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In a special politics chat, we unpack the news that Ted Cruz has decided to name a vice presidential pick. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

Ted Cruz talks a lot about conservative leadership but there was nothing conservative about his desperate gambit naming Carly Fiorina as his running mate less than 24 hours after he was mathematically eliminated from winning enough delegates for the Republican nomination.

Trailing Donald Trump by more than 400 delegates after suffering a string of defeats in the Northeast in which he failed to crack 25 percent anywhere, Cruz reached for the biggest tool available to a flagging presidential candidate: naming a vice president.

Much has been made of late over the battle for delegates being waged between businessman Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Politico updates the story and suggests that even as Cruz has been winning the behind-the-scenes contest for delegates, he is likely to do even better in future weeks:

The parallel universe where Cruz is beating Trump

Donald Trump has earned more than 9 million votes in the Republican primary and amassed a lead that puts him on the brink of ... Read More >>

Donald Trump has earned more than 9 million votes in the Republican primary and amassed a lead that puts him on the brink of clinching the GOP nomination. But in the shadow contest for the delegates to a contested national convention, he’s getting obliterated by Ted Cruz.

It’s halftime in the hustle for loyal convention delegates. By the weekend, more than 1,300 will have been elected in county, state or congressional district elections or selected by local Republican leaders.

The tra­ject­ory of the GOP nom­in­a­tion fight has gone something like this: Don­ald Trump dom­in­ates a round of primar­ies and ap­pears close to clinch­ing the nom­in­a­tion, only to suf­fer an em­bar­rass­ing set­back days later. His ad­visers plan to un­veil a more-pres­id­en­tial Don­ald Trump even as the can­did­ate is ramp­ing up his trade­mark in­sults. Just as the es­tab­lish­ment starts com­ing to grips with Trump, he gives them yet an­oth­er reas­on to pan­ic.

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.

Call it what you want — the Acela primaries, the Atlantic primaries or one more Super Tuesday — but it was another big night on the electoral calendar as voters in five states went to the polls.

This time, the action wasn’t all on the presidential level. There were a number of closely watched down-ballot races as well.