By the way, very good article. He’s done a great job of counting the numbers, but of course when you guess outcomes in 20 states you are going to be wrong about a lot of them.
Thanks for the reasonable debate and comments. So hard to come by lately on FR.
This is an even bigger pill to ask Trump supporters to swallow than the usual pill that conservatives are asked to swallow in supporting someone like Mitt or McCain - who did at least win the conventions outright.
I don't believe that many Trump supporters would move to Cruz, as evidenced by the comments around here.
And, of course, Cruz also has little appeal outside GOP circles, and so seems unwilling to do any better than Romney or McCain in the general election.
If Cruz had won conventionally he would have made an excellent test-case for one of the claims made here on Free Republic all the time: that a "true blue" conservative can win where a moderate can't. "If we nominate another Reagan, we can win ..." goes the Mantra.
Sadly it's going to be an impure test of that. Cruz may well win the nomination on a later ballot and lose the general by a very wide margin. It's likely though that the Cruz camp will attribute that to Trump, not to Cruz, and (sadly) the damaged GOP will be likely to go through all this again in 2020.