The endgame of the 2016 primary campaign looms out west in California, the final big state on which the remaining presidential candidates are pinning their hopes. But to get there, they'll first have to make it through Indiana, where things aren’t looking so good for Ted Cruz. The Texas senator is pretty nearly finished if he cannot beat Donald Trump in the winner-take- all Hoosier state, whose delegates could easily set the Republican front- runner on a glide path to clinch the nomination. Cruz has been talking confidently about winning Indiana and ultimately denying Trump the delegates he needs to win a majority, triggering a contested convention. “At this point, no one is getting to 1,237. I’m not getting to 1,237 before the convention, but neither is Donald Trump,” Cruz said this weekend in California. But internally, his team is reportedly beginning to worry that its candidate is just one loss away from defeat. According to several staffers who spoke to Politico, Cruz is nervous about the outcome of Indiana, where Trump has a significant lead. (The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll, released Sunday, has Trump a whole 15 points ahead of Cruz.) One senior aide said that while the campaign hadn't discussed dropping out before the final round of primaries, which includes California, on June 7, Cruz wouldn't be likely to stay in if there was no longer any chance for him to win. “A Cruz loss in Indiana means lights out,” Scott Reed, the chief political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told Politico. “Game, set, match.”
Recent moves made by Cruz seem to suggest he’s losing steam. Tapping Carly Fiornia to be his running mate—despite the fact that he’s nowhere close to winning the nomination—only boosted his polls slightly, and his bitter disavowal of an alliance with the equally-unlikely John Kasich quickly collapsed, dashing hopes for a combined effort to stop Trump. A big win in Indiana would change the developing media narrative that Trump has locked up the Republican race, while a loss would likely accelerate the growing number of G.O.P. elites, like Jon Huntsman, embracing the billionaire and calling on the party to unify behind him.
If it gives Cruz some comfort, at least he has a friend on the Democratic side. Bernie Sanders, who recently lost several major states to Hillary Clinton, has indicated that he won’t leave the race and also hopes to force a brokered convention—even if he doesn’t have a chance of winning enough delegates to make it past the first ballot. Last week, he began laying off hundreds of staffers, and on Sunday The Washington Post reported that his last round of fundraising only brought in $26 million in April, a massive decline from the previous month. Bernie’s occasional money bombs have been crucial to his ability to remain in the race, leveraging his army of die- hard, small-money donors to keep his insurgent campaign strong. With their support drying up, Sanders's prospects don't look so good. Perhaps he and Cruz have more in common than we thought.
