Ted Cruz needed to win Indiana primaries tonight but he lost to his rival Donald J. Trump.
There's no couching it: He has staked his campaign on the primary here. He convinced John Kasich to pull his resources out of the state so he could go head to head with Donald Trump. He has spent the past week criss-crossing the state, criticizing Trump to voters.
And recent polls show him down.
This will be the first state to vote since Cruz was mathematically eliminated from contention to clinch the nomination outside of a contested convention, and so he's been campaigning on keeping Trump from getting to the magic number.
A possible bad sign for him from exit polls?
Three-quarters of voters in Indiana say they were casting a ballot in support of their candidate rather than against his opponent, and two-thirds think the candidate with the most support in primaries and caucuses should be the nominee at the convention if no one captures a majority of the delegates.
The statewide winner tonight on the Republican side gets 30 out of 57 delegates automatically. Cruz not only needs that kind of margin to keep Trump from getting to 1,237 -- he also needs it to show that he can even win anywhere else on the map.
Tonight is a rare night where it is even more about momentum than it is about math. If voters in Indiana don't go for Cruz's stop Trump pitch, it's hard to believe they will elsewhere in the country.
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