Adam Wren is a contributing editor at Indianapolis Monthly.

On a sunny day at the Oasis Diner in Plainfield, Indiana, roughly 20 miles west of Indianapolis, Ted Cruz breezed through a 1950s-era diner with a gleaming steel facade. One of the last diners of its kind, the Oasis sits along the Historic National Road, the iconic highway traversing the state that fancies itself the Crossroads of America. Here, four days before he named Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential pick, Cruz met a crowd of a few hundred supporters. He mugged for photos, noshed on a fried pickle offered to him by a customer, then shot straight behind the counter. Pleasantries aside, it was time to get down to the business at hand.

“Alright, can I get anyone some fill-ups?” he asked to no one in particular, grabbing a pot of coffee and holding it up, as a peal of laughter pierced the humid air inside the packed diner. “Refill of coffee for anyone?”


Everything seemed to be going well for Cruz, who gripped and grinned amid his biggest fans, wearing copious amounts of camouflage and Dale Earnhardt No. 88 hats and “Don’t Tread On Me” T-shirts. As he spoke from the back of a red Chevrolet pickup truck, one could even hear a few “Amens.”

But then it happened.

Outside the diner, in a gaggle with reporters, Cruz unloaded on North Carolina’s transgender bathroom law. “There is no greater evil than predators, and if the law says that any man, if he chooses can enter a women’s restroom, a little girl’s restroom and stay there and he cannot be removed because he simply says at that moment he feels like a woman, you’re opening the door for predators,” Cruz told reporters.

The comments went over well with the Cruz crowd, but moderate Republicans watching Cruz’s comments on the local news later that night might as well have heard a record scratch—the amens replaced by sighs. “I don’t like any campaign that puts one class of humans against another,” a central Indiana Republican delegate to Cleveland who was turned off by Cruz’s comments, told me.

It was not supposed to go this way for Cruz. Indiana seems to be, at least from 30,000 feet, a barn-red bastion of Bible-believing IndyCar social conservatives—a place where a Washington Wiseman like Senator Richard Lugar can lose a primary to a bomb-throwing conservative like Richard Mourdock 60 to 40 percent.

But over the past year, the state’s Republican landscape has shifted. Last March, when conservative Gov. Mike Pence signed the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) into law, the once-lockstep Republican coalition here fractured, putting daylight between the state’s social conservatives, who backed Pence, from the fiscal conservatives, who have become squeamish over divisive social issues—and who long for the days when the state was ruled by pragmatic, coalition-building Republican Mitch Daniels.

Today, vast swaths of the state’s Republican electorate, from Indianapolis to West Lafayette, have retreated from the culture wars. And like the 50s-era diner itself, Cruz’s dogged socially conservative message seems anachronistic—and perhaps a little tin-eared—to these fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicans, the kind Cruz has to win over in the state’s crucial, populous and well-heeled “doughnut” counties surrounding Indianapolis (if you remove Marion County, the remaining surrounding counties form a doughnut-shaped ring) in order to have a shot at beating Donald Trump in the primary on Tuesday.

Cruz might have thought that he didn’t need to appeal to this section of the electorate—that it would be enough to preach to the choir of Pence’s base, but his 15-point deficit in the polls shows that he might have made a fatal miscalculation.

“There’s no doubt that doughnut county Republicans are more fiscally focused and less socially conservative,” said Pete Seat, a former member of the George W. Bush administration based in Indianapolis, who is aligned with the John Kasich non-campaign here. “You want to call them Mitch Daniels Republicans. Cruz needs to earn their votes to earn the state. Any statewide party comes down to the doughnut, and it’s not a natural constituency for him.”

While Cruz’s selection of Fiorina as his running mate—who last appeared in Indiana in swank Carmel, located in the doughnut’s Hamilton County, and who struck a chord with educated, moderate Republicans here during her campaign—could help Cruz win some of them over, it’s likely too late.

