Republican front-runner Donald Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton sparred over the "woman card" and Sen. Bernie Sanders, after Trump won presidential primaries in five states and Clinton won four on April 26. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) 
 
 Voters in five states stretching from the mid-Atlantic to the Northeast went to the polls on Tuesday. At the presidential level, Donald Trump crushed his two remaining competitors, while Hillary Clinton took four of the five states in play, extending her delegate lead over Bernie Sanders. 
 
 I picked some winners and some losers from the night that was. They're below. 
 
 Winners 
 
 • Donald Trump: This was an an absolutely sweeping across-the-board victory for the real estate mogul. From a delegate perspective, this may wind up being Trump's single best night of the primary process. His massive wins in Connecticut and Maryland help him run up the delegate score. His big margin in Pennsylvania should be a persuasive argument for the 54 unbound delegates the state sends to the Republican National Convention. And what's clear is that Trump is getting stronger and stronger as the race moves to Indiana on May 3, a state that the anti-Trump forces now must win in order to blunt his momentum heading into the critical California primary on June 7. If Trump wins Indiana, the race will be all but over. 
 
 The simple fact is this: Trump just keeps winning and, increasingly, winning across all subgroups and demographics within the GOP. He still isn't a numeric lock to get to the 1,237 delegates he needs. But man oh man is he sitting pretty right now. 
 
 • Hillary Clinton: Five more states came off the table Tuesday night -- including big delegate prizes in Pennsylvania and Maryland -- and Clinton remains in a commanding delegate position over Sanders. Clinton and her team are reluctant to call the race over for fear of angering Sanders supporters. And the race will keep going all the way through California in early June. But, for all intents and purposes, this one is over. To quote MSNBC's Rachel Maddow: "She has effectively put this out of reach." 
 
 In her victory speech, Clinton praised Sanders and his supporters and savaged Republicans as deeply out of touch with the needs of middle class Americans. Expect more and more of that in the coming days as Clinton continues her primary pivot and begins to focus full time on Trump. 
 
 • Chris Van Hollen: All the Maryland congressman does is win tough Democratic primaries. He did it when he won his House seat in 2002 by defeating Mark Shriver, a member of the Kennedy clan, and he did it again on Tuesday when he beat back a challenge from fellow Rep. Donna Edwards. The race was deeply bifurcated along racial lines, but Van Hollen won the white vote more convincingly than Edwards won the black vote. Given Maryland's deeply Democratic nature, Van Hollen will roll in the fall general election and will likely never need to worry about reelection again. Look for him to quickly move up the ranks of Senate Democrats and eventually land in a leadership position; Van Hollen is a rare pol who understands not only politics and policy but also how those two are deeply intertwined. He's a rising star within the party. 
 
 • MSNBC cutaways to Bill Clinton during Hillary Clinton's speech: Whoever was producing that speech deserves a raise. During almost every Hillary Clinton applause line, the camera cut to the former president in the crowd. Bill looked somewhere between proud and bemused throughout. It was awesome political theater -- and the sort of stuff I absolutely love. 
 
 Losers 
 
 • Ted Cruz: I am somewhat baffled as to why the Texas senator continues to get something of a pass from the party (and the media) for finishing not second but third behind Trump and John Kasich in a bunch of these mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states. Remember that Cruz is now the de facto establishment candidate. And that Kasich has won a total of one state and has fewer delegates than Marco Rubio, who left the race in March. Soooo.... If I might quote that great philosopher Ric Flair: If you want to be the man, you have to beat the man. I'd even be open to modifying that Flair-ism to: If you want to be the man, you have to come in second to the man. 
 
 My point is that if Cruz is the only true viable alternative to Trump -- and he is -- then why the heck is he not only getting blown out by The Donald but losing to Kasich? Momentum matters to Cruz. And, as of Wednesday morning, Cruz will be at a dead stop. Look for him to pull out all the stops he has to get restarted. 
 
 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders held a campaign rally in Huntington, W.Va., following primary elections in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. (Reuters) 
 
 • Bernie Sanders: It's not a question of if Sanders loses now, it's a question of when he decides to leave the race -- and what he wants as a parting gift. Presumably that will be some major influence over the party platform at the convention (unlikely) and/or a prominent speaking role at that convention (likely). The thing to watch now is whether Sanders tempers his rhetoric against Clinton, a tacit acknowledgment that the math is close to conclusive, or whether he keeps going at her hammer and tongs. His most ardent supporters -- are there any other kind when it comes to Sanders? -- won't want him to pull any punches. How much does he listen to them? And how much should he? 
 
