Indiana primary 2016: election results and updates

“Donald Trump is now the leader of the Republican Party. It’s real.”

It’s a sentiment that many Americans are feeling today, but it also came from a brutal Facebook post by Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday following Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary and Ted Cruz’s decision to drop out.

Hillary Clinton seems to have regained her dominance over Bernie Sanders after a long and contentious primary battle. And she has the polls to show it.

Back in mid-April, something big appeared to be happening in the Democratic race: Even as Clinton was amassing an insurmountable delegate lead in the state contests, Sanders was pulling neck and neck with her in head-to-head polling among Democratic voters.

1) On Tuesday night, the Republican Party confirmed the worst suspicions liberals had of it. Five years ago, it would have sounded like a partisan slur to say the GOP harbored enough racial resentment, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism, and latent authoritarianism to nominate someone like Donald Trump. But it was true.

2) Credit where it’s due. The Republican Party is what congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said it is: “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” In case you are skeptical of that final charge, recall that Trump began his rise in the Republican Party as a champion of the birther movement.

Ted Cruz dropped out of the presidential race. After a year of denial, the race looks all but over — and Donald Trump will almost certainly be the Republican nominee.

For Twitter, these types of situations are a time for jokes. On Tuesday night, pundits and political watchers around the country lived up to the calling.

Bernie Sanders won the Indiana Democratic primary on Tuesday night, giving his campaign a moral boost if not an actual path to the Democratic nomination.

The state was called at around 9:15 pm Eastern for Sanders by CNN and NBC News.

The Republican race is now down to Donald Trump and John Kasich — but as far as the Republican National Committee is concerned, Trump has already won. Here’s what RNC chair Reince Priebus had to say after Ted Cruz dropped out of the race Tuesday night:

Despite the misspelling of “presumptive” (since deleted and tweeted again by Priebus with the correct spelling), this is a deeply significant moment. The Republican Party is not resisting Trump. They are not holding out hope that Kasich could somehow deprive Trump of a delegate majority in the remaining five weeks of voting.

After Ted Cruz lost the Indiana primary Tuesday night, he announced that he would suspend his presidential campaign, rather than fight it out with Donald Trump for another month in hopes of denying him a delegate majority.

To understand why, just take a look at this chart from Gallup, which shows Cruz’s reputation among Republican voters absolutely nosediving in the past few weeks:

Ted Cruz ran for the Republican presidential nomination by promising the most pure form of ideological conservatism and by attacking the power brokers in his own party’s establishment. It didn’t get him far enough.

Cruz dropped out of the race on Tuesday night after losing in Indiana, a state on which he’d pinned much of his campaign’s hopes, his campaign manager has told multiple news outlets.

Donald Trump will almost certainly be the Republican nominee after he defeated Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary on Tuesday night.

The news, a crippling blow to the #NeverTrump campaign, has sent many conservatives into a panic. On social media, several of them conceded the election to Hillary Clinton. One even declared that he’s with Clinton, and another said America is dead.