#Breaking: Ted Cruz drops out of the 2016 presidential race https://t.co/7eshI3SCbQ pic.twitter.com/fO5Q3c4hBi
— CNN (@CNN) May 4, 2016
As Politico reports,
Ted Cruz is quitting the presidential race, according to campaign manager Jeff Roe, ending one of the best-organized campaigns of 2016 after a series of stinging defeats left Donald Trump as the only candidate capable of clinching the nomination outright.
Like the primaries last week, the Indiana Republican primary was a walkover for Trump. Trump has won the state as expected, and he appears to have won it decisively. With just 12% reporting, he leads Cruz by 20 points, 53-33%. The CNN exit poll suggests that he will end up with more than half the vote. He is very likely to come away with all of the state’s 57 delegates, and if surveys from California are to be believed he is on track to win going away there a month from now. Tonight’s result confirmed that die-hard anti-Trump Republicans are a minority of the GOP.
With the polls in eastern Indiana closed (the last polls in the western part of the state are open until 7pm Eastern), the first results come in, and in early counting of the available votes, Trump has a daunting 53% lead over Cruz's 33% and Kasich at 11%, while Hillary leads Bernie Sanders 58% to 43%.
If Trump's 50%+ lead remains largely unchallenged, it is difficult to see how the New York real estate billionaire will fail to accumulate the required threshold of votes before the Republican convention in July.
Developing
* * *
Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump has accused his rival Ted Cruz of belonging to a family with links to Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK. Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, has been seen in a photo standing next to alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald just days before the ‘assassin’ was assassinated himself. Ted Cruz has replied to the allegations calling them “nuts” and sarcastically admitting that his father was Elvis Presley in disguise and did indeed kill JFK and Jimmy Hoffa and buried the latter’s body in their garden.
When I give talks about the Benedict Option, I tell people that the signal event was not Obergefell, but the Indiana RFRA debacle a couple of months earlier. That was when Big Business took sides in the culture war in a very big way — and did so against social conservatives, who lost massively.
A reader sends in this Politico piece about how the RFRA loss shattered the GOP coalition in the Hoosier State. The hook? Ted Cruz’s failure to connect with locals regarding his socially conservative message. Excerpts: