It's Trump
Ted Cruz suspends his campaign after losing Indiana, all but assuring the front-runner of the Republican nomination.
“Republican nominee Donald Trump.”
That phrase, once the stuff of fantasy, is now all but set in stone. The entertainer scored a huge victory on Tuesday in Indiana, as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas announced that he was ending his bid for president after being routed in the Hoosier State.
Trump will be the first major-party nominee without prior experience in elected office since General Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. With most of the vote in, Trump was on course to win around a large majority of the state’s 57 delegates. Those numbers, the subject of obsessive calculation and analysis over the last month, have now become somewhat academic. With Cruz out of the race, Trump is effectively assured of winning a majority of the delegates ahead of the July Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
“I’ve said I would continue as long as there was a viable path to victory. Tonight, I’m sorry to say, it appears that path has been foreclosed,” Cruz said from a stage in Indianapolis, flanked by his wife and daughters, both of his parents, and his running mate of just a few days, Carly Fiorina. “We gave it everything we got, but the voters chose another path. And so with a heavy heart but without boundless optimism for the long-term future of our nation, we are suspending our campaign.”
Cruz did not mention Trump during his brief remarks, either to congratulate the presumptive nominee or to pledge him his support. Throughout the campaign, Cruz had repeatedly refused to say he would not support Trump, but on Tuesday, he lashed out at his rival, calling him a “pathological liar” after Trump claimed Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination.
Trump’s win set off an immediate spree of despair, garment-rending, and tooth-gnashing among Republican elites and conservative journalists. His success has come at the expense of not only the party establishment but also many of the conservative insurgents who sought to remake the GOP under a more conservative banner. Instead, the likely winner of the party’s nomination is a political newcomer who has backed liberal causes in the past, embraces foreign autocrats like Vladimir Putin, and rejects basic party orthodoxy on matters such as free trade. His nomination seems likely to set back by decades the party’s efforts to win over younger voters and minorities, and to cause the Republican coalition to shed women voters, too.
Even if these predictions prove too dire, the mood on the right on Tuesday was extremely bleak. Leading conservative pollsters and opinion makers proclaimed Hillary Clinton the winner of the 2016 election, declared that they’d back the Democrat over Trump, and in one case even forecast the end of the republic. Some tossed around terms like “Armageddon.” In any case, it is a stunning denouement to a primary campaign season that began with one of the most heralded classes of policy-focused Republican candidates in generations, and ends with the nomination of an outsider uninterested in policy and hated by the party establishment. It’s nearly impossible to overstate what an accomplishment Trump’s success is, and how unlikely it seemed when he entered the race last summer. (It didn’t even seem likely at the time that he’d run.)
“It’s been some unbelievable day and evening and year, and I never have been through anything like this,” Trump said from Trump Tower in New York Tuesday night. “We’re gonna make America great again.”
Though his speech was typically rambling and extemporized—not a grand victory statement—Trump signaled his change of focus to running against the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“We’re going after Hillary Clinton. She will not be a great president, she will not be a good president, she will be a poor president,” he said. “This country which has become divided in so many ways is going to become one beautiful loving country.”
As the Republican nominee, Trump will head into the general election with a roughly 70 percent unfavorable rating among women, a record of alienating minorities, and the opposition of large segments of the party he aspires to represent. But Trump has repeatedly surprised throughout the campaign. His supporters argue that the real-estate developer, though divisive, represents an unprecedented brand of politician who will realign the American political landscape, cutting across party lines and bringing in new voters. In Hillary Clinton, he will also likely face one of the weakest candidates in memory, with one of the highest unfavorable ratings in history. The only candidate with worse numbers? That would be Donald J. Trump.
Despite Cruz barnstorming hard across Indiana and pouring resources into his campaign there, Trump won the majority of the delegates at stake, picking up 30 awarded to the leader and most of the remaining 27 allocated by congressional district. That total puts him at roughly 1,000 delegates—still 237 away from what he needs to win, but a total that should be well within reach if his recent pattern holds in coming states. He also boasts roughly 45 delegates who are not bound to support him and could switch. Ohio Governor John Kasich, who finished a distant third Tuesday, vowed to stay in the race, a promise met mostly with shrugs. With only Kasich contesting the remaining contests, Trump should have no trouble reaching 1,237.
