Tuesday night was an opportunity for Donald Trump to make up ground he needed to win the Republican nomination and, for once, he made the most of it. He even beat the polling projections for a change. His blowout in New York doesn't quite put him back on track to reach 1,237 delegates and the nomination, but it appears he did what he needed to do: win almost all of the 95 delegates up for grabs.
Trump accomplished this despite having jumped out of the Red Queen Race he has been in ever since he declared his candidacy last summer. All along, he had managed to grab and maintain an unprecedented share of media attention by making more and more outrageous comments, attacks on the press, anti-democratic boasts and personal smears against his Republican rivals. The formula seemed clear, and Republican voters, who barely knew anything about the other candidates in that information environment, have supported him.
Suddenly, after the Wisconsin primary and his loss to Ted Cruz, that changed. He is still complaining about the "rigged" nomination process, but for the last two weeks he has been acting more or less like a normal candidate. His victory speech on Tuesday night — in which he repeatedly referred to "Senator Cruz" rather than "Lyin' Ted" — was positively boring.