Senator Ted Cruz looked out on the hardwood, on the precipice of defeat, claiming the mantle of an underdog squad from the fictional Indiana town of Hickory.
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| © Darron Cummings/Associated Press Senator Ted Cruz of Texas during a campaign stop at the restaurant Sisters’ Place in Indianapolis on Wednesday. |
“There is nothing that Hoosiers cannot do,” he told a crowd on Tuesday, packed into the faux high school gym where the movie “Hoosiers” was filmed. There was still time, he suggested, for a cinematic comeback.
One night later, Donald J. Trump offered his rebuttal in the state where basketball is king: an endorsement from Bobby Knight, the former Indiana University coach whose brash persona is matched only by his reputation as a consummate winner.
Mr. Trump, who is loath to accept second billing at his own rallies, made an exception to introduce Mr. Knight. Then he offered a prediction. “If we win Indiana,” Mr. Trump told the thousands gathered at an arena on the state fairgrounds here, “it’s over. It’s over.”
After a monthslong reckoning with Mr. Trump’s possible nomination, most of the Republican Party seems to agree. There is time left on the clock in the primary season, but not much. The margin is not entirely prohibitive, but close to it.
And in a fevered scramble to deny Mr. Trump a majority of delegates before the Republican convention in July, Mr. Cruz has let no page of the campaign playbook go to waste.
He has tried teamwork, setting off on a fragile alliance with Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, who agreed not to contest Indiana if Mr. Cruz steered clear of Oregon and New Mexico.
He has recycled successful strategies from contests past, deploying his father, Rafael Cruz, a pastor, across the state as an envoy to religious conservatives and housing out-of-state volunteers at a “Camp Cruz,” as the campaign did before victories in Iowa and Wisconsin.
Most audaciously, the Texas senator has elevated Carly Fiorina as his would-be running mate, a desperate heave intended to energize supporters and impress the undecided at a time when he continues to trail Mr. Trump in the polls here.
If Mr. Cruz is acting as though Indiana may represent his last chance, many here believe it is.
“If he loses the primary here after that deal he cut with Kasich, it doesn’t bode well,” said Randy Head, a Republican state senator running for attorney general. “It may be too late to recover.”
That Indiana Republicans are even playing host to such a consequential race is novel. They have not enjoyed a crucial role, or really any role, in a presidential nominating contest in decades. Their late primary has made them an afterthought in recent Republican races.
“Indiana is a critical state for the first time in my lifetime,” Mr. Head said.
But for all the attention — Mr. Cruz naming his choice for running mate on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trump bringing out Mr. Knight in the evening — there is widespread uncertainty about how the race will transpire.
Mr. Trump is also making an aggressive push to win the state. He planned to appear at least one more time with Mr. Knight, this time in Evansville, the largest city in southern Indiana. And he is deploying additional staff members here: His top aides told a small group of Indiana Republicans at the Republican National Committee meeting last week that Mr. Trump already had 20 campaign workers on the ground in the state and planned to bring in 20 more.
“I am here for three days, then coming back for three more,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday evening, before staying overnight at a Holiday Inn Express, according to a message posted hours later on Twitter. “I’m not playing games with Indiana.”
Unlike in Wisconsin, the last state where he and Mr. Cruz made such an aggressive push, Republican leaders here have yet to rally around one of the candidates. Gov. Mike Pence; his predecessor, Mitch Daniels; and Senator Dan Coats have all stayed out of the race. Some of Indiana’s establishment-aligned Republicans drifted to Mr. Kasich, but his semi-withdrawal from the state has even further complicated the situation for mainstream conservatives.
“I have no idea if I’ll vote for a presidential candidate now,” said Jim Merritt, a state senator from the Indianapolis area who had been inclined to back the Ohio governor. “I am very disappointed.”
Perhaps the most consequential question looming over the race now that Mr. Kasich has pulled back is whether his voters will support Mr. Cruz to stop Mr. Trump. It is especially pivotal in the Indianapolis area, the most voter-rich and affluent part of the state. If Mr. Cruz can make a strong showing here, it could offset Mr. Trump’s expected strength in the industrial areas of northern Indiana and the more working-class precincts of the state’s south.
“Now the question is: Is it a 3 percent movement or an 8 percent movement?” Curt Smith, an Indiana social conservative leader and political veteran, said of the possible shift in support from Mr. Kasich to Mr. Cruz.
If the energy and size of Mr. Cruz’s crowds have not quite measured up to those in some earlier states, there have been encouraging signs nonetheless.
Mr. Cruz, recognizing what is on the line, has taken to barnstorming the state Iowa-style, stopping in both cities and smaller towns. “He is crisscrossing the state in a way I’ve rarely seen at any level,” said Brandt Hershman, an Indiana state senator and former congressional aide. “There are enough voters out there for Cruz to win, but time is short.”
Hundreds filled a pavilion at the fairgrounds in Franklin, Ind., on Monday night, where two decades of grand champion steers and supreme champion heifers are honored with a tally on the wall.
“Donald is very fond of telling us how big and tough and strong he is,” Mr. Cruz told voters during a particularly spirited appearance, at times shouting his stump speech. “Come to Indiana. Let’s have a debate in Indiana.”
Mr. Cruz has spoken of Carrier, the air-conditioning behemoth, which announced plans this year to move its manufacturing operation from Indianapolis to Mexico, and he has taken pains to tie Mr. Trump’s policy prescriptions to those of Hillary Clinton.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Cruz strolled through a diner here, taking a seat at patrons’ tables, filming a congratulatory video for the graduating seniors of Ball State University in Muncie, and grilling the residents on their breakfasts of choice.
“Do you like coffee?” he asked 4-year-old Genevieve Hess, smiling beside her father. “No. That’s silly. Four-year-olds don’t like coffee.”
At a campaign office here, dozens of volunteers worked the phones around 3 p.m. on Tuesday, straining to reach a daily goal of 20,000 calls — posted on the wall a short distance from at least four “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.
“It’s been 46 days,” one volunteer said insistently, asking a voter if she wanted to see another debate between the candidates.
“Trump’s not going to have a majority,” another worker said hopefully. “This will go to a contested convention.”
Matthew Cronin, a volunteer from Durham, N.C., invoked a Latin saying from the Roman Republic — “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”) — to explain his motivations.
“Why am I here?” he asked. “Trumpo delenda est.”
Megan Kerr, a 17-year-old volunteer from Fishers, Ind., said that Mr. Trump’s nickname for Mr. Cruz, “Lyin’ Ted,” seemed to be sticking with some voters she called.
More recently, though, Mr. Trump has added a taunt more narrowly tailored to his latest audience.
During Mr. Cruz’s event in the “Hoosiers” gym on Tuesday, he referred to the rim as a “basketball ring,” earning a measure of local ridicule. On Wednesday night, Mr. Trump did not let him — or Indiana’s hoops-obsessed voters — forget it.
“Last night he called the rim a ‘ring,’ ” Mr. Trump said, after Mr. Knight took the stage in his signature Hoosier-red sweater. “So he doesn’t know too much about basketball.”