Alexander Burns at The New York Times provides a preview of today’s Indiana primary:
The coalition of Republicans opposed to Donald J. 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 has emerged as a decisive and perhaps final test for Senator Ted Cruz, who has abandoned hope of overtaking Mr. Trump in the race but still aims to throw the Republican nominating fight to a contested convention in July. Mr. Cruz, of Texas, has pleaded with Indiana voters in recent days not to anoint Mr. Trump as the party’s standard-bearer, and has devised a series of long-shot tactics to derail him in the state. […]
Republican strategists opposed to Mr. Trump acknowledge that losing Indiana could break the back of the organized resistance to his candidacy and relegate Mr. Cruz to the role of a symbolic dissenter on the right. Mr. Trump has said that a victory in Indiana on Tuesday would effectively resolve the race in his favor.
Ed Kilgore:
Cruz actually could do pretty well in the statewide vote in Indiana and still get clobbered on delegates, partly because over half (30 of 57) go to the statewide winner, and partly because his best performing areas are concentrated in a single congressional district, which awards just three delegates like the other eight do. Nobody's going to give Cruz a lot of credit for coming close in the statewide vote if he's losing the delegates 54-3 or 51-6.
For Trump, that kind of win would put him fewer than 200 delegates away from pay dirt, with 51-delegate winner-take-all New Jersey, which everyone expects him to win, and 172-delegate winner-take-most California, where he's led every poll this year, still ahead.
The Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff:
[A]fter Hail Mary veep picks and strange alliances, the Texan has turned in the home stretch to God, Glenn, and Gohmert.
Cruz is looking to re-bottle the Wisconsin and Iowa magic, filling the state with right-wing radio favorites and recruiting endorsements from dozens of pastors.
It’s a mix of strategies that’s brought him success in other Midwestern states. But in Indiana, the outlook is a bit bleaker -- and the Cruz Crew is living on a wing and a prayer.
Claire Landsbaum at New York Magazine:
Ted Cruz's popularity among Republicans is waning at the worst possible time: Just before the Indiana primary, where Cruz must score a victory if he still wants to stop GOP front-runner Donald Trump. The polls have confirmed Cruz's downturn, and Cruz himself is radiating desperation, but a confrontation on Monday between the Texas senator and several Trump supporters foreshadowed the doom that awaits him in Indiana.
At The New Yorker, John Cassidy looks a Trump’s candidacy through the prism of European politics:
Europe has plenty of its own problems to deal with. But with these problems has come the rise of a number of Trump-style right-wing populists. Indeed, one of the things you realize when you cross the Atlantic is that Trumpism isn’t as purely American a phenomenon as it appears from up close. Save perhaps Silvio Berlusconi, the disgraced former Prime Minister of Italy, there is no exact European equivalent to the brash New York billionaire, but the larger forces that have propelled Trump to the brink of the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination—nationalism, nativism, disillusionment with the economic results of globalization, fear of terrorism, cynicism about career politicians—are just as strong in Europe, perhaps stronger.
Chris Cillizza breaks down the GOP’s rough map:
If Clinton wins the 19 states (and D.C.) that every Democratic nominee has won from 1992 to 2012, she has 242 electoral votes. Add Florida's 29 and you get 271. Game over.
The Republican map — whether with Trump, Cruz or the ideal Republican nominee (Paul Ryan?) as the standard-bearer — is decidedly less friendly. There are 13 states that have gone for the GOP presidential nominee in each of the last six elections. But they only total 102 electorate votes. That means the eventual nominee has to find, at least, 168 more electoral votes to get to 270. Which is a hell of a lot harder than finding 28 electoral votes.
And, on a final note, here’s Eugene Robinson’s take at The Washington Post:
Faced with Trump’s challenge, GOP grandees have failed to react in any meaningful way. Trump’s closest challenger for the nomination is the least-liked Republican in the Senate, a man who believes the party’s problem is that its presidential candidates haven’t been orthodox enough.
In no way do I minimize the ugly side of Trump’s appeal — the naked chauvinism, the authoritarian streak, the cynical appeal to his supporters’ worst instincts. But it is wrong — and, for the Republican Party, suicidal — to ignore the fact that he is doing more than merely rousing the rabble. Trump is filling a vacuum left by years of inattention to voters who have been patronized and taken for granted. The fissures he exposed in the GOP will not go away.