him to get a majority of the delegates
before the summer convention, but he might have been able to make a
stronger case for running competitively against Trump.
The next few contests will likely be tough for
Cruz and Kasich now that Trump seems so inevitable, and a convention
victory appears to be in Trump's near future.
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