There will be plenty of occasions in the following days and weeks and months to reflect on what a Donald Trump nomination means for the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and for the nation.
But the results from Indiana have made one thing abundantly clear: Republican voters have spoken and they want Donald Trump to be the GOP nominee.
Conservative opponents of Trump may never get behind him (I for one, remain firmly in the NeverTrump camp), but they can no longer deny the reality that he’s the top choice of Republican voters.
In hindsight, this has been obvious for awhile. But there were always reasons to doubt the obvious.
As Trump led in polls last summer and fall, there was reason to believe that he’d fade once voting began, as with other fallen GOP front-runners such as Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain.
When he started compiling wins in early primaries, there was a plausible argument that he had a ceiling, and that as the field consolidated he would lose momentum.
Even after he stormed to victories in the Northeast primaries, there was an argument that this was always going to be the toughest stretch for Sen. Ted Cruz and that Trump could at the very minimum be denied the majority of delegates needed to win the nomination. Indiana, a very conservative state with lots of religious voters, should have been fertile ground for Cruz.
But now, there is no escaping the reality that has been staring everybody in the face.
Trump has effectively led national polling of Republican voters from wire-to-wire since joining the race last summer. He won when there was a large field and when the field had narrowed to three candidates. He has won big states and small states. He nearly swept the Northeast and the South, and has won in the Midwest. He’s attracted the support of moderates and conservatives, of evangelicals and non-religious voters.
With votes still coming in, it looks as though he’ll win over 50 percent in Indiana, just as he won a majority in the previous six states.
There will be a lot of second-guessing and “what ifs” thrown around about whether this could have been prevented. What if there weren’t as many candidates to begin with? What if Cruz had attacked Trump earlier? What if the anti-Trump movement had started spending money on attack ads in December? What if Sen. Marco Rubio hadn’t stumbled at the pre-New Hampshire debate? What if candidates had dropped out sooner, allowing anti-Trump Republicans to rally around an alternative before it was too late?
This is mostly a wasted exercise. It’s quite possible that if Cruz had attacked Trump earlier, he would have collapsed ahead of Iowa, as with other candidates who got in Trump’s way. It’s unclear why ads attacking Trump’s character, business record, electability, or conservatism, would have proven any more effective months earlier.
Even before his New Hampshire stumble, Rubio had a precarious strategy in which he had no clear advantage in any of the early primary states. And it’s hard to say that consolidation in February would have been any more likely to deny Trump wins, given that we now know he didn’t have the ceiling we once thought.
The simplest and easiest conclusion to draw from these results is that Republican voters want Donald Trump to be their nominee. Check back at this space for more on the implications of that.
