Trump’s foes fear Indiana vote could deal decisive blow

By Alexander Burns, New York Times News Service

Tuesday, May 3, 2016 | 2 a.m.

The coalition of Republicans opposed to Donald Trump’s candidacy braced Monday for a debilitating setback, as he appeared poised for a victory in Indiana that would put him on track to seal the Republican nomination by the time primary voting ends next month.

The Indiana vote on Tuesday has emerged as a decisive and perhaps final test for Sen. Ted Cruz, who has abandoned hope of overtaking Trump in the race but still aims to throw the Republican nominating fight to a contested convention in July. Cruz, of Texas, has pleaded with Indiana voters in recent days not to anoint Trump as the party’s standard-bearer, and has devised a series of long-shot tactics to derail him in the state.

On Monday, that mission of persuasion took on a vividly literal form for Cruz during a campaign stop in Marion, Indiana. Confronted there by determined hecklers bearing Trump campaign signs, Cruz insisted to one that he was making a mistake.

“Donald Trump is deceiving you,” he said. “He is playing you for a chump.”

Polls now show that Trump has a clear advantage in Indiana, where 57 delegates are at stake. A survey conducted by Marist College for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found Trump leading Cruz by 15 points there, and close to capturing an outright majority of the vote. Gov. John Kasich of Ohio was in a distant third place.

Cruz has signaled that he intends to forge ahead irrespective of the outcome in Indiana in a bid to block Trump from winning the 1,237 delegates required to claim the nomination. He spent part of the weekend campaigning in California, which is among the last states to vote on June 7, and collected the endorsement of former Gov. Pete Wilson, who warned that Trump would doom the party as its nominee.

But Wilson conceded in an interview on Monday that a defeat in Indiana would imperil Cruz’s path forward. To win California, Wilson said, “the first thing he needs to do is win in Indiana.”

Without such a victory, Wilson said, “I think it’s much more difficult. The nearer that Trump gets to having the magic number, the more difficult it is.”

Republican strategists opposed to Trump acknowledge that losing Indiana could break the back of the organized resistance to his candidacy, and relegate Cruz to the role of a symbolic dissenter on the right. Trump has declared repeatedly in the runup to Tuesday’s vote that a victory in Indiana would effectively resolve the race in his favor.

At a concert hall in Carmel, near Indianapolis, on Monday, Trump again said that winning the state would end the Republican race, and interspersed his mockery of Cruz with harsh attacks on Clinton. “I’m going to start focusing on Hillary,” he said. “That’s going to be so easy. It’s going to be so great.”

Paul Manafort, a senior adviser to Trump, said the Indiana vote would confirm Trump’s status as “the inevitable and presumptive nominee.” After Tuesday, Manafort said, the Trump campaign would increasingly turn its attention to preparing for the July convention in Cleveland and laying the organizational groundwork for the general election.

Manafort said it was past time for Trump’s rivals to bow to reality. “Cruz and Kasich should be doing what, historically, all losing candidates do,” he said. “Drop out.”

On the Democratic side, polls suggest that Hillary Clinton is in a close fight for Indiana with Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont. Sanders’ populist message has broken through in several other states in the industrial heartland, including neighboring Michigan, and he could score an upset that would reinvigorate his demoralized supporters.

Campaigning Monday in Evansville, Indiana, Sanders said he needed to record some big wins to become the nominee. Addressing a riled-up crowd, Sanders took aim at “the billionaire class,” prompting a supporter to cry out that the superrich should get lost, in earthier language.

Laughing, Sanders replied that he was “constrained” from using such language. “I can’t quite phrase it like that, but that’s not bad,” he said. “You get to the point very succinctly. I like it.”

If some voters remain passionately supportive of Sanders, the delegate math, however, is firmly against him. Clinton has more than 90 percent of the 2,383 delegates needed for the nomination, including unpledged superdelegates who can change their affiliation. She has nearly 300 more pledged delegates than Sanders.

For Republicans trying to stop Trump, Clinton’s command of the Democratic race has further raised the stakes. Trump trails Clinton in general election polls, and party leaders fear that his unpopularity would drag down their candidates for the Senate and House of Representatives.

But as Trump has gained strength in the nominating fight, winning primaries by widening margins, some Republicans have grown apprehensive about mounting an all-out war against him, given the growing likelihood that he will be nominated.

Trump’s adversaries have pursued a range of unlikely strategies against him, as the odds of defeating him have faded almost to the point of evaporation. The forces arrayed against Trump staked their hopes first on Wisconsin, where Cruz soundly defeated him, and then on Indiana, another Midwestern state where Trump was seen as vulnerable.

Cruz, a hard-line conservative who has struggled to rally the Republican establishment to his side, has seemed to deploy every available tactic to block Trump in the state, including forming a brief alliance with Kasich and naming Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard executive, as his vice-presidential running mate.

Groups opposed to Trump have spent $2 million on television ads attacking him in Indiana, and on Friday, Cruz collected an endorsement from the state’s Republican governor, Mike Pence, who is popular among conservative voters there.

Should Trump win easily despite all that, Cruz might not have another chance to regain momentum before next month’s vote in California, when he must collect a huge number of delegates to block the front-runner.

Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster, said if the anti-Trump efforts in Indiana falls short, “it will be increasingly difficult for either Sen. Cruz or Gov. Kasich to make an argument in upcoming primary contests they can stop Trump.”

Blizzard, who worked for a super PAC supporting Jeb Bush’s campaign, said an Indiana defeat for the anti-Trump forces would prompt Republicans to turn their attention to shoring up the rest of the party for a fall campaign.

“There’s no doubt we’re going to face an uphill general election contest with Trump at the top of the ticket,” he said, “and it’s time to figure out how our candidates, from U.S. Senate to Congress to state legislature, compete on that battlefield.”