Why Cruz, and the G.O.P., Lost to Trump

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The electoral map looks very good for the Democrats now, but complacency would be a mistake. Clinton lost Indiana to Bernie Sanders. Thanks to superdelegates, she still has a strong hold on her Party's nomination, but that doesn't remove the question of whether Sanders's endurance in the race points to unaddressed weaknesses in her candidacy, such as the way she talks about money. On Tuesday night, Sanders said that he would take the fight to the Convention, and also said that he wanted superdelegates to think hard about who would do better against Trump. They undoubtedly are, though it may lead not to support for Sanders but to more calls for him to get out of the race. The general election is going to be ugly, not easy, no matter how wide the final margin is. Those who wrote off Trump as a joke have, since the beginning, willfully ignored two factors that are, in retrospect, pretty obvious. First, Trump wants to be President. He has, in his way, imagined himself as a creature of politics for decades. Second, in order for him to lose, someone else had to beat him--and the Republican Party has failed to produce that person. If Jeb Bush doesn't become a byword for the collective delusions of a political class, then the lessons of this election won't have been learned.