Cruz-Kasich pact highlights the importance of Indiana

Donald Trump is calling it “pathetic,” “corrupt” and an “act of desperation”— but a state-by-state alliance between Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich aimed at denying the real estate mogul the Republican presidential nomination highlights the increasing importance of Indiana, a state that could be make-or-break for the #NeverTrump movement.

When Republican voters head to the polls Tuesday in five states — Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut and Rhode Island — Trump is expected to notch significant wins in each. So much so that the campaigns are already looking past Tuesday to May 3, when Indiana Republicans head to the polls in one of the last true battleground states.

Of the 15 states that remain on the GOP primary calendar, Indiana offers more delegates than any other except Pennsylvania and California. Thirty delegates will go to the candidate who wins the statewide vote, while the remaining 27 will be allotted to the winners of the state’s nine congressional districts.

In a campaign where every single delegate increasingly counts, a win in Indiana would make Trump’s quest to reach the magic number of 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the Republican nomination nearly unstoppable. But a Trump loss there would make it harder for him to sew up a first-ballot nomination. That’s why Kasich, in a deal announced late Sunday night, agreed to stop campaigning in the Hoosier State, hoping that a win there by Cruz would improve the chances of a contested nomination at the convention in Cleveland this July. In exchange, Cruz is standing down his operations in Oregon and New Mexico, where Kasich is believed stronger.

But it’s not clear this maneuver will work.

In theory, Cruz would have a good shot at winning Indiana, a heavily Republican state where social conservatives, led by Gov. Mike Pence, dominate the party’s voting electorate. But the few polls conducted in the state have found Trump narrowly leading Cruz ahead of next week’s primary. A CBS News/YouGov survey released last week found Trump leading Cruz by five points, 40 percent to 35 percent, a result that was within the poll’s six-point margin of error.

So Cruz has shifted his focus away from the five Northeastern states voting Tuesday to concentrate almost entirely on Indiana, where he has been campaigning since last Thursday. He’s expected to crisscross the state in coming days and is also making a big push to win Pence’s endorsement.

A former congressman, Pence has seen his approval rating plummet over the past year, in part because of his support of a controversial religious freedom bill that many viewed as discriminatory against gays and lesbians. But the governor still remains wildly popular among Republicans, especially social conservatives — the voters Cruz desperately needs to turn out for him next Tuesday.

But Trump isn’t ceding any ground in the state. Last week, in a rare move for a candidate known to brag about Republicans coming to him rather than the other way around, Trump kicked off his first visit to Indiana with a trip to the governor’s mansion, where he met with Pence and personally asked for his endorsement. The meeting was brokered by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former head of the Republican Governors Association who since dropping out of the race himself and endorsing Trump has been using his party connections to woo support for the GOP frontrunner.

Slideshow: Primary day in 5 Northeastern states >>>

Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: AP

At the same time, the Trump campaign has opened three offices around the state, where staff and volunteers have set up phone banks and are going door-to-door looking for votes. A flier handed out at a Trump rally in Indianapolis last Wednesday promised volunteers a free “Make America Great Again” hat for knocking on 50 doors or making 500 phone calls.

The inducement is apparently working. The following day, Trump’s campaign office in Carmel, just north of Indianapolis, was packed in the middle of the day — as volunteers clutching call sheets for prospective voters sat at tables and paced the sidewalk outside making phone calls to get out the vote for Trump.

While a campaign spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment about Trump’s organization in Indiana, including how many staff are on the payroll, the campaign’s efforts seem more active than in other early states, including Iowa, where Trump invested little money or effort in a ground operation.

On Monday, the Cruz campaign reportedly reserved nearly $1 million of television ad time in Indiana, as the Texas senator goes all in on a state that may be his last chance to stop Trump. And his campaign is hoping that with Kasich out the way, Cruz can top Trump in a head-to-head matchup. But it’s not likely to be that simple.

There’s no guarantee that Kasich’s supporters will automatically turn to Cruz. And although Kasich has said he’s not going to campaign in Indiana, he pointedly told reporters during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania on Wednesday that he’s not asking his supporters to vote for another candidate.

“I’ve never told them not to vote for me — they should vote for me,” the Ohio governor said, insisting the deal was more about “resources” and “not a big deal.”

Meanwhile, Trump, who has spent the past week trashing the nomination process as “corrupt” and “rigged,” added the Cruz-Kasich alliance to his list of evidence of how he alleges party insiders are trying to steal the nomination from him — more evidence, he claimed, of his own dominance.

“It shows that they are just getting killed,” Trump told supporters at a Rhode Island rally on Monday. “It shows how weak they are. It shows how pathetic they are.”