Indiana has turned into one of Ted Cruz’s last big chances to stop Donald Trump — and a huge opportunity for Trump to push Cruz his main remaining rival to the brink of defeat.

If the polls are correct, Cruz will end Tuesday in big trouble.


The Texas senator trails Trump in almost every poll and by double digits in many of them. And if Cruz loses Tuesday, he will need wins in territory even less friendly if he is to have any chance of stopping Trump from getting the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the Republican presidential nomination.

Indiana’s primary rules, which allow even a narrow popular-vote winner to grab an outsized portion of the state’s 57 GOP delegates, raise the stakes for Tuesday. Of those 57 delegates, a full 30 go to the statewide winner. The other 27 are allotted three at a time to the winner of each of Indiana’s nine congressional districts.

Trump needs only 241 more delegates to guarantee he’ll come to the Republican National Convention with a majority. If Trump nets anywhere near 50 Tuesday night, Cruz will need not just a major upset to stop Trump, but a string of them.

“If [Cruz] loses in Indiana, it’s definitely Dunkirk,” said GOP strategist Rick Wilson, referencing a low point for Allied forces during World War II as routed Allied troops scrambled to evacuate from northern France and regroup in the United Kingdom.

For Cruz, that regrouping would have to start one week later. But the May 10 primaries also look dicey for Cruz. He’d need to top Trump in winner-take-all Nebraska, because the other state voting is West Virginia, where all signs point to Trump running riot.

Indiana, in turn, is not a must-win for Trump, but it’s a win he’d love to have.

Trump comes into the contest with 996 delegates bound to him on the first ballot at the GOP convention — plus a number of unbound delegates from Pennsylvania, many of whom said they’d vote either for Trump or vote for the winner of their congressional district. (Trump carried every district in the state April 26.)

That means Trump is getting close to the majority marker: 1,237. Meanwhile, the best news Cruz can point to is that while the polls put him behind Trump, the margin of projected defeat is not insurmountable.

And the Cruz campaign is going all-out in search of an upset. It started last week, when he and primary rival John Kasich announced that the Ohio governor’s campaign would pull back in Indiana, while Cruz’s would do the same in Oregon and New Mexico, giving the candidates something approximating one-on-one matchups with Trump. And Cruz’s last-gasp efforts continued Wednesday when he announced that, should he win the nomination, Carly Fiorina would join his ticket as a prospective vice president.

But while Cruz and Fiorina project optimism on the stump, even Cruz insiders find their confidence flagging and fear any boost Cruz got from naming Fiorina won’t be enough to close the gap .

Ahead of the election, the “never Trump” movement is telling Indiana Republicans that they can be the ones to break the Manhattan mogul’s momentum and return the Grand Old Party to more reliable hands.

The movement is also, apparently, in the mood for World War II references: Quin Hillyer, a conservative columnist, related Indiana to the Battle of the Bulge, in which the Allies beat back a German counterattack in Western Europe. (Hillyer emphasized the comparison was about strategy, and not about likening Trump to Nazi Germany.)

“Indianans can be the ones to stop this nonsense of Donald Trump as a legitimate presidential candidate,” he said.

But the RealClearPolitics polling average puts Cruz behind Trump by more than 9 percentage points, and the Huffington Post’s Pollster trend puts Trump 14 percentage points ahead of Cruz. Trump leads seven of the eight surveys listed by the two polling aggregators. And the website FiveThirtyEight lists Trump’s chances of winning at 83 percent to Cruz’s 17 percent.

Ted Cruz is looking to avoid a knockout blow in the Indiana primaries on Tuesday. | AP Photo

If there is hope for Cruz, it lies in a poll from IPFW/Downs Center, which put the senator up 16 points over Trump. The poll, which was conducted from April 13 to 27, is an outlier, and the firm that conducted it also produced Democratic results that were out of step with the mainstream — labeling Hillary Clinton up 13 points over Bernie Sanders while the average puts Clinton ahead by less than 7 points.

The other hope for Cruz is that his “stop Trump” accord with Kasich will give him a last-minute bump. One top Kasich surrogate in Indiana said the pact has already helped Cruz.

“Sen. Cruz is going to do better than he would have if the governor had spent resources,” Jim Brainard, mayor of Carmel, Indiana, and one of the Kasich campaign’s four state co-chairs, said on Monday.

But the parameters of the Cruz-Kasich deal have never been clear, especially on the most important matter at hand: exactly what the candidates want their supporters to do with their votes.

“I’ve never told them not to vote for me; they should vote for me,” Kasich said the morning after the deal was announced.

Asked about his vote Tuesday, Brainard, the Kasich co-chairman, said he “planned to do what it takes” to get to a Republican National Convention that allows the party to pick the candidate it thinks is best.

Pressed on whether that meant he’d vote for Cruz or vote for Kasich, Brainard wouldn’t say.

Shane Goldmacher contributed to this report.