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Indiana: The Anti-Trump Republicans’ Last Stand

Trump is winning in Indiana, and the half-hearted Cruz-Kasich pact to oppose him has gone over very poorly in the Hoosier State:

But 58 percent of likely Republican primary voters in Indiana say they disapprove of Cruz and Kasich teaming up to beat Trump in the Hoosier State, while 34 percent say they approve of the move.

It doesn’t bode well for anti-Trump Republicans when barely a third of the electorate in the next primary state supports an attempt to thwart Trump’s nomination. The attempted coordination with Kasich seemed likely to backfire, and to the extent that it had any effect it seems to have done the anti-Trump cause more harm than good. The goal of anti-Trump Republicans is to thwart the preferences of most Republican voters and install a different nominee from the one that received the most votes. Like most Republicans across the country, Indiana Republicans aren’t interested in that: 64% of likely Republican voters say that the candidate with the most votes in the primaries should be the nominee even if he doesn’t have the majority of delegates. Just 29% want the delegates to pick the candidate they believe to be the best nominee.

Even if the Cruz-Kasich pact had worked as planned, the poll suggests that Trump would have won a two-way race with Cruz anyway. The evidence from the NBC News/WSJ poll tells us that Kasich, not Cruz, was the most popular second choice for voters in Indiana, so the assumption that Cruz could win Indiana without Kasich in the race was based on a misunderstanding of the state’s electorate, which is part of the larger failure to understand the Republican primary electorate as a whole. When all is said and done, Trump owes his nomination in no small part to the unfailingly incompetent and belated opposition he faced throughout the process. Anti-Trump Republicans have assumed all along that Trump prevailed mostly because of a divided field, and they believed that he would lose against one or two opponents, but each time the field has narrowed Trump’s support has increased enough to stave off any challenger.

The Cruz campaign is starting to pay attention to the writing on the wall:

Within the campaign, some are turning to the question of what’s next. One senior aide said there had been no discussion about dropping out before the final primary contests are held on June 7 but noted that Cruz wouldn’t be eager to prolong a campaign he was convinced he couldn’t win.

If Trump wins Indiana by more than 10 points, he is set to take the state’s entire haul of 57 delegates (30 go to the statewide winner, and the remainder are determined by winner of each district). That not only brings him that much closer to securing the nomination outright, but it deprives Cruz of his last, best chance at a significant victory. Cruz has staked whatever remains of his campaign on a win in Indiana, and all indications are that he won’t be able to deliver.

Die-hard anti-Trump Republicans are proving once again to be a distinct minority in their own party. They have been consoling themselves for months with the conceit that Trump’s support is limited to no more than a third of the GOP, but the truth is that they can rely on barely a third of Republicans for their cause. They have not only been wrong about how much support Trump can expect to receive (49% say they will vote for him in Indiana in the latest poll), but they have also greatly overestimated the intensity of opposition from Republican voters that prefer another candidate. If Trump received 35-40% of the vote in a given state, his opponents assumed that this meant that two-thirds of Republicans were implacably against him, but that hasn’t been true in months if it ever was. If a third of the party is firmly behind Trump and a third is determined to oppose him, the remaining third is content to go with whichever candidate is winning. Anti-Trump Republicans are losing so badly because they simply don’t have the numbers to win in most places, and they seem to be the last ones to understand this.