 • Mike Pence: The Indiana governor has avoided wading into the presidential race to date, and he signaled Tuesday night that he has no immediate plans to make an endorsement. The reason is simple: Politics -- both in the near term and long term for Pence. In the near term, Pence is up for a second term this fall and doesn't want to make any part of the GOP base in his state angry. In the long term, Pence would like to be a national candidate and, again, doesn't want to piss off the Trump wing of the party. But, the "stop Trump" forces are going to push Pence like crazy over the next 48 hours for him to get behind Cruz; "Governor Pence, It’s Time to Take a Stand" reads a National Review op-ed posted Tuesday night. There's more where that came from. 
 
 
 
 Mike Pence, sad. (AP Photo/AJ Mast) 
 
 • Jeff Merkley: The Oregon Democrat is the only senator not named Bernie Sanders who has endorsed the Vermont socialist's presidential campaign. That means that when cable TV is looking for a surrogate to represent Sanders, Merkley gets the call. That can be a good thing -- raising Merkley's profile! -- but on Tuesday night it was a very bad thing. Moments after the terrific Steve Kornacki had run through the virtual impossibility of Sanders catching Clinton in pledged delegates, the MSNBC election night hosts threw it to Merkley to defend his candidate. After acknowledging that the math was getting more and more difficult for Sanders, Merkley tried to pivot to note that the national race is tightening. Which, of course, doesn't matter at all in a state by state race for delegates. Oomph. 
 
 • Trump's sound guy: Look, I am no advance guy or audio expert, but I do know this: When the candidate gets to the microphone and tries to start talking, you should turn off the music. And that you need to make sure the microphones work when Trump takes questions from reporters. Which puts me two steps ahead of Trump's sound guy at Trump Tower on Tuesday night. ||||| Tuesday night went about as well as possible for Donald Trump. 
 
 Two weeks ago, after a rough stretch of states for Trump, we issued a series of delegate projections that included something called a “path-to-1,237�? projection, a set of targets that would allow Trump to clinch a delegate majority without having to rely on uncommitted delegates. With Trump’s terrific results in New York last week and even better ones in the five states that voted on Tuesday, Trump is running a little ahead of that path. 
 
 Based on provisional results, it looks as though Trump will sweep every pledged delegate in Maryland (as a result of winning every congressional district), Connecticut (as a result of winning every congressional district and getting more than 50 percent of the vote statewide), Pennsylvania (where statewide delegates are awarded winner-take-all) and Delaware (ditto), along with 11 of 19 delegates in Rhode Island (which is highly proportional). Combined with the New York results, that gives Trump 200 delegates since we issued the path-to-1,237 projections, five delegates ahead of his original targets. 
 
 STATE PATH-TO-1,237 PROJECTION ACTUAL TRUMP DELEGATES Wyoming 1 0 New York 91 90 Maryland 32 38 Connecticut 28 28 Pennsylvania 17 17 Delaware 16 16 Rhode Island 10 11 Total 195 200 Trump’s back on a potential path to victory Sources: The Green Papers, Elections.MARYLAND.GOV 
 
 None of this was assured, or necessarily all that likely, when we surveyed the race a few weeks ago. Trump was coming off one of his worst results of the campaign in the Wisconsin primary, along with a disastrous series of results in state and local Republican delegate-selection conventions (those will still hurt him if the Republican convention goes to multiple ballots). While the Northeast had long appeared to be a reasonably strong region for Trump, the polls two weeks ago suggested it was a tossup whether he’d get to 50 percent of the vote in Connecticut; instead he won it easily with 58 percent of the vote. It looked as though he’d probably lose a couple of congressional districts in the Washington suburbs in Maryland even if he won the state; instead, he swept all eight districts. 
 
 In other words, something changed for the better for Trump in the past couple of weeks. At the time we issued those delegate projections, Trump had yet to get 50 percent of the vote in any state and both his national polls and statewide results seemed stagnant. Now he’s gotten over 50 percent in six states in a row. Whereas Trump had once been a safe bet to underperform or, at best, match his polling averages, he’s now beaten them in the last six states. 
 
 Having moved to a demographically favorable bloc of states is part of the equation, but not all of it. Compare Trump’s excellent result in Maryland (55 percent of the statewide vote) to his mediocre one in demographically similar Virginia on Super Tuesday (35 percent). Pennsylvania, where Trump got 57 percent of the vote on Tuesday, isn’t all that different from Illinois, where he got 39 percent on March 15. (The Pennsylvania result is especially important given that Trump also got favorable-seeming results among the 54 officially uncommitted delegates elected in the state on Tuesday night, which will give him a cushion if he falls a bit short of 1,237 pledged delegates.) 
 
