Ted Cruz threw everything at Indiana, and none of it stuck.

After finally getting the two-man contest against Donald Trump that he had promised would deliver victory, Cruz was routed, a staggering defeat for the senator's dimming presidential ambitions.


Cruz is now 0 for the last 7 contests and stumbles into the final month of the primary calendar with no momentum, a new low in favorability and a growing aura of inevitability around his chief rival.

A remarkable 91 percent of Republicans, according to a CNN poll released Monday, said they now expected Trump would become the Republican nominee.

“He wanted a one-on-one with Donald Trump the entire election and he got it and he lost,” said Keith Nahigian, a Republican strategist who managed Michele Bachmann’s 2012 campaign. “If you're the true conservative alternative to Trump, they're not buying it, so quit selling it and close the store.”

Cruz had a miserable final 48 hours on the trail in Indiana. His new running mate, Carly Fiorina, slipped and fell off stage in a moment that went viral online. He confronted a Trump supporter on camera and told him in a heated exchanged that, “He is playing you for chump.” And Cruz interrupted a young heckler to scold him that, “In my household, when a child behaves that way, they get a spanking.”

Rick Tyler, Cruz’s former communications director, said, “There’s a psychology that’s beginning to take place with these three videos playing that demoralizes his supporters.”

Then on Tuesday, as voting was underway, Cruz eviscerated Trump in his harshest and most desperate terms yet, calling him a “serial philanderer,” a “pathological liar,” and a “narcissist.”

“The man is utterly amoral,” Cruz went on, comparing him to the fictional bully character in Back to the Future, “We are looking, potentially, at the Biff Tannen presidency.”

The fresh attacks came as Cruz’s image nationally had plunged to new lows in the Gallup poll, putting him underwater for the first time, with 39 percent favorable and 45 percent unfavorable ratings, on the eve on Indiana’s election.

Indeed, while Cruz had hoped to consolidate the Stop Trump movement behind him after winning in Wisconsin, he netted few new endorsements. Almost a year after he announced his candidacy, Cruz still has the backing of only four of his Senate Republican colleagues, less than 10 percent of the conference, and one of them (Lindsey Graham) likened it to picking poison over being shot and another (Jim Risch) wasn’t even sure his tepid approval qualified as an endorsement.

Josh Holmes, who served as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s chief of staff when Cruz arrived in the Senate in 2012, said Cruz was perhaps the lone top Republican politician in America who couldn’t rally congressional Republicans against Trump, a bombastic outsider whose heated rhetoric and unpredictability has turned off many GOP elites.

“They would vote for almost anybody other than Donald Trump,” Holmes said. “Unfortunately, almost anybody does not include Ted Cruz.”

Cruz’s campaign manager Jeff Roe dismissed a report Tuesday that layoffs were coming, tweeting that Cruz still had $9 million cash on hand. But big donors are expected to reassess continuing to invest in super PAC ads attacking Trump and boosting Cruz after their latest loss.

After the Indiana defeat, it’s not clear Cruz can knock Trump off his stride anywhere. The Nebraska primary is a week away, but Trump’s most likely paths to 1,237 delegates doesn’t require him to win there.

More ominously for Cruz, Trump has obliterated the competition in primaries thus far. Trump has won 24 of 29 such contests, with two of his five losses coming in his rivals' home states.

All nine of the remaining contests are primaries. (Cruz has fared better in caucuses and party conventions, lower turnout affairs dominated by hardcore activists. There are no such contests left.)

Cruz has vowed to soldier on, announcing over the weekend he was “all in” on California, which votes on June 7 and whose delegates Trump will need to formally clinch the nomination. But the three most recent public polls in California showed Trump winning the state by increasingly lopsided margins: 18, 27 and 34 percentage points, respectively.

"This is over," said Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger's California reelection. "It's always difficult when a campaign comes to an end for people to realize it. There's dissonance between the emotional and intellectual parts of the brain."

Cruz executed every available political maneuver in Indiana, hoping to turn his fortunes in a Midwestern state whose makeup he likened to his past landmark victories in Iowa and Wisconsin. He tried retail stops, a nonaggression pact with John Kasich, gobs of TV ads. He even unveiled his vice president. None of it worked.

The Kasich maneuver even seemed to backfire, as Kasich still told his supporters to vote for him even though he wasn’t campaigning there, limiting its impact. Trump, meanwhile, hammered his opponents as typical opportunistic politicians.

Cruz had entered Indiana on the decline, after losing six straight states in the northeast by unexpectedly large margins — and finishing behind Trump in every county in those six states.

Republicans with tracking polls in Indiana said Trump’s decisive New York win on April 19 — he topped 60 percent statewide — eroded Cruz’s support among Hoosiers. One Republican tracking the race said Cruz had led Trump in their Indiana poll, 33 percent to 32 percent, in the first week of April. But that as of a week ago, Trump had opened up a 12-point lead, 43 percent to 31 percent, over Cruz.

Notably, at the 2016 campaign’s most crucial inflection point, Republican insiders have pushed Cruz aside in favor of Trump.

Former Speaker John Boehner called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.”

Former Sen. Judd Gregg declared himself a “never” Cruz voter, calling him “a demagogue’s demagogue.” Two House committee chairman endorsed Trump in the last week, as seasoned Washington hands from John Feehery, a former top House GOP aide, to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have embraced his inevitability.

In his final rally on Monday in Indiana, Cruz wrapped up his speech with a rare bit of public introspection. “This has been a strange and long journey,” he said. “It hasn’t been boring.”

The next morning, on primary day, Cruz warned that Indiana was the “the one thing that stands between us and the abyss."

And so now, in Cruz’s own telling, there is just the abyss.