Tony Cook, Chelsea Schneider, and Stephanie Wang

IndyStar

Ted Cruz is betting big on Indiana.

He has spent four of the past five days here, largely eschewing five contests in Northeastern states expected to go for Donald Trump. And now, he has announced he won't compete in two Western states — Oregon and New Mexico — in hopes that his other rival, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, can stop Trump there. In exchange, Kasich won't campaign here.

So Cruz is putting all his energy into winning Indiana's May 3 primary, which has emerged as a kind of political last stand for Republicans trying to block Trump from locking up the nomination.

The big question is: Will enough Hoosiers come to his aid?

To win, he'll need support from two factions of the party that don't often agree. He'll have to appeal to more evangelicals, who are now evenly split between him and Trump, according to one recent poll. But he'll also have to win over Kasich supporters, who tend to be more interested in fiscal issues and see divisive social topics as a distraction.

It's a tricky balance and the stakes are high.

"It’s kind of a Hail Mary pass," said Jim Kittle, a former Indiana Republican Party chairman. "When you’re on a last stand, you try anything, and that’s what they’re trying here in Indiana."

Cruz described Indiana's importance this way to a crowd of about a thousand people over the weekend in Lebanon.

"Now Indiana is a battleground,” he said. “The entire country and the eyes of America are on Indiana. Indiana has a platform. Indiana has a national megaphone, and we can decide which path we want to go down."

At stake are Indiana's 57 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer. With the exception of California, that's the largest number of delegates still up for grabs after Tuesday's five primaries. A loss in Indiana will make it difficult for Trump to secure the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the party's nomination outright and avoid a contested convention, where Kasich and Cruz think they could win over enough delegates to beat Trump.

Cruz is centering his efforts on Indiana's evangelical Christian vote, which has produced mixed results for him in other states. And he's banking on a novel arrangement with Kasich — a kind of political ceasefire that will allow Cruz to campaign in Indiana without competition from Kasich. Cruz, in turn, will not campaign in Oregon or New Mexico. Both men are hoping the move will allow anti-Trump voters to consolidate around a single candidate.

But recent polls suggest Cruz is trailing Trump by six to eight points in Indiana.

In some ways, Indiana seems like a favorable battlefield for Cruz.

It's home to a large number of evangelical Christians, who play an important role in the state's Republican politics. It's also the state that elected Gov. Mike Pence, a conservative Republican who has ignited national controversies over social issues such as abortion and Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law that critics feared would allow discrimination against gay and transgender Hoosiers.

Cruz has long taken more conservative positions on those issues than Trump. It's a difference Cruz is ramming home on the campaign trail, as when he attacked Trump for saying recently that transgender people should be allowed to use the bathroom of their choice.

"It doesn’t make any sense at all to let grown adult men, strangers, to be alone in bathrooms with little girls," Cruz said in the small Indiana town of Borden on Monday. "If Donald Trump dresses up as Hillary Clinton, he still can’t use the little girls’ restroom!"

Cruz's consistency on such issues is appealing to people like Ron Johnson, a pastor who leads the conservative Indiana Pastors Alliance. He said Monday that Trump’s views aren’t “consistent with evangelical Christianity.”

“He certainly is not pro-life. He’s not pro-religious freedom. He just came out condemning North Carolina on a common-sense piece of legislation to keep men out of women’s restrooms...," Johnson said. “When you look at the moral issues, Donald Trump is not a conservative Christian at all. … I’m not even sure he would be considered a believer, let alone someone Christians should be swarming around."

Such voters have helped to propel Cruz to victory in Iowa and Wisconsin — successes he's seeking to mimic here.

In addition to Cruz's barnstorming campaign schedule, his father, a pastor, has been meeting with smaller groups of people across the state in an effort to cultivate relationships among religious voters. The campaign has also set up traditional phone banks across the state and is working hard to make sure those voters get to the polls.

Ann Selzer, a longtime Iowa pollster who has surveyed Hoosier voters in the past, attributed Cruz's success in the Hawkeye state not just to the size of the evangelical vote, but to the Cruz campaign's ability to organize that group.

"It was just a superior organization, knowing what it’s going to take to get the most people to show up at the (Iowa) caucus," she said. "There was a lot more effort in the hand-to-hand combat and targeting evangelicals."

That success may be difficult to replicate here. A strong grass-roots effort is more important in caucus states like Iowa than in primary election states like Indiana. As for Wisconsin, Cruz got a big boost in the form of an endorsement from Gov. Scott Walker. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has not endorsed any of the candidates, though he has said he still might.

Moreover, Cruz's evangelical appeal was not enough to help him in the South, where Trump dominated. And a Fox News poll of Indiana voters released Friday found that even among white evangelical Christians, he and Trump split the vote nearly evenly.

But Cruz has a new weapon in Indiana — his novel arrangement with Kasich.

That could give Cruz a badly needed boost. The same Fox News poll found that without Kasich in the race, it’s much closer, with Trump at 44 percent and Cruz at 42 percent.

In announcing the deal on Sunday, Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe said, "Not only would Trump get blown out by Clinton or Sanders, but having him as our nominee would set the party back a generation. To ensure that we nominate a Republican who can unify the Republican Party and win in November, our campaign will focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Gov. Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico, and we would hope that allies of both campaigns would follow our lead."

That approach, however, is untested — and could even do more harm than good.

First, it's unclear whether Cruz's fiery message on hot-button social issues will woo Kasich supporters, who often call their candidate the only adult in the room and who tend to be more concerned with electability and fiscal issues.

There's also potential for voter backlash.

Trump's campaign is slamming the Cruz-Kasich alliance as "un-American" and "un-Democratic."

"Wow, just announced that Lyin' Ted and Kasich are going to collude in order to keep me from getting the Republican nomination. 'DESPERATION!'" Trump tweeted late Sunday.

Paul Helmke, a public affairs professor at Indiana University and former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, said the partnership could backfire.

“This might get the Trump supporters all the more riled up,” he said. “Here are establishment types in collusion working against Trump to try to find some scheme to stop him and make them all the more angrier and anxious to go to the polls.”

That was exactly the reaction Monday from Tim Poe, a Trump supporter and auto mechanic in Connersville.

"I’m pissed," he said. "I do think that even people who don’t like Trump are going to see how crooked this (expletive) is. I think it’s going to backfire. There are some guys down on the (gun) range that feel the same way. And you see a lot on Facebook about how crooked they are doing him. They just need to get behind him and let’s go."

IndyStar reporter Mark Alesia contributed to this story.

Call IndyStar reporter Tony Cook at (317) 444-6081. Follow him on Twitter: @indystartony.