Indianapolis
Had Ted Cruz won the Hoosier primary Tuesday, Indiana would still be a red state. But now it’s crimson—the same shade as Bobby Knight’s sweater and a different color from the one we’re used to seeing represent the Republican party in electoral maps of the United States.
This isn’t your father’s GOP, or Ronald Reagan’s, for that matter. It’s Donald Trump’s.
The New York businessman knocked Cruz out of the Republican race for president Tuesday, routing the Texas senator in a state he had to capture to keep his path to the nomination open.
“It appears that path has been foreclosed,” Cruz told a modest but lively gathering of supporters and volunteers at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Indianapolis.
“Together, we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it everything we’ve got. But the voters chose another candidate.”
With more than 83 percent of the state reporting, Trump led Cruz by 16 percentage points, landing the knockout blow to a campaign that hoped to make the Hoosier state the GOP race’s turning point. Instead, Indiana rendered the bizarre, unprecedented contest virtually over, with only Trump and John Kasich still in the field, and the math to capturing a majority of the delegates needed for the party’s nomination 100 percent on Trump’s side.
The Republican front-runner’s triumph came on the heels of a typically weird week, one that began with Trump touting the endorsement of Knight, a favorite son of the Hoosier state and his temperamental equal, and concluded with him parroting an unsubstantiated tabloid rumor about ties between Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald.
No big deal. A random aside like that was never going to derail Trump’s progress. Nothing has—not his unprompted embrace of celebrity endorser and convicted rapist Mike Tyson this week, not anything. It’s been enough to drive some Cruz supporters mad.
“Who’s the next president? Kim Kardashian, if this is the standard?” Brian Adams, 52, told me. The Indianapolis resident shook his head and nursed a glass of red wine in a booth next to the bar area in the event space. He said he’s an Army veteran and was disgusted by Trump’s comments about John McCain several months ago.
Those once-shocking remarks might as well have never happened. Trump has bulldozed his way to a major party’s nomination in the most unconventional manner in modern political history: Spending little money and gobbling up all the airtime, saturating the media with outbursts and tangents to control the news cycle daily, and appealing to his supporters with an uncompromising, alpha-male attitude based on the concept of winning and sticking it to the elites out east.
Cruz, himself the definition of an anti-establishment candidate, didn’t buy that pitch in the closing stretch before Tuesday’s vote. He contrasted his “positive and optimistic” message with Trump’s bombastic approach. When his play fell short, his supporters were crushed, letting out the customary chorus of “No!” that accompanies a candidate’s announcement that they’re getting out of the race.
“I’m despondent, like someone just staked me in the heart,” Cruz volunteer David Christensen, 51, told me. “You’ve got the one guy you truly believe in—he’s a conservative, he makes sense, a good Christian man—and just hit the Trump wall, and fell apart.”
Christensen trekked north from Johnson City, Tennessee to campaign for Cruz last Thursday, starting out with phone banks and following up with door-to-door visits. He’ll return south with lingering doubts about Trump.
“I don’t know where he stands on anything,” he said, highlighting his worries about how Trump would use the executive branch to impose his will. “The last few presidents, especially Obama, have set some precedents of what a president can do—I’m just going to go around Congress, say it out loud, and get away with it. It sets a precedent for the next man. The next man is Donald Trump, the biggest ego I’ve ever seen walking.”
Yet when he’s asked if he’ll ultimately line up behind the presumptive nominee, he says “I’m pondering,” and he grits his teeth. A beat passes. He remembers Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic opponent.
“Yeah, I would,” he mumbles. “I have to pick. We have to vote. There can’t be any, ‘I have to abstain.’ I’m not one of those guys.”
Trump can only hope for all of Cruz’s voters to reach the same conclusion—and preferably elsewhere than Tennessee.
Indiana is the state in the headlines for now. It received an unusual amount of attention this year during the primary, given its late voting date on the election calendar. Though the results didn’t produce what Cruz and his backers hoped for, he vowed to continue pushing his vision for the country—as most candidates are wont to do—and, notably, never mentioned Trump’s name during his concession speech.
The show must go on for Adams, too. He wore a customized Chicago Cubs baseball jersey that had the number “5” and the characters “O’CLOCK” printed on the back—pretty appropriate for the disappointment of the occasion.
A few minutes after word of Trump’s victory began to spread among the attendees, he stared at a plastic-wrapped cigar on his table he brought to the rally.
“Yeah, I’m smoking this no matter what,” he said.
He was out of sight within 15 minutes.
