Ted Cruz can’t win the Republican primaries. That’s been more or less true for better than a month and absolutely true since the last round of primaries capped his potential delegate count somewhere well south of the number required to walk into Cleveland for an insta-crown. However, Cruz is still insisting that he can snatch the nomination based on a complex system or arm-twisting and convincing people that while, yes, he is one of the most hateable men in North America, he’s only a runner up in that contest.
But even before the make-or-break primary night in Indiana, where the latest polls show Cruz down by fifteen points, it seems that those few delegates who had said they might TrusTed, are starting to wander away.
Even as Donald J. Trump trounced him from New Hampshire to Florida to Arizona, Senator Ted Cruz could reassure himself with one crucial advantage: He was beating Mr. Trump in the obscure, internecine delegate fights that could end up deciding the Republican nomination for president….
It turns out that delegates — like ordinary voters — are susceptible to shifts in public opinion. And as the gravitational pull of Mr. Trump’s recent primary landslides draws more Republicans toward him, Mr. Cruz’s support among the party’s 2,472 convention delegates is softening, threatening his hopes of preventing Mr. Trump’s nomination by overtaking him in a floor fight.
Until the last two weeks, Cruz’ plan to ignore Republican voters and deal directly with delegates who were more likely to share his bitter quest for theocratic conservative purity seemed to be working out. At one state convention after another, unsecured delegates were casually gathered into Lucifer’s right pocket.
But as a sense of Trump’s inevitability settles over the process, delegates are starting to edge away from Cruz. Some of them probably suspect that the only thing worse than having Donald Trump as your acknowledged leader, is being on Trump’s sh!# list when he ascends the throne. The rest are in a position shared by most of the nation—they just want this thing over with.