![Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a primary night news conference in Indiana.](https://cdn.govexec.com/media/img/cd/2016/05/04/050316trump/860x394.jpg?1626857952)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a primary night news conference in Indiana. Mary Altaffer / AP
With Vote for Trump, Indiana Spurns its Conservative Roots
If Ted Cruz was going to win anywhere, it was in the Hoosier State. Instead he got knocked out of the race.
Indiana has long been home base for conservatives. Mike Pence was one of the brightest conservative stars in the House before becoming Indiana’s governor. The last two presidents of the antitax Club for Growth represented the state in Congress. In 2012, antiestablishment conservatives scored one of their most consequential (if pyrrhic) victories when they ousted moderate GOP Sen. Richard Lugar from office. But on Tuesday, the Hoosier State offered an uncomfortable reality for principled conservatives: Their movement is in decline.
With a sweeping win that knocked Ted Cruz out of the race, Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination. And with that, he proved that a candidate doesn’t have to adhere to conservative principles to win.
Trump was on pace to win an outright majority of the Indiana vote—in a region, the Midwest, where he struggled to top 40 percent in any previous contest. Exit polls showed him losing the most conservative voters to Cruz—but dominating among everyone else. He carried the upscale Indianapolis suburbs, where his populist message once seemed anathema, and won most counties in the state’s socially conservative northeast. He was in line to win all of the state’s delegates, putting him in position to clinch the nomination before the Cleveland convention.
Adding insult to injury for conservatives, a Cruz acolyte (Rep. Marlin Stutzman) lost badly to the party favorite (Rep. Todd Young) in the GOP Senate primary. Most of the same voters who cast ballots for Trump also backed the establishment choice for Senate. It underscored how Trump’s base of support is noticeably different than the tea-party-fueled insurgency that dominated Republican politics for the last six years. Trump may not be winning establishment Republican operatives in Washington, but he’s winning over Republican voters who typically back the most mainstream candidate in primaries.
In the weeklong run-up to the Indiana primary, Cruz employed every tactic to woo conservatives to his side—and it wasn’t enough to come close. He relentlessly attacked Trump for his position on the North Carolina law restricting bathroom usage for transgendered individuals. He tapped Carly Fiorina as a running mate to rally women behind his candidacy. His allies successfully pressured Gov. Mike Pence to endorse his campaign. And Trump even embarrassed himself on Election Day, offering a cockamamie conspiracy theory that Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. None of it mattered.
All signs are that most Republicans will be rallying around the Trump flag, however reluctantly, now that he’s clinched the nomination. With his victory in Indiana, he proved that the stop-Trump-at-all-costs movement makes up only a small (albeit influential) faction of the party.
Anti-Trump stalwarts had already begun to show cracks in their armor. In his endorsement of Cruz last week, Pence spent as much time praising Trump’s message as he did complimenting Cruz. Marco Rubio has called on the party to unite in Cleveland, even if that means embracing Trump. Cruz himself refused to rule out voting for Trump, even as the billionaire lobbed scathing insults about his family.
Tonight’s Indiana results confirmed that the tea-party movement that roiled Republican politics from 2009 to 2014 was as much about fighting against the party’s establishment as it was about reducing the scope of government. Indiana was the tea-party heartland in 2010. Six years later, it’s Trump country.