Cruz was hoping the “bathroom issue” would make a difference in Indiana. But despite a final push, he lost big and then suspended his campaign.
Via Politico on why Cruz’s social conservative pandering fell flat in Indiana (and, really, most everywhere else):
The only problem with Cruz’s socially conservative message? The voters he has to win over [in Indiana] don’t like it. …
Today, vast swaths of the state’s Republican electorate, from Indianapolis to West Lafayette, have retreated from the culture wars. And like the 50s-era diner itself, Cruz’s dogged socially conservative message seems anachronistic—and perhaps a little tin-eared—to these fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicans….
Along similar lines, Dave Weigel on why Cruz’s defeat in Indiana may also be the biggest electoral victory for transgender rights:
[Cruz] pummeled Donald Trump for supporting the rights of transgender people to use their adopted gender’s bathrooms. And then he lost in a landslide, and quit the presidential race.
I wish Kasich had competed in Indiana; the pact with Cruz was a bad idea.
On the other hand, hard to argue with Cruz’s takedown of Trump. If only they both could have lost!
More. “Many Republicans were surprised Mr. Cruz was the one in the large GOP field to wind up being Mr. Trump’s most formidable opponent,” the Wall Street Journal reports, noting:
The senator’s coalition never grew beyond a core group of dedicated social conservatives, leaving Mr. Trump to pick up support from voters who might have otherwise supported one of the other 14 Republicans who have ended their presidential campaigns.
Cruz’s social conservative bloc was large enough to make him the designated runner up in a crowded, diffuse field. But as the political power and popular appeal of the religious right wanes in the GOP, Cruz as the alternative meant votes going to Trump.
Furthermore. Via a Wall Street Journal editorial, A Cruz Postmortem:
Mr. Cruz’s pandering to the right also sent a signal to moderate and somewhat conservative Republicans that he didn’t need their support. Mr. Trump split the “very conservative” vote with Mr. Cruz but crushed the Senator among more moderate voters. That doomed Mr. Cruz in the East in particular, but also in Indiana.
The Texan’s lost opportunity was to expand his appeal beyond his most conservative base of support and coalesce mainstream Republicans. He never tried to break out of his factional ghetto, as if excoriating the establishment and transgender bathroom laws could motivate a majority to defeat Mr. Trump’s plurality.
The conservatives aghast at Mr. Trump should appreciate the irony that even as Mr. Cruz hoped to produce a new conservative era, he helped wreck the best chance for conservative reform in years.
Indeed. And the WSJ rightly points out the culpability of both Cruz “and his allies at the Heritage Foundation and the Mark Levin talk-radio right.”