Another prominent Indianapolis Republican operative summed up in a few words what many Daniels Republicans here are thinking about Cruz: “He has a terrible message.”

***

Celebrating its bicentennial this year, Indiana holds in its hands two great gifts from history in the month of May: the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500, and, to hear pundits and politicos tell it, the opportunity to decide the fate of Western Civilization.

“By the time you get to Indiana, usually the race is decided,” Trump told a few thousands people in the Indiana Farmers Coliseum at the Indiana State Fairgrounds on Tuesday night, the same megarally at which he touted the endorsements of former boxer Mike Tyson, who spent three years in prison for rape down the road in Plainfield during the early 1990s, and legendary Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight, who praised Trump’s “guts” to drop an atomic bomb. “The greatest endorsement in the history of Indiana,” Trump said of Knight’s nod. Later, he declared: “If we win Indiana, it’s over.”

Not quite. But the stakes seem that high here—a rarity for a state whose primary comes so late in the nominating process. In 2008’s Democratic battle royale between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, national candidates lavished attention on Indiana; but before that, not since the spring of 1968—when Bobby Kennedy battled with Eugene McCarthy and favorite-son candidate and Lyndon Johnson stand-in Indiana Gov. Roger D. Branigin—has Indiana promised to be so pivotal in a presidential campaign.

All of which explains the buzz you feel from Bloomington to South Bend on radio stations and restaurants and coffee shops, as all five remaining presidential candidates crisscross the state, in a presidential campaign like the Hoosier State has never seen but for which it has long pined. Enthralled with the chance to press the flesh with politicians and journalists they see only on television, Hoosiers gawk and rubberneck at national reporters just as much as they do at the candidates.

“A lot of Hoosiers have always looked to Iowa, two states over, with a lot of envy,” Seat said. “All these candidates going to diners and basketball gyms. We’ve always sat here and thought, why not us?”

But for all of Hoosiers’ aw-shucks, thanks-for-noticing-us excitement about their brief moment in the political sun, they also harbor a chip on their shoulders about the “Indianoplace” wrap. When Hillary Clinton questioned an aide in 2010, “Are you still in basketball-crazed Indianoplace?” Hoosiers bristled. (“It was a joke,” Clinton recently told CBS4.)

To understand the offense, one needs only to consider how the city and state has come to view itself differently over the past several decades. “Naptown,” no more, Indianapolis’ downtown has blossomed. At first, during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the city pined to become the Amatuer Sports Capital of the World. In 1987, the city hosted the Pan American Games in virtually the same space where Cruz named Fiorina his running mate. The NCAA hung its shingle here in 1999. By 2012, the city had graduated to hosting Super Bowl XLVI—to rave reviews. Under a procession of well-liked mayoral leaders, from Richard Lugar to Bill Hudnut to Bart Peterson to Greg Ballard, the city, and the state, landed on the national map. Where chain eateries once reigned, now James Beard-recognized restaurants pop up along Eat Street on Virginia Avenue and other places across the city.

This hard-won goodwill and civic optimism seemed in danger this time last spring, when the city and state weathered national blowback from battle over RFRA, the so-called religious freedom bill, which allowed businesses to discriminate against customers from the LGBT community. After Gov. Pence, successor to the walking think tank Daniels, signed the bill, an imbroglio roiled the state, as critics castigated the law, and the governor, for endangering the LGBT community’s civil rights. The blowback, which included canceled concerts and fears that the NCAA could relocate its March Madness basketball tournament, cost the city and state $60 million and 12 national conventions—and damaged Pence badly. The big-tent confederacy of pro-business and socially conservative Republicans that Daniels, who in May 2011 talked of a so-called truce on divisive issues in favor of focusing on fiscal matters, had pieced together fractured. Pence became persona non grata to many Chamber of Commerce Republican-types in his own party, especially around Indianapolis, the state capital.

Which is why it struck some Central Indiana politicos as curious, then, when Cruz veered into the culture wars back at the Oasis Diner on that Saturday.

