Long frustrated by Donald Trump’s seeming invincibility, the Republican establishment’s anti-Trump brigade celebrated a clear victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday night. And while it was a long time coming, it might be just in time and just enough to prevent the GOP front-runner from winning the party’s presidential nomination.

Ted Cruz, taking upwards of 30 of Wisconsin’s 42 delegates, leaves Trump with little margin of error in the remaining contests to win the 1,237 delegates necessary to secure the nomination on the first ballot at July’s GOP convention. And if he doesn’t win it that way, many anti-Trump Republicans believe, he’s not going to win it at all.


“There is a growing consensus that Trump’s best chance to win the nomination may have come and gone,” said Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan GOP chairman who is supporting Cruz. “The path for getting to 1,237 before the convention is very limited for everybody now.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s primary, the Republican National Committee held a conference call to explain the intricacies of a contested convention to roughly two dozen veteran GOP operatives—a signal, Washington strategist Bruce Haynes said, that “everyone can see this coming now.”

Even, perhaps, Trump, whose senior advisors are wrestling for influence and the campaign looks to regain its footing as the nomination battle turns into a long delegate fight dominated by party insiders.

The Manhattan billionaire did not face the television cameras after the results came in on Tuesday night, offering only a statement from his campaign spokeswoman as noteworthy for its vitriol toward Cruz and the party establishment as was his rare absence from the Election Night airwaves. It accused Cruz of illegally coordinating with a super PAC supporting him, but offered no evidence.

“Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet— he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump,” Hope Hicks said in the statement. “We have total confidence that Mr. Trump will go on to win in New York, where he holds a substantial lead in all the polls, and beyond. Mr. Trump is the only candidate who can secure the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton, or whomever is the Democratic nominee, in order to Make America Great Again.”

Our Principles PAC, the main organization formed to stop Trump, spent heavily in Wisconsin, targeting various anti-Trump messages to different subsets of voters. The group ran a television ad highlighting Trump’s support for eminent domain in Eau Claire after research showed it testing well with voters there; in Green Bay, the group opted to air a different spot highlighting Trump’s less than full-throated opposition to Obamacare.

But just as the group is finding success in targeting voters—in Wisconsin, of course, it came working in tandem with several influential local conservative media voices with proven success at uniting and mobilizing the GOP base in and around Milwaukee—it is about to shift from stopping Trump from winning votes to stopping him from winning delegates.

“Moving past Wisconsin, whoever wins what state becomes irrelevant,” said Katie Packer, the group’s director. “It doesn’t matter if Trump wins New York, because he can’t get to 1,237. It doesn’t matter if he wins California, because he can’t get to 1,237. From this point forward, it’s all about delegate math.

“We’re not particularly concerned about winning New York or California, because it’s irrelevant.”

Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, continues to point to the fact that the Manhattan billionaire has won the most delegates and states as proof that he remains “the clear frontrunner” as the race heads into the final three months. “He is the only person who can secure the nomination through the delegate acquisition process,” Lewandowski said Friday.

Behind the scenes, Lewandowski is fighting to preserve his own power and to box out Paul Manafort, who was hired last month to lead the campaign’s delegate corralling effort. “Corey and his people know the knives are out for them,” said one source close to the campaign, referring to Manafort as a “pretty experienced in-fighter.”

On Saturday, Lewandowski went as far as to fire a young operative named James Baker, who’d been recently put in charge of its Colorado campaign—he’d arrived in the state less than 48 hours earlier—because he’d been communicating with Manafort after Lewandowski instructed him not to do so, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation confirmed. Lewandowski disputed the reason for Baker's dismissal.

Manafort met with Trump in New York Wednesday morning to discuss strategy and to outline his concerns about a lack of cooperation, according to one source. “If Manafort walks, this thing comes apart,” they said. “And some of the people close to him are ready to walk.”

The landslide loss in Wisconsin could finally prompt Trump to make changes in the campaign structure, even if Lewandowski retains his title as campaign manager. “This campaign has outgrown the team,” one high-level Trump supporter said. “Hopefully this wakes up the candidate, because Lewandowski can’t handle it from here.”

The delegate math is getting more difficult for Trump, as the electoral map continues to shrink and Cruz’s superior organization is enabling him to snatch away delegates from Trump at the state level.

“From day one, the Cruz campaign organized a 50 state effort in anticipation of and planning for the eventuality of running and gaining delegates across the country,” Anuzis said. “We have a built-in institutional advantage in that this campaign was built from the ground up. Trump ran a generic populist campaign without paying attention to the rules of the game and even understanding how the process would play out.”

In Colorado, Cruz swept the six delegates elected last Saturday—Baker had been sent there to organize a slate but was fired on the eve of the two congressional district assemblies. And the Texas senator is poised to win a majority of the 27 remaining delegates that will be elected there this weekend. “Trump’s organization is largely self-initiated folks who have rarely been involved in politics and are running as Trump delegates on their own initiative,” said Ryan Call, a former Colorado GOP chairman. “There doesn’t seem to be any organization in the state, as far as I can see.”

Polls show Trump holding large leads in the biggest delegate prizes remaining on the nomination calendar: New York, where 95 delegates are up for grabs on April 19, and California, where 172 delegates are in play on June 7.

Trump is looking to turn the page on his Wisconsin loss with a large rally in Bethpage, NY Wednesday night where he is set to roll out endorsements from more than half of the GOP county chairs in the state along with leadership in every single one of the 27 congressional districts.

But his poor showing in Wisconsin may be a harbinger of another loss May 3 in Indiana, where all 57 delegates will go to the outright winner—and missing out on that prize would hurt Trump deeply in the zero-sum game of delegate acquisition.

“If he can’t win Wisconsin, he’s sure as hell not going to win Indiana,” Packer said, hinting that Our Principles PAC could invest resources there in the coming weeks.

Opposition forces are already plotting and securing funding for an anti-Trump operation in California, where delegates are appointed proportionally by congressional district. And they believe two months is plenty of time to weaken a candidate who polls show with only a 10-point lead.

“There’s a lot you can do just by focusing on congressional districts with fewer Republican voters but have just as many delegates,” said Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento-based GOP operative involved in the early anti-Trump efforts.

