Donald Trump notched a major victory in Indiana’s Republican primary Tuesday night, solidifying his position as the presumptive GOP nominee and delivering a considerable setback to the campaign of his leading opponent, Ted Cruz.
Trump’s seventh consecutive victory comes one week after he swept nearly a half-dozen Northeastern states and 14 days after he carried 60 percent of the vote in his home state of New York. With 53 percent of precincts reporting, the billionaire leads Cruz by nearly 20 percentage points in the Hoosier State.
Nine primaries remain before the Republican National Convention in July, and Trump’s win on Tuesday makes the possibility of him securing 1,237 delegates more plausible than ever.
The battle for a first-place finish in the Hoosier State began to shift in Trump’s favor shortly after Cruz’s landslide loss in New York. But a series of polls that showed the billionaire fluctuating between single and double-digit leads over Cruz raised doubts about his actual advantage.
Nevertheless, Trump’s trio of endorsements from three former college basketball coaches in Indiana — Indiana University’s Bobby Knight, Purdue’s Gene Keady and Notre Dame’s Digger Phelps — gave him a major boost in a state with a dedicated collegiate basketball fanbase.
Realizing the pivotal role Indiana could play in getting him to 1,237 delegates, Trump escalated the ferocity of his attacks against Cruz and his running mate, Carly Fiorina, in the final week before the primary.
“He set a record. First candidate in the history of this country who has no path to victory, who can’t win, and he picked a vice presidential candidate,” Trump told voters during his first of two rallies on the eve of Indiana’s primary.
With 996 delegates in his back pocket already, Trump’s big win Indiana is likely to put him within 200 or so delegates of securing the nomination.
The Trump campaign expects their candidate to pick up a handful of the delegates in West Virginia, Oregon and Washington in the coming weeks, before heading to California and New Jersey, where a combined 223 delegates are up for grabs.
At the Republican National Committee’s spring meeting last month, Trump’s convention manager predicted that the businessman could secure more than 1,400 delegates on the first ballot.