 The question is what’s changed for Trump, whether the change is permanent or temporary, and what implications it has for the next set of states to vote. More particularly: What it means for Indiana, which votes next week and awards its delegates winner-take-all (some statewide and some by congressional district), and which the path-to-1,237 projections had Trump winning. As much good work as Trump has done over the past two weeks, a loss in Indiana would mostly undo it. 
 
 One theory, which I proposed last weekend, is that Trump is benefiting from Republicans who buy his argument that the delegate system is “rigged�? against him — or if you prefer the milder version, that the candidate with the plurality of delegates and votes should become the nominee. It’s hard to prove definitively that this is what’s behind Trump’s gains, but there’s some good circumstantial evidence for it. Polls suggest that Republican voters mostly take Trump’s side on the question of the nominee’s legitimacy, and the timing of Trump’s gains in the polls lines up well with when he started pressing the argument. 
 
 My original idea was that this sentiment might be moving undecided voters toward Trump — Republicans who just wanted to get the race over with and who didn’t want to go through the ordeal of a contested convention. After seeing the exit polls on Tuesday, however, I’d propose a slightly different version. According to the exit polls, Trump did not perform especially well among late-deciding voters — no better than John Kasich did. But recent turnout has been low as compared with earlier states. Whereas 25.6 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a Republican ballot in Wisconsin, according to Michael McDonald’s estimates, an average of only 9.9 percent of eligible voters have in the six northeastern states to vote over the past eight days. 
 
 STATE TURNOUT AS SHARE OF VOTING-ELIGIBLE POPULATION New Hampshire 27.8% Wisconsin 25.6 Alabama 23.9 Ohio 22.3 Missouri 20.7 South Carolina 20.3 Idaho 19.7 Arkansas 19.2 Mississippi 19.1 Georgia 18.8 Michigan 17.8 Tennessee 17.6 Virginia 17.0 Oklahoma 16.5 Texas 16.4 Florida 16.3 North Carolina 15.8 Pennsylvania 15.8 Illinois 15.3 Massachusetts 12.8 Vermont 12.5 Arizona 11.4 Maryland 10.6 Delaware 10.0 Louisiana 8.9 Connecticut 8.7 Rhode Island 7.8 New York 6.4 GOP turnout has been low in recent primaries Turnout estimates for states with incomplete reporting are extrapolated based on results as of midnight on April 27. Sources: Electproject.org, New York Times 
 
 So it may not be that undecided voters are gravitating to Trump so much as anti-Trump Republicans are discouraged. Trump faces unusually high levels of intraparty opposition for a front-runner — or at least he had seemed to until the past two weeks. But Kasich and Ted Cruz are also deeply flawed, and somewhat factional, candidates. It’s asking a lot of voters to cast a tactical vote against Trump when that tactic requires (i) going to a contested convention in order to (ii) deny the candidate with the plurality of votes and delegates the nomination in order to (iii) give the nomination to a candidate they don’t particularly like anyway. The #NeverTrump voters might not be voting for Trump, but they might be staying at home. 
 
 I mostly buy this argument — I’m as optimistic about Trump’s chances as at any point in the election cycle. (Granted, that isn’t saying that much given that I spent much of last year being highly skeptical of Trump’s chances.) 
 
 But I still have a couple of points of caution. 
 
 One is that it isn’t uncommon for candidates to run up the score in primaries that appear to be noncompetitive. In fact, this happens all the time. Polls usually call the winners right in primaries, but they often lowball their margins of victory. It isn’t very motivating to turn out for a guy who’s going to lose a state by 30 percentage points, even if doing so might win him an extra delegate under some obscure provision of the delegate rules. In Indiana, a genuinely competitive, winner-take-all race where Cruz is (theoretically) the clear alternative to Trump, that won’t be such a problem. 
 
 The other caveat is that the Republican race has not only defied “momentum�? but often contradicted it. Whenever Trump seemed to be on a glide path to the nomination (such as after Super Tuesday or March 15), he’s had a setback. When he’s seemed to be vulnerable (such as after losing Iowa or Wisconsin), he’s rebounded. 
 