Cruz’s back was to the wall after Trump routed him and Kasich in the northeastern primaries a week ago. But Indiana, with a large population of conservative evangelicals, seemed like the kind of state where the Texan could fare well. Cruz pulled out two major stops, too. First, he struck a deal with Kasich to split up the rest of the map in the hopes of stopping Trump. As part of that agreement, Kasich would abandon the Hoosier State to Cruz. But the agreement splintered nearly as soon as it was struck, and Kasich still campaigned (lightly) in the state.
Then came Cruz’s second trick: He announced that he was selecting Carly Fiorina as his running mate. The move earned him some derision—Why was he selecting a running mate for a nomination he most likely would lose? Did he even have the authority to do so?—but it was a decent ploy to win some media attention, perhaps capture a few more voters, and even better to lure Trump into making one of this trademark misogynistic comments about Fiorina.
None of that worked out. Trump wasn’t baited into lashing out. Fiorina’s addition didn’t give Cruz much of a bump in the polls. Trump collected endorsements from Indiana sports legends, including former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight, former Purdue coach Gene Keady, and Gary native Fred “the Hammer” Williamson. Meanwhile, the evangelicals never did come through for Cruz—just as they let him down around the country before. According to exit polls, Trump won the Indiana evangelical vote by five points.
On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in Indiana, outperforming polls that had shown her ahead. The result won’t make much difference to the result of the race. As she has been since at least last week’s northeastern primaries, Hillary Clinton remains the presumptive nominee on the Democratic side, though she still needs to pick up more delegates to clinch her party’s nomination. After winning only Rhode Island last week, the Sanders campaign had already begun to contract, laying off workers, streamlining its operation, and moving away from rhetoric devoted to beating Clinton and toward trying to influence the direction of the Democratic Party.
Cruz’s exit caps a precipitous rise in national politics. Only elected to the Senate in 2012, Cruz quickly became a national star, but he did so by alienating most of his party—launching suicide operations to shut down the government and “filibuster” funding for Obamacare, ploys that won him grassroots appeal but infuriated colleagues who felt he was endangering the party. From there, he leapt into the presidential race, where he cut a clever path: first, grasping onto Trump’s mantle, then systematically stealing enough ground from candidates like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul to become Trump’s only remaining serious rival. But Cruz was unable to eclipse Trump, hobbled by the loathing of many in his own party and overwhelmed by the Trump fervor he’d helped to feed earlier in the campaign. To many leading Republicans, even those who dislike Trump, Cruz’s demise was poetic justice—an outsider bomb-thrower brought down by a bomb-throwers from even further outside.
It’s unclear what Cruz’s path forward in politics now. He has two years remaining on his term in the Senate, and though his colleagues may dislike him, a Republican seat in Texas should remain safe for as long as he wants it. The recent acrimony between Cruz and Trump may close off any chance of a role in a Trump campaign or administration, though worse disagreements between former rivals have been reconciled. Cruz might also try to run for president again in 2020 if Trump loses the general election. Tuesday night, he swore to keep standing up for his views.
“Hear me now: I am not suspending our fight for liberty. I am not suspending our fight to defend the Constitution, to defend the Judeo-Christian values that built America,” Cruz said. “Our movement will continue. And I give you my word that I will continue this fight with all of my strength and all of my ability.”
Trump, with the easy grace of a victor, praised the Texan. “Ted Cruz, I don’t know if he likes me or doesn’t like, but he is one hell of a competitor,” he said. “He is a tough, smart guy. He has got an amazing future. I want to congratulate Ted.”
To get a sense of why Cruz lost in Indiana Tuesday, and why he might not have better luck even if an contested convention was in the offing, look at a new Gallup poll finding that Cruz’s favorability among Republicans has tanked in the last two weeks. The same poll shows Trump’s favorability on the rise.
The election might not be formally decided until June 7, the date of the last Republican nominating contests, when California, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Montana vote. Trump should win New Jersey, and is leading polls in California by more than 25 points. Former Golden State Governor Pete Wilson, a man who knows something about how hardline immigration stances can destroy a party, had warned fellow Republicans against selecting Trump, saying it would destroy the GOP in down ballot races and lead to erratic government.
But on Tuesday, Republican voters in Indiana disregarded that advice, and ratified the decision Republican voters in most of the rest of the United States have made too. Now the nation will see whether Wilson’s predictions of down-ballot doom come to fruition—and whether the voters hand him the keys to the White House to test just how erratic a Trump administration could be.
—David Graham