***

“I bring greetings from my beloved Indiana, a land of surprises where, as we say, South Bend is in the north, North Vernon’s in the south, and French Lick is not what you hoped it was,” Daniels said at the Gridiron Club Dinner in 2011, as he considered a bid for president.

A land of surprises indeed. Indiana, despite its reliably red-state status, is full of political contradictions. In 2008, Barack Obama managed to turn the state purple, narrowly eking out a victory over John McCain, the same year in which pragmatic conservative Daniels won reelection by 18 points. It’s the home of Hoosier Hospitality, and it’s also been called the South’s middle finger to the North—the site of “the last classic lynching north of the Mason-Dixon line,” which took place in 1930, according to author Cynthia Carr.

In the weeks leading up to Indiana’s primary, pundits have struggled to peg Indiana’s political identity, too. Is it a Trump state or a Cruz state? Is it more like Iowa or Wisconsin? The truth is somewhere in the interstice: “It’s a bit more unique,” Kellyanne Conway, president of the pro-Cruz super PAC Keep the Promise I, and Pence’s pollster, told me.

For one, Trump has managed to build a non-traditional army of voters never involved in Indiana politics before—consider, for example, the trifecta of Indiana sports figures who have endorsed him: Knight, and his longtime rival Purdue basketball coach Gene Keady—not to mention Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz. In vast stretches of Indiana, from the northwest steel town of Gary to the union halls of Vigo County, Trump’s cobbled together an amalgam of voters that transcend typical GOP blocs. “The people he’s got fired up, I want to talk to those people,” says Randy Gentry, the GOP chair of Vigo County, where Trump campaigned Sunday in Terre Haute, citing union voters who typically vote Democrat in Vigo County politics. Gentry, now a volunteer for the Trump campaign, added that he wants to expand the party’s message beyond the Pence or Daniels coalitions. So far in the last week, he has handed out more than 1,000 Trump yard signs to people who have never been involved in Vigo County politics. In one 30-minute stretch at a shopping center on a recent Saturday, he handed out 135. “There’s a whole new group of people out there.”

Rex Early, Trump’s Indiana chairman and a quintessential former Hoosier GOP insider who was a delegate at the 1976 convention, said Trump captures the Hoosier ethos better than Cruz. “We’re a pretty conservative state, what he’s talking about—building walls, taking care of guns, jobs, and ad infinitum, those are conservative issues and Hoosiers like them,” Early said the April day the Trump campaign opened its office in Carmel, which is located in the doughnut’s Hamilton County.

And there are signs that Trump is taking his ground game in Indiana more seriously than he has in other states, which could make a difference on Election Day. After the New England primaries, the campaign shifted 20 additional paid staffers to the state, doubling its operation. Over the weekend and through Monday, the campaign was on track to knock on 70,000 doors. "We have a ground game that is second to none,” Rick Wiley, Trump’s national political director, told me.

Trump’s powerful new coalition means that, despite how socially conservative some regions of the state remain—Northeastern Indiana, for example—doing well in those regions on Tuesday just isn’t enough for Cruz. Which brings us to Central Indiana, in and around Indianapolis and its doughnut counties, the most pronounced front in Battleground Indiana, which for its sheer population size, is a huge percentage of the state’s Republican vote.

According to a source with knowledge of Conway’s polling, Trump and Cruz are currently “neck and neck” in this decisive part of the state. And if Cruz has any hope of overcoming Trump, he has to win this area decisively.

Here, amid tony McMansions, well-groomed golf courses and “Fire Mike Pence” yard signs, the Republican voters are more moderate, and Pence’s endorsement of Cruz carries little weight. “The counties [though majority Republican] do not necessarily remain loyal to Republicans,” said Michael Wolf, an associate professor at the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics at Indiana University Purdue-Purdue University Fort Wayne. “Ideologically extreme candidates don’t do well.” In the 2012 general election, for example, Mitt Romney won Madison County by 4.5 points, and yet fellow Republican Mourdock, a fierce social conservative, lost there to Democrat Sen. Joe Donnelly by 13 points.

