Indiana primary: Ted Cruz could use a prayer against Donald Trump

Ted Cruz was in Indiana on the eve of today's crucial primary, seeking an endorsement of the almighty kind.

"Lord, we lift up Ted Cruz to you tonight," an anti-abortion activist with the Indiana Family Institute recited yesterday, leading a prayer at a rally before hundreds of Hoosiers backing the Republican presidential candidate. "Do not be far from me, oh Lord. Awake and rise to my defence."

It was a timely invocation. If the polls are to be believed, the Texas senator can use all the prayers he can get as Indiana voters head to cast ballots this morning.

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The basic arithmetic already denies him a chance of winning the nomination in a first-ballot convention vote. And a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist survey shows Cruz trailing Donald Trump by 15 percentage points among likely Republican primary voters.

For his part, Cruz did not betray any anxieties onstage last night, firing up rapturous cheers as he deployed familiar stump lines about "standing unapologetically with the nation of Israel" and chopping the air while sounding off on a plan to repeal Obamacare and "abolish the IRS."

"Yessir!" came the approving call-and-response shouts. "That's right!" they said.

Cruz's anti-Trump outburst

But Cruz's cool demeanour ahead of a do-or-die vote began to show cracks today, when he unloaded a blistering personal attack on Trump, calling him everything from a "serial philanderer" and "pathological liar" to an "arrogant buffoon" before a gaggle of live cameras.

"I'm going to do something I haven't done for the entire campaign, for those of y'all who have travelled with me all across the country. I'm gonna tell you what I really think of Donald Trump," Cruz began.

Cruz lashes out at Trump

8 years ago

Duration 1:55

Texas politician has harsh words against fellow Republican candidate on Indiana primary day

"This man is pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth," Cruz said, adding that Trump was a "narcissist at a level I don't think this country's ever seen."

In a particularly odious turn, Cruz delved into Trump's sexual forays and his alleged history as "a serial philanderer" who "describes his battles with venereal disease as his own personal Vietnam."

Trump wasted little time in responding, calling Cruz'sremarks a "desperate" last-resort bid to save a foundering campaign.

"Over the last week, I have watched Lyin' Ted become more and more unhinged as he is unable to react under the pressure and stress of losing, in all cases by landslides, the last six primary elections," Trump said in a statement.

The billionaire real estate mogul's momentum after big wins in New York and five northeastern states is undeniable.

"If we win Indiana, it's over," Trump told supporters this week in the Hoosier State.

Indiana, the so-called Crossroads of America, has become a deciding state in determining the viability of the Cruz and John Kasich Republican presidential campaigns.

True though that may be, Cruz vowed at a campaign stop to soldier on "as long as we have a viable path to victory."

It's a course that appears to be shrinking.

This week's NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll has Trump, the billionaire real-estate magnate, leading with 49 per cent, followed by Cruz with 39 per cent, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich with 13 per cent.

The Real Clear Politics polling average isn't much better, putting Trump at 42 per cent favourability to Cruz's 32.7 per cent.

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Even among his supporters in the state fairgrounds on Sunday, the concern was very real.

"It's very, very important that he wins Indiana. If he doesn't win here, his chances go down a lot, and I don't know what he'll do," said Kirk Booher, wearing a Ted Cruz fan football jersey bearing the number 45, an aspirational reference to Cruz's hopes of becoming the 45th president of the United States.

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"I support him now, with the options that are left," added Anne Demone, 52. "But I don't really know what might happen. I don't know if it looks good, but the stakes are pretty high."

Her support for Cruz wasn't exactly rock-solid.

The Indianapolis resident counts herself among the moderate Republicans who swung their support from Kasich towards Cruz last week, after the two rival candidates agreed to clear the way for one another in contests in which they had the best shot of peeling away delegates from Trump.

"I didn't dislike [Cruz], he was just a little more conservative than I am, but I supported Kasich," she said.

Indiana delegate Kyle Babcock, treasurer of the Indiana Republican Congressional 3rd district, was also leaning towards Kasich before the Cruz-Kasich deal was announced.

"I believe [the deal] was a mistake," he said, reasoning that Indiana's proximity to Kasich's home state of Ohio might have played well among voters here.

But Babcock understands a strong Trump performance in this winner-take-most state with 57 delegates could be game over for both Cruz and Kasich, who have been hoping to prevent Trump winning a first-ballot convention outright.

For her part, Marjorie Hershey, a politics professor with Indiana University in Bloomington, believes the window has already closed as far as Cruz's ability to advance any further.

"Ted Cruz's last stand has long since passed. I really can't see a path for him at this point," she said. "The math, unfortunately, is just so against Cruz's succeeding that I think all of this notion of 'maybe if he wins in Indiana, he still has a chance,' is more of an effort to keep hope alive than to confront a realistic projection."

Indiana unpredictable

Pundits have billed Indiana as Cruz's final chance to win big with a largely white and evangelical population, thereby prolonging the nomination fight.

But while Cruz's sophisticated delegate ground operation has compared Indiana to states that the Texan has already triumphed in namely Wisconsin elections here are a little less predictable than other Midwestern races, says writer Craig Fehrman, a Hoosier who recently analyzed the state's demographics for the political statistics blog FiveThirtyEight.

Indiana is 86 per cent white, according to 2014 U.S. Census Bureau numbers, while Ohio is 83 per cent white.

"But what makes Indiana unique in the Midwest is it was settled in the South. And while other states Ohio, Illinois drew settlers from the South, Indiana drew more of them," he said.

We trust that whoever our leader is, ultimately really it's all up to God.- Bryan Ries

After this migration via the Ohio River in the early 19th century, Indiana wasn't impacted by the same waves of immigration elsewhere, possibly due in part to lack of easy access to water.

"So this homogenous population arrived in the beginning, and the interesting thing is that never really changed," Fehrman says.

Those Southern, evangelical values persist today. While they may seem congruent with Cruz's base, Trump has performed better than expected among Christian conservatives.

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Fehrman points out that Indiana's last-place rankings on metrics for income and education align closer with Trump Southern bastions like Kentucky and Tennessee than Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin. So does Indiana's divorce rate, which is much higher than the rates in those Midwestern states and more in line with rates in Southern states.

Although Cruz supporters at last night's rally are resistant to the idea of a Trump nomination, many, like Bryan Ries, 34, said it was important to keep their faith intact no matter the outcome.

"I wouldn't say we're nervous about anything, because we trust that whoever our leader is, ultimately really it's all up to God," he said. "God and the American people."