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Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Indiana will decide whether or not Donald Trump earns enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination. | AP Photo Cruz: Trump can't get to 1,237 if he loses Indiana

If Donald Trump fails to win the Indiana Republican primary on May 3, Ted Cruz said Friday, the current front-runner will not be able to reach the magic number of 1,237 delegates in order to clinch the party's nomination.

As he has repeatedly asserted, Cruz told radio host Dana Loesch that neither he nor Trump will go to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland with a majority of the delegates. The Midwestern state, which awards 57 delegates on a winner-take-all basis by congressional district and statewide, is an important component of the Texas senator's strategy to deny Trump enough delegates to lock up the nomination outright before the convention.



“And Indiana is absolutely pivotal. If Trump loses Indiana, he can’t get to 1,237," Cruz said, sharpening and amplifying remarks he made the previous night in Indianapolis, where he told a crowd of Indiana Republicans that they "will decide" whether Trump gets the nomination.

"And so the people of Indiana really have an opportunity to stand up and speak and for that matter, so do the people of Pennsylvania and Maryland and Delaware and Rhode Island and Connecticut," Cruz told Loesch, appealing to the voters who will cast their ballots on Tuesday — when he is likely to lose badly to Trump.

The upcoming primaries represent "an opportunity to stand up and, No. 1, say: We want to support a campaign that is a positive, optimistic, forward-looking conservative campaign built on real solutions to bring jobs back to America, to raise wages, to bring manufacturing jobs back to our country," Cruz said, in addition to supporting a candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton in November.