Daniels, who took a vow of political celibacy when he became president of Purdue University and will stay on the sidelines in the state’s primary, still hangs over all of politics in this region—among voters and establishment figures alike. “There’s still a very strong Mitch Daniels Republican component in Indiana, especially among the party people,” Christine Matthews, president of Bellwether Research, and Daniels’ former pollster, said.

The longing many more moderate, pro-business Republicans in Indiana have for a Daniels-like leader is so strong that one Republican delegate to Cleveland told POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney last month that he would write in Daniels on a second ballot. In the runup to 2016, many Daniels backers supported Jeb Bush. Today, left to choose between Trump, Cruz and Kasich, many would choose Kasich. “[Kasich’s] the hope,” one former Daniels hand told me. “You see a lot of Mitch people gravitating toward him.” State Sen. James Merritt, a member of Kasich’s steering committee in Indiana, told me he saw Daniels’ green eyeshade pragmatism in Kasich. “He’s Mitch Daniels in a different suit,” Merritt said.

But now, with a pact between Kasich and Cruz meaning Kasich isn’t officially campaigning in the state, it’s hard to tell which candidate Daniels voters will back. “They’re not Trump people. They’re not Cruz people,” said the former Daniels hand. “Do they take this [Kasich and Cruz] bargain? Or do they do something different?”

Cruz’s social conservative message isn’t helping him. At the Republican spring dinner last week in Indianapolis, Seat, the former Bush administration official, said Cruz received a cordial, if unenthusiastic, welcome. “The response to Cruz is very subdued,” he said. It was almost golf claps. There weren’t the hoots and the hollers that he usually gets. Those are precisely the [types of] people he needs to win over.”

By selecting Fiorina as his running mate, Cruz may have made strides toward poaching a few of them. “The doughnut counties are home to educated, independent and disaffected Republican women,” said Mike O’Brien, chairman of the Hendricks County GOP. “Republicans don’t have a good message to them in this presidential race. I think Ms. Fiorina helps those women consider that maybe there’s still a place for them in the Republican Party.”

But based on interviews with a range of Daniels’ hands and voters, it’s clear that Cruz has failed to woo many of them—even with his last-minute VP gambit.

Heather Neal, a former aide in both the Daniels and Pence administrations, who lives in Avon, a small town of about 13,000 in Hendricks County in Central Indiana, still hasn’t made up her mind about what she’ll do once she enters the voting booth on Tuesday. “I do not think I’m alone in being a longtime Republican in Indiana who has worked under many Republicans who has absolutely no idea how I’m going to vote on Tuesday for president,” says Neal, president of public affairs at the consultancy Limestone Strategies, who is leaning toward voting for Jeb Bush. “When we say we’d like to write in Mitch or Paul Ryan, we’re not kidding. It’s actually not a joke.”

And then there’s the possibility that even though Trump is unpopular among professional Republicans here (“We are turned off by the anger of the Trump campaign,” one tells me), grass-roots Daniels Republicans end up breaking toward Trump.

Perhaps sensing Cruz’s weakness in Central Indiana, Trump scheduled his penultimate rally on Monday night at the The Palladium, a $126 million sweeping structure built in the Italian Renaissance style in Carmel—tellingly in the heart of the doughnut counties. There, Karen Field, 50, a registered nurse, flocked to see the billionaire real estate mogul on her day off. On her blouse, she wore no fewer than five Trump buttons. In her yard, there are four Trump signs. Still for her, Trump was her second choice—behind none other than Daniels. “He was a people person,” she said of the former governor and Eli Lilly executive. “He was a business guy. I wish he would have run for president.” Field, too, turned up her nose at Cruz’s social conservative pitch on issues such as transgender bathrooms.

“Talk to me about something that’s important,” she said.