 This maybe — or probably — is just our reading too much into noisy data. But it’s possible there’s some sort of thermostatic effect at work. When Trump seems to be on the verge of becoming the presumptive nominee, there’s more focus on his awful general election numbers; meanwhile, the media’s incentives for covering him change, with the possibility of Trump imploding at a contested convention becoming a more attractive story than the man-bites-dog narrative of Trump winning the nomination in the first place. When Trump seems to be in trouble, conversely, Republicans are forced to contemplate the problems of a contested convention and the inadequacies of Cruz and Kasich, and the media becomes more eager to tell a Trump comeback or pivot story. 
 
 Indiana is important not only because of its delegates, but also because it will give us an indication as to whether the apparent change in Republican attitudes is temporary or permanent. If Trump wins Indiana despite its middling-to-fair (from his standpoint) demographics, he won’t quite be the presumptive nominee because he’ll still need to follow through with a decent performance in California. But he’ll at least be in the liminal zone that Hillary Clinton spent a lot of time in, with the race not quite wrapped up mathematically but close enough that something (a gaffe, a scandal) would have to intervene to deny him the nomination. Incidentally, Trump’s potential support from the uncommitted delegates in Pennsylvania will give him more margin of error in that situation. 
 
 Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast. 
 
 If Trump loses Indiana, however, that will suggest the race is still fairly volatile week-to-week, that he’s very likely to lose states such as Nebraska that vote later in May, and that the geographic and demographic divergences in the GOP haven’t reversed themselves so much as they’ve become more exaggerated. It will improve the morale of anti-Trump voters and change the tone of press coverage. And mathematically, it will make it hard (although not quite impossible) for Trump to win 1,237 delegates outright; he’d be back to fighting tooth-and-nail for every uncommitted delegate. 
 
 I don’t know what’s going to happen in Indiana. But Trump’s strong results over the past two weeks have changed the Hoosier State from potentially being “must-win�? for Trump to probably being “must-win�? for his opponents. ||||| Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE President Bill Clinton, during a campaign stop in Indianapolis, briefly talks about the Carrier job situation to lead into Hillary Clinton's views on business wealth sharing. Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar 
 
 Clockwise from top left: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz. (Photo: AP photos) 
 
 Indiana is now the center of the political universe. 
 
 For the next week, the state's May 3 primary stands alone on the calendar, making it a magnet for presidential candidates. 
 
 But the importance of Indiana's nominating contest goes well beyond its place on the schedule. It has emerged as a must-win state for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and Republicans trying to block front-runner Donald Trump from locking up the nomination. And it is one of Democrat Bernie Sanders' dwindling opportunities to stand in the way of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's march toward the nomination. 
 
 Trump and Clinton enter Indiana with strong momentum and are increasingly prepping for a potential fall campaign against each other after building on their sizable delegate leads in Tuesday night's primaries. Trump scored widely anticipated wins Tuesday in five Northeastern states: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island. On the Democratic side, Clinton won four of those states, while Sanders picked up Rhode Island. 
 
 Even before those primaries ended, Indiana was bombarded with candidate visits and presidential campaign commercials. Cruz has been barnstorming the state for a full week. Trump is scheduled to hold a second rally Wednesday at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Clinton toured factories in Northern Indiana on Tuesday. And Sanders has rallies planned Wednesday at Purdue and Indiana universities. 
 
 Hoosier voters aren't accustomed to so much attention. Usually, the nominees are already determined by the time the contest comes here. 
 
 "Indiana has transitioned from a state that doesn’t matter to a state that will matter more than any other in determining the winner of the Republican contest between now and June 7," said David Wasserman, an election analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in Washington, D.C. "Five states voted Tuesday, but there’s five times as much drama in Indiana." 
 
 If you need evidence, just switch on the television. Candidates and outside groups have already blasted Indiana with more than $5.5 million in television ads, according to SMG Delta/NBC News. That's more than in Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware and Rhode Island combined. 
 
 The activity reflects the wide-open nature of Indiana's contest. The state represents a return to the industrial Midwest, where results in other states have been mixed for Trump and Clinton. Indiana also has a large number of evangelical Christians, a group that has helped propel Cruz to victory in some states. Public polling here — which has been scant — shows Cruz within striking distance of Trump and Clinton and Sanders in a dead heat. 
 
 The stakes are especially high on the Republican side, where 57 delegates are up for grabs. Those delegates could play a key role in determining whether Trump, the billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star, can reach the required 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination and avoid a contested Republican National Contention in Cleveland this summer. 
 
