Cruz was ecstatic. He viewed Wisconsin as a watershed in the race, proving his capacity for beating Trump one on one and laying a blueprint for how to stop him in other contests. This was willfully naive; the stars had aligned in the Badger State in ways Cruz’s team could not hope to replicate elsewhere. Still, taking the stage in Milwaukee to celebrate his victory, Cruz called the Wisconsin result “a turning point,” and a “rallying cry” for Republicans to defeat Trump. He touted his consecutive delegate conquests in four states—Utah, Colorado, North Dakota, and Wisconsin—before declaring, “We’ve got the full spectrum of the Republican Party coming together and uniting behind this campaign.”
Once Cruz had shaken hands and posed for pictures to commemorate his triumph, he climbed onto his campaign bus and dialed into Fox News. The initial signs were positive; Hannity’s program was showing images of him, not Trump, on the screen. (Cruz had become accustomed to seeing all three cable networks, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, showing his opponent simultaneously, a situation his advisers referred to as “The Full Trump.”) Relieved, Cruz settled in to hear the analysis. Just then, however, Hannity began discussing the night’s developments with Laura Ingraham.
“If Ted Cruz can keep beating Donald Trump in state after state after state—” she began.
“Can he?” Hannity interrupted.
“I don’t see that happening in a place like New York and especially the New England states,” Ingraham replied.
“Yes, New York’s got to be Trump’s firewall,” Hannity said. “He’s going to win New York. He’s up by thirty-four points.”
Cruz’s grin turned into a grimace.
When Hannity returned from commercial, he was joined by news anchor Bill Hemmer, who ran down the slate of upcoming state contests.
“New York—winner take all. Right now, Trump looks pretty good in New York,” Hemmer said. “End of the month here, you’ve got five states in the Northeast. Trump looks pretty good in all five. And then we clear the month of April and move to May. And on May third is Indiana. We’ve looked at the numbers so far. We’re crunching them. Looks pretty good for Trump. Go a week later, West Virginia looks good for Trump. That’s winner-take-all, by the way . . .”
Cruz leapt from his seat. “What the fuck?” he screamed at the television. His staffers were startled and more than a bit surprised. Their boss was not the emotional sort. But months of building antagonism toward Trump, and frustration with Fox News, could no longer be suppressed.
Cruz flopped back into his seat. He had just secured his biggest victory to date, yet he felt deeply defeated.
IN THE TWO WEEKS BETWEEN WISCONSIN ON APRIL 5 AND NEW YORK on April 19, the Cruz campaign laid the groundwork for its last stand.
Despite the candidate’s public projections of confidence, everyone knew Trump was poised to steamroll through the northeastern primaries and crush Cruz in late April. If that happened, the campaign would need an abrupt, high-profile victory to stop the bleeding. Their best shot: Indiana on May 3.
The state offered 57 delegates, an electoral jackpot that, if hit, could make Trump’s delegate math unworkable. Cruz’s team began throwing everything they had into Indiana, hoping to reapply the formula that had worked in Wisconsin. But despite some demographic similarities, Indiana bore little electoral resemblance. There was no multimillion-dollar assault from outside groups on Trump. The conservative talk radio army was nowhere to be found. And unlike in Wisconsin, where Cruz was backed by much of the party establishment, Indiana’s top officials showed no signs of support. Trump was far too popular in the state for Republican leaders to risk disaffecting their base by denouncing him.
Mike Pence was Exhibit A.
The governor loathed Trump, his longtime friends and allies whispered at the time, viewing his personal indiscretions and campaign rhetoric as destructive to the cause of conservatism. But Pence was in no position to do battle with the GOP front-runner. He had been damaged goods since early 2015, when the religious liberty dispute blew up in his face. The governor’s actions had alienated almost every constituency imaginable—the left, the socially moderate center, the business community—when he first signed the legislation, and then, for good measure, the conservative base and evangelical right when he backtracked. By the spring of 2016, things looked grim. Pence’s popularity had tanked, his approval rating was underwater in public and private polls, and he was running even in his race against Democrat John Gregg. Almost uniformly, Pence’s friends believed his political career was slipping away. The last thing he needed was a war with Trump.
But Cruz wouldn’t go away. For several weeks in April, he put a full-court press on Pence: phone calls, text messages, emails from mutual friends. He finally secured a lengthy private meeting, and later, a formal invite to the Indianapolis GOP spring dinner, where Cruz gave a speech and sat at the governor’s table. The senator implored Pence to do what was right, not just for his candidacy but for the conservative movement.
The governor began to wear down. For all his political ambition and keen sense of self-preservation, Pence was a true believer. All the way back to his earliest days as a think tank president and talk radio host, Pence had approached politics with a zealot’s sincerity. In 1999 he wrote an opinion piece trashing the Disney film Mulan, the story of a Japanese girl who disguises herself as a man to join the military. “I suspect that some mischievous liberal at Disney assumes that Mulan’s story will cause a quiet change in the next generation’s attitude about women in combat and they just might be right,” Pence warned.10
With his party’s nomination potentially hanging in the balance, and a like-minded conservative pleading for support to stop someone they both viewed as unfit for the office of president, Pence thrilled Cruz by informing him of his endorsement. There was one condition: Pence said he would not, could not, disparage Trump the way Walker had in Wisconsin. He would endorse Cruz but say nothing negative about Trump.
As the final arrangements were made for Pence’s endorsement, Cruz offered another surprise to the voters of Indiana. On April 27, six days before the state’s primary, Cruz introduced Carly Fiorina, the onetime Hewlett-Packard CEO and a former rival in the Republican race, as his running mate.
Cruz was desperate for a shift in momentum. One day earlier, Trump had swept him in the April 26 primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, with Cruz failing to break 25 percent in any of the contests. Fiorina made perfect sense as a vice-presidential pick: She had endorsed him sometime ago and proved herself to be an effective surrogate, especially when it came to connecting with conservative women who liked Cruz’s policies but found him personally unpleasant.
The National Enquirer was not impressed. “Carly Fiorina Plastic Surgery—Fake Face of Ambition,” its headline screamed.
Two days after the Fiorina announcement, on April 29, Pence announced his support for Cruz—in a fashion even more lukewarm than anyone in Cruz’s camp had anticipated.
“I particularly want to commend Donald Trump, who I think has given voice to the frustration of millions of working Americans with a lack of progress in Washington, DC,” the governor said on a local radio program. “And I’m also particularly grateful that Donald Trump has taken a strong stance for Hoosier jobs when we saw jobs in the Carrier company abruptly announce leaving Indiana not for another state but for Mexico.”