https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/indiana-looms-large-for-cruzs-slender-hopes-after-trump-sweeps-northeast/2016/04/26/e0c111f4-0b2d-11e6-8ab8-9ad050f76d7d_story.htmlBy Dan Balz April 26
After his clean sweep of five primaries Tuesday, the options for denying Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination continue to dwindle rapidly — so swiftly, in fact, that next week’s primary in Indiana now appears to be a make-or-break event for the stop-Trump forces and especially the candidate running second, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).
For Trump’s rivals, all is now a numbers game — including the challenge of making everyone believe that the front-runner can be kept short of the 1,237 delegates needed to win on the first ballot at the convention. Based on raw arithmetic, it’s not unreasonable for Cruz, Kasich and others in the party who don’t want Trump as their nominee to express hope-to-confidence that he can be stopped.
Beyond his victories, there was evidence in the exit polls to suggest that the will among rank-and-file Republicans to stop a Trump nomination, even if he falls a bit short of 1,237 at the end of the primary race, might not be as strong as Cruz, Kasich and the GOP establishment would like to see.
acker sees California as the ultimate arbiter of the success of the stop-Trump forces, if only because the state will award 172 delegates on June 7. But as a practical matter, Indiana and the 57 delegates up for grabs in its winner-take-all contest next Tuesday loom even larger. A Trump victory next week would amplify calls for the party to begin to rally behind him.
Trump has shattered Cruz’s goal of consolidating conservatives. Cruz was planning to nail down the evangelical vote, but Trump has won evangelicals in at least twice as many states as Cruz. Before Tuesday, among GOP voters who do not have college degrees, Trump had won in 18 states to Cruz’s four. In the contest for the most conservative voters, Cruz had won them in more states than Trump, but only by a handful. Trump had won those who call themselves “somewhat conservative” in 18 states to Cruz’s three. Those patterns continued Tuesday.
Cruz must survive to Cleveland and hope that Trump’s first-ballot strength will be his high-water mark. A defeat in Indiana, though not a mathematical ending to the nomination battle, would nonetheless be a crippling blow to what is left of his strategy for winning.
