Become part of the movement for unbiased, accessible election information. Donate today.
Indiana decisive: Cruz loses GOP primary and drops out
Ballotpedia's scope changes periodically, and this article type is no longer actively created or maintained. If you would like to help our coverage grow, consider donating to Ballotpedia.
Presidential election in Indiana, 2016
This article covering the 2016 presidential election was written outside the scope of Ballotpedia's encyclopedic coverage and does not fall under our neutrality policy or style guidelines. It is preserved as it was originally written. For our encyclopedic coverage of the 2016 election, click here.
 Date: November 8, 2016 |
Winner: Donald Trump (R) Hillary Clinton (D) • Jill Stein (G) • Gary Johnson (L) • Vice presidential candidates |
Important dates • Nominating process • Ballotpedia's 2016 Battleground Poll • Polls • Debates • Presidential election by state • Ratings and scorecards |
2028 • 2024 • 2020 • 2016 Have you subscribed yet?
Join the hundreds of thousands of readers trusting Ballotpedia to keep them up to date with the latest political news. Sign up for the Daily Brew.
|
May 4, 2016
Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz both said that the results of the Indiana primary would be decisive in their battle for the Republican presidential nomination and they were right: Trump swamped Cruz in the primary and the Texan suspended his campaign.
With 95 percent of the precincts reporting, Trump defeated Cruz 53-to-37 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich finished a distant third with less than eight percent of the vote. In the largely one-on-one showdown between Trump and Cruz, the billionaire developer won or was leading in 87 of the state’s 92 counties. Cruz carried Allen County (Fort Wayne), the second largest vote producer in the primary by less than 500 votes. The only other manufacturing county he carried was Elkhart. He won Adams, Wells and Whitley Counties, all adjacent to Allen County, that includes exurbs of Fort Wayne.
But Trump won everywhere else, from the old steel center of Lake County (Gary) to other manufacturing counties like Delaware (Muncie) Howard (Kokomo), Grant (Marion). Trump won the state’s largest county Marion County (Indianapolis) and more importantly, the suburban and exurban counties that encircle it, traditionally the Republican Party’s strongest region in the state. And he swept the rural and agricultural counties.
According to the television networks’ exit poll, a representative sampling of Indiana primary voters as they left their precinct polling stations, Trump won both men and women who voted in the GOP primary, all age and income groups, evangelical and non-evangelical voters, as well as voters who described themselves as moderates and “somewhat conservative.” Cruz won Republicans who called themselves “very conservative” and those with post-graduate degrees.
The television networks declared Trump the winner as soon as all the polls had closed in the state. Not long after that, Cruz addressed a rally of his supporters and announced his intention to suspend his campaign. In his remarks at a victory rally in the Trump Tower in Manhattan, Trump saluted Cruz as a tough and worthy competitor in the race for the Republican nomination—a far cry from “Lyin’ Ted,” his favorite nickname for the Texan during the primaries.
The run of Republican primary victories by Trump, a first-time political candidate, has been a remarkable rebuke to the GOP establishment, which abhorred his candidacy. But the presumptive nominee still has work to do to unify his party. The exit poll found that almost half of the Indiana Republican primary voters who cast ballots for Cruz, and more than two-thirds who voted for Kasich, said they would not vote for Trump in the general election. Supporters of rival candidates often feel a bit raw by the end of a hard-fought primary contest, but Trump has his work cut out for him.
Some good news for Trump and his party: their primary’s turnout was roughly 1,110,000, a half-a-million more votes than the previous Indiana GOP presidential primary record of 635,000 in 2012 and almost triple the turnout from 2008.
| Indiana Republican Primary, 2016 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Vote % | Votes | Delegates | |
| Jeb Bush | 0.6% | 6,508 | 0 | |
| Ben Carson | 0.8% | 8,914 | 0 | |
| Chris Christie | 0.2% | 1,738 | 0 | |
| Ted Cruz | 36.6% | 406,783 | 0 | |
| Carly Fiorina | 0.1% | 1,494 | 0 | |
| John Kasich | 7.6% | 84,111 | 0 | |
| Rand Paul | 0.4% | 4,306 | 0 | |
| Marco Rubio | 0.5% | 5,175 | 0 | |
 Donald Trump |
53.3% | 591,514 | 57 | |
| Totals | 1,110,543 | 57 | ||
| Source: Indiana Secretary of State and The New York Times | ||||
99 percent of precincts reporting.
James A. Barnes is a senior writer for Ballotpedia and co-author of the 2016 edition of the Almanac of American Politics. He is a member of the CNN Decision Desk and will help to project the Democratic and Republican winners throughout the election cycle.
See also
- Presidential candidates, 2016
- Presidential debates (2015-2016)
- Presidential election, 2016/Polls
- 2016 presidential candidate ratings and scorecards
- Presidential election, 2016/Straw polls
