Donald Trump's victories in New York and other eastern states were no less devastating for being so predictable.
The delegate haul may have already been "baked into" assessments of his chance to get to 1,237, but perceptions of inevitability will matter in remaining states, including Indiana Tuesday and California next month.
The logic has been the same from the beginning but becomes more irresistible near the end--the more Trump wins, the more the GOP establishment will search for reasons to come to grips with the idea of him as their nominee, and thereby avoid a chaotic contested convention.
Trump's efforts to appear "more presidential" (a notion that, in itself, summarizes the nature of the problem) will be designed to make this acquiescence less painful; to entrench the notion that putting him atop the ticket is the least terrible of a terrible array of options.
It will likely come down to rare Republican voters in places like Santa Barbara and Palo Alto, but the permutations suggest that Trump's chances of reaching the magic number are now considerably better than even, the Ted Cruz-John Kasich common-front strategy notwithstanding.
The division of the GOP field has always been Trump's biggest advantage and it continues, with Cruz-Kasich representing too little too late because it falls short of what is necessary, which is for Kasich to withdraw in order to turn what's left into Trump versus Cruz.
If Trump does becomes the nominee, Kasich, who appears to still believe that a contested convention will somehow turn to him or that he can parlay his modest delegate total into the VP slot, will have been his primary enabler--swing 75 percent of his poll support to Cruz in Indiana and California and suddenly a great deal changes.
The "white knight" isn't coming and it looks more and more like it will be either Trump on the first ballot or Cruz on a ballot thereafter in Cleveland. We don't know yet if Trump can get to 1,237 going in, but if he is even a couple dozen shy, his total will go down with each ballot after the first and Cruz's, with his hyper-efficient delegate-hunting machine, will go up.
So for the sake of argument, and just in case it isn't entirely futile speculation at this point, what would a Cruz-Hillary Clinton race in which Trump can somehow be persuaded to stay out look like?
The poll numbers for such a match-up have been fairly even for months now, but the hunch is that Cruz winning the GOP nomination in such a fashion at such a convention would put him behind at the outset, perhaps by five to 10 points (parties usually get a boost from conventions in the polls, but the GOP won't this year).
That in itself wouldn't be determinative--many candidates have started out in comparable circumstances but were able to either win (Ronald Reagan in 1980, George Bush in 1988) or make a race out of it (Gerald Ford in 1976).
The problem, however, comes in the electoral math: The Democratic "blue wall" consists of 18 states (plus the District of Columbia) that they have won in each of the last six presidential contests, amounting to 242 electoral votes (of the required 270). The Republican "red wall" consists of just 13 states won in each of the last six presidential contests, amounting to only 102 electoral votes.
The details are a bit more complicated than that and a bit less imposing for Republicans--the GOP hold on their states is more secure than the Democratic hold on theirs, such that what's Republican is more likely to stay Republican than what's Democrat is likely to stay Democrat, such that even a weak GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, came within 5 percent of winning Pennsylvania and 7 percent of winning Wisconsin and Minnesota. Republicans have also been winning more governorship and congressional races in blue states in recent years than Democrats have been winning in red states.
Nonetheless, it will likely, as usual, come down to Florida and Ohio. The average margin of victory in Florida in the past six presidential elections has been 1.8 percent, the average in Ohio 3.5 percent.
Thus, the question is whether Cruz could do better in Florida and Ohio against Hillary than Romney did against Barack Obama (Romney lost Florida by just 0.9 percent and Ohio by 3.0 percent).
The conventional wisdom--that battleground-state voters prefer moderates, like Romney and Kasich--would seem to cast doubt on the more ideological Cruz's prospects there (and in other contested states like Colorado, Iowa, Virginia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania).
Even if he can somehow wrest the nomination away from Trump at the convention, it isn't clear which states Romney lost that Cruz would do better in (or whether he could even hold the one battleground state, North Carolina, Romney managed to narrowly capture).
Cruz is not, however, without some advantages. Unlike Romney (and John McCain), he has a coherent message and is a superb campaigner and debater.
That, and the nature of his opponent--Hillary isn't Obama and it will tell on the campaign trail, on the debate stage, and probably also in terms of turnout on Nov. 8th.
But all of this becomes irrelevant if Cruz doesn't win Indiana tomorrow.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 05/02/2016