LA PORTE, Ind. — Back in the part of the country where he last lost to Ted Cruz, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is confidently pushing for a win Tuesday in Indiana he argues ought to knock the Texas senator out of the race.

Buoyed by a sweep of last week’s primary elections along the East Coast, the billionaire businessman appears to have learned a few lessons from his defeat last month to the Texas senator in nearby Wisconsin.

There have been no slip-ups on talk radio in recent days, nor stumbles over issues that matter deeply to Republican voters. Trump arrived in Indianapolis to start campaigning the day after winning his home-state New York primary weeks ago and began spending money on television advertising far sooner than he did in Wisconsin.

Addressing a cheering crowd at a Sunday rally in Terre Haute, the first of four events in Indiana over the final two days before Tuesday’s election, Trump bragged: “If we win here, it’s over, OK?”

Not quite, as the New York real estate mogul can’t win enough delegates to clinch the Republican nomination. But after his wins in five states last week, Trump no longer needs to win a majority of the remaining delegates at stake in the remaining primaries to lock up the GOP nomination.

Cruz has no cushion. Already eliminated from reaching 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination, he desperately needs a victory in Indiana to keep Trump from that number and press ahead with his strategy of claiming the nomination at a contested convention this summer.

“This whole long, wild ride of an election has all culminated with the entire country with its eyes fixed on the state of Indiana,” Cruz said Sunday. “The people of this great state, I believe the country is depending on you to pull us back from the brink.”

The importance of Indiana for Cruz became evident even before he and fellow underdog John Kasich formed an alliance of sorts, with the Ohio governor agreeing to pull his advertising money from Indiana in exchange for Cruz doing the same in Oregon and New Mexico.

But that strategy, which appeared to unravel even as it was announced, can’t help either man with the tens of thousands of Indiana voters who had already cast ballots: early voting began in Indiana three weeks before they hatched their plan.

It also risks alienating those who have yet to vote, said veteran Indiana Republican pollster Christine Matthews. She said she believes many have continued to vote for Kasich in Indianapolis and in the wealthy suburbs north of the city.

“Indiana voters don’t like the idea of a political pact, or being told how to vote,” Matthews said. “They don’t want to be part of that kind of a strategy.”

It’s those voters Cruz needs, argued Pete Seat, a Republican strategist in Indiana whose firm was advising Kasich. He questioned why Cruz was focusing so much effort in blue-collar northern Indiana, where Trump is popular, instead of the voter-rich suburban counties that ring the state capital.

“If I were advising him, I’d tell him you need to be in these doughnut counties,” Seat said. “He needs to be more concerned about them, and he’s ignoring them.”