The longer Trump gets to face a divided field, the longer Cruz has to wait to consolidate the non-Trump vote. And the more victories and delegates Trump will pile up.

And there’s a very big pile ahead.

Trump already has at least 621 pledged delegates, and will rack up more as Tuesday’s votes are finalized. He already has more than half of what he needs to clinch the nomination. Between now and the last primaries on June 7, there will be eight (state- or district-level) winner-take-all contests — in Arizona, Wisconsin, Delaware, Maryland, Indiana, California, New Jersey, and South Dakota. That’s another 439 delegates. If Trump won all of them, he’d have 1,060 — just 177 delegates short of what he needs.

Now Trump probably won’t win all of those states — and he probably won’t win all of the delegates in all of the states he does win, because of the quirks of district-level delegate allocation. But that leaves a long list of proportional states where Trump will surely win significant numbers of additional delegates. Cruz may win big in Utah, New Mexico, and few other places. (Mitt Romney’s attack on Trump will carry a lot of weight among the many Mormons in the former, while the latter borders Cruz’s home state of Texas.) But what about Trump’s home state of New York (with 95 delegates), and Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and Oregon, and Nebraska, and Washington, and Connecticut, and Rhode Island? Maybe Cruz will carry Nebraska and another state or two. But will Trump really lose enough states to fail to earn the delegates he’ll need?