 "The national attention has been heating up and it will become white hot by the time we get to May 3," said John Hammond, Indiana's Republican National Committeeman. "We are at the pivot point of American politics. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and it appears and the campaigns have put all their chips on the line in Indiana." 
 
 At a campaign rally at Hoosier Gym in Knightstown — where the movie "Hoosiers" was filmed — Cruz said Trump's success in Tuesday's primaries underscored the importance of Indiana in the battle for the GOP nomination. 
 
 "Donald Trump is likely to win some states, and the media is going to have heart palpitations this evening," Cruz said to about a thousand supporters. "Tonight, this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain. Tonight, this campaign moves to Indiana." 
 
 Indiana will serve as a testing ground for an unusual noncompete agreement that Cruz struck with the trailing candidate on the Republican side, Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Kasich agreed not to campaign in Indiana, while Cruz said he will avoid campaigning in Oregon and New Mexico. The two men are hoping the arrangement will consolidate the anti-Trump vote. 
 
 Trump has blasted the arrangement, calling it desperate. He is due back at the State Fairgrounds on Wednesday, where he is expected to appear with IU basketball coaching legend Bobby Knight. He will also tape a town hall with Fox News' "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" at Hilbert Circle Theatre on Monument Circle. 
 
 Haley Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman, said both Trump and Cruz have much at stake in Indiana. 
 
 "If Trump loses, it could shift the momentum," he said. "If Trump wins, then he makes a case that he could win all over the country, even in a two-man race, and that would be very beneficial to him as he prepares for the West Coast primaries. So both sides have a lot to gain." 
 
 The Democratic primary is somewhat less consequential. Most analysts see a clear path for Clinton, who toured two manufacturing facilities in Northern Indiana on Tuesday, while her husband, former President Bill Clinton, campaigned in Indianapolis. 
 
 But Sanders, the self-described Democratic socialist, has shown remarkable resilience, especially with younger voters. He should see them Wednesday during his visits to West Lafayette and Bloomington. 
 
 The last time Indiana came close to mattering so much was during the Republican presidential contest 40 years ago, when Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford battled all the way to the 1976 convention. 
 
 Frank Donatelli, a Republican campaign consultant, was an organizer with Reagan's campaign in Indiana. 
 
 "I didn’t think in the era of the mass primary, with conventions pre-arranged, that we would be looking at something like this again," he said. "(Indiana) is one of two remaining sates where all three candidates feel like they have a chance to do well, if not win." 
 
 The result is a political atmosphere traditionally associated with the early primary and caucus states. 
 
 " Now," he said, "you know what Iowa and New Hampshire are like." 
 
 The Associated Press contributed to this story. Call IndyStar reporter Tony Cook at (317) 444-6081. Follow him on Twitter: @indystartony. Call IndyStar reporter Chelsea Schneider at (317) 444-6077. Follow her on Twitter: @IndyStarChelsea. Call IndyStar reporter Brian Eason at (317) 444-6129. Follow him on Twitter: @brianeason. 
 
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– Despite what Donald Trump says, the GOP race isn't over, but his foes are running out of time. After Trump's five big wins on Tuesday night, all eyes—except possibly those of John Kasich—are on Indiana, which votes next Tuesday. With 54 delegates at stake, awarded on a winner-take-all basis statewide and by congressional district, experts predict that a Trump victory in the state will all but seal the nomination for him. A roundup of coverage: Ted Cruz can be expected to "pull out all the stops" over the next week in a bid to regain momentum, writes Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post. He notes that Cruz, bafflingly, is getting "something of a pass from the party" for finishing third behind Kasich in many races, including four out of Tuesday's five primaries. Cruz came in second place in Pennsylvania. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver notes that "something has changed for the better" for Trump in the last few weeks, putting him ahead of the necessary targets on the road to 1,237 delegates. Indiana has gone from a must-win for Trump to a must-win for his opponents, Silver writes—but a Trump loss will mean he is "back to fighting tooth-and-nail for every uncommitted delegate" in a volatile race. Indiana hasn't mattered this much to the GOP race in 40 years, and voters are receiving a lot more attention than they're used to, reports the Indianapolis Star. "Five states voted Tuesday, but there's five times as much drama in Indiana," Cook Political Report analyst David Wasserman says. Counting Indiana, Trump is now two states from the nomination, according to the New York Times, which looks at the delegate math—and at why it will be tough for Cruz and Kasich to coordinate anti-Trump efforts in California. Politico looks at what it calls a "parallel universe where Cruz is beating Trump"—the search for loyal delegates for the second round of a contested convention.