The Republican primary is effectively over, and Donald J. Trump will really, truly be the nominee.
Mr. Trump won Indiana so convincingly on Tuesday that he drove Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, his chief rival, out of the race. One more contender, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, remains, but for all intents and purposes, the contest is finished.
On the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders’s victory did little to alter the race. Hillary Clinton’s
delegate lead remains intact, and Mr. Trump’s emergence as the
unchallenged Republican standard-bearer may help the Clinton cause as
Democrats grow anxious about the general election matchup.
Here are some of our takeaways from what proved to be a decisive night for the Republican race:
Trump’s problems begin at home
With
his victory in Indiana, Mr. Trump inherits a Republican Party that has
been traumatized and torn apart by his campaign. A majority of primary
voters in the later contests ultimately chose him, but potentially
crippling divisions persist on the right: In Indiana, roughly a quarter
of Republican voters said they would be scared to see him elected
president, according to exit polls.
It
is not clear that Mr. Trump has it in him to unite the party. His final
day on the campaign trail was a tour de force of political brutality.
He first lobbed the outlandish claim
that Mr. Cruz’s father had a connection to John F. Kennedy’s killer,
and then mocked Mr. Cruz as a floundering loser. Mr. Trump has continued
to ridicule other vanquished foes, including Jeb Bush, long after they
left the race.
Mr. Trump begins the general election as a severe underdog to Mrs. Clinton,
and large-scale defections from the Republican side could doom his
candidacy even before he formally claims the nomination. But Mr. Trump
boasted on Tuesday night that Republicans were clamoring to board “the
Trump train,” and said of the party, “We have to bring unity.”
A time for choosing
Republican
elected officials and party leaders deferred the day of reckoning for
as long as possible, but now it has arrived: They will have to say,
definitively and soon, whether they plan to support Mr. Trump in the
general election.
The Republican National Committee has already swung behind Mr. Trump, with Reince Priebus, the party chairman, declaring Tuesday night
that Mr. Trump was the presumptive nominee. But others in the party —
most significantly, a half-dozen senators running for re-election in
Democratic and swing states — face a tougher choice.
Democrats
see this as a fateful moment for their adversaries, who must decide
whether to shun Mr. Trump and risk angering a huge chunk of the
Republican base, or to embrace him despite his controversial comments
and low levels of support among crucial groups like women,
college-educated voters, moderates, young people and nonwhite voters.
Democratic
Senate candidates have already wielded Mr. Trump against their
opponents this week. Ted Strickland, the party’s nominee in Ohio,
released a statement Tuesday night jeering, “Here are the 5 words that
are striking fear into Senator Rob Portman: presumptive Republican
nominee Donald Trump.”
There was no anti-Trump majority
Republicans
opposed to Mr. Trump gravely misunderstood their own party. Many
believed that the bulk of primary voters were firmly set against Mr.
Trump’s candidacy and saw his early successes as a function of the
large, fractious group of candidates running against him. As the
Republican field dwindled in size, they expected a majority of the party
to rally around a single rival.
That simply did not happen. When Mr. Trump won a landslide victory in New York
last month, easily cracking the 50 percent mark, Republicans hoped it
was a home-state phenomenon. A week later, on April 26, he swept five Northeastern states, and Republicans hoped that was a matter of regional affinity.
This
was wishful thinking, and in Indiana, Mr. Trump put an end to the
mirage. He defeated Mr. Cruz by more than 15 points and won more than
half the vote in a seventh consecutive state — this time, in the
Midwest.
There was no anti-Trump majority left to rally, if it ever existed in the first place.
Liberals want Clinton to sweat
Mr.
Sanders’s success in Indiana did little to loosen Mrs. Clinton’s grip
on the Democratic nomination. It would still take a turnaround of
unprecedented scale for Mr. Sanders to overtake her in the delegate
race, and many of his supporters seem to recognize that.
In
a state split almost evenly between the candidates, three-quarters of
Democratic voters said they expected Mrs. Clinton to be the nominee,
according to exit polls. Of the voters who forecast a Clinton
nomination, two in five voted for Mr. Sanders.
Sanders
supporters, who are mainly young, liberal and distrustful of Wall
Street and international trade, are not delusional about his path
forward — but nor are they willing to stand aside and give Mrs. Clinton
the nomination unchallenged. They want to make her keep working for it.
Trump changes the game for Sanders
Mrs.
Clinton and her closest allies have been careful not to anger Sanders
supporters by seeking to shove him out of the presidential campaign. His
strong showing on Tuesday proved that there is still a powerful
constituency for Mr. Sanders’s ideas within the Democratic base and, in
some sectors of the party, a real sense of loyalty to him personally.
Mr.
Trump’s emergence as the all-but-anointed Republican nominee may change
this dynamic. Giving him a monthlong head start to rally skeptical
Republicans behind his campaign, while Mrs. Clinton continues to grapple
with Mr. Sanders’s challenge on the left, could become an intolerable
prospect for Democrats eager for a free hand to engage Mr. Trump.
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