If you look at the numbers, it was a bad weekend for Donald Trump. Ted Cruz beat him badly in delegate selection conventions around the country. The Texas senator swept the 14 delegates up for grabs in Wyoming and scored victories in South Carolina and Kansas. In Florida, where delegates are obligated to vote for Trump who won the winner-take-all primary in March on the first three ballots of the GOP convention, Cruz’s impressive ground game enabled him to snag the majority of the slots ensuring that, should the contest go to a fourth ballot, those votes would go to him rather than the frontrunner. Yet there is more here in this struggle than meets the eye. These triumphs for Cruz show us three things.

One is that, if Trump fails to get the 1,237 delegates he needs to wrap up the nomination on the first ballot, he’s in big trouble. If the contest does go more than one ballot, Trump’s numbers will start to evaporate as more delegates are allowed to vote as they like.

That leads to the second conclusion, which is that Trump’s effort lacks a national cadre of GOP activists that is a must for an effective delegate operation, as well as the sophistication and the sheer political know-how to operate the complicated machinery of a presidential campaign. As I’ve noted before, that not only undermines Trump’s chances of winning the nomination if he initially falls short of a majority but also demonstrates that being an outsider who doesn’t know how the machinery of government operates is not a plus. If he can’t manage the not-all-that-terribly-complicated intricacies of how Republicans select convention delegates in Colorado and Wyoming, why are we supposed to think he can deal effectively with Congress or manage a difficult to tame federal bureaucracy?

Yet there is a third conclusion to be drawn from these events that may outweigh the other two in the minds of many Republican primary voters. And that is the one about his losses in the delegate fight being proof that the system is rigged against him. Rather than seeing his defeats in these contests as a sign of weakness, Trump supporters and perhaps many other Republican voters seem to think of it as an indication of virtue that validates his pose as an outsider seeking to clean up the mess in Washington the politicians made.

This is the message that Trump spent the weekend working hard to convey to voters in New York and the other Northeastern states that will vote in the next eight days, where 196 delegates (not counting the 54 unbound delegates in Pennsylvania that might or might not vote with the winner of their congressional district or the state) are at stake. And, judging by the polls, voters are buying it. As the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll indicates, GOP voters think the candidate with the most votes in the primaries and the caucuses ought to be the nominee. They also think that the person nominated by the Republicans ought to be someone that actually ran for the presidency rather than a white knight that parachutes in at the Cleveland convention.

Such beliefs undermine the notion that Cruz has been building momentum with his brilliant delegate operation. To the contrary, the very fact that Cruz’s operation has worked the system with good planning, organization, and persistence — as well as by relying on the loyalty of a vast army of dedicated grassroots activists — seems to impress many GOP voters less than Trump’s whining about a rigged system.

That Trump’s claims are bunk can’t be emphasized too much. Far from hurting him or the result of a conspiracy authored by the Republican National Committee intended to deny him the fruits of his victories, Trump is the beneficiary of a system that was designed to give a frontrunner who wins pluralities a huge advantage. He has gotten only 37 percent of the votes yet has received up to 45 percent of the delegates won so far. Some Trump supporters have been huffing and puffing about the need for a more democratic system that would treat the voters’ decisions with greater respect. But if such a scheme were to be implemented among Republicans this year, it would mean that Trump’s pluralities would not be rewarded with as many delegates as they have been so far. More democracy, in the form of proportional allocation of delegates (such as the one Democrats have, minus their undemocratic several hundred super delegates) would maroon Trump at a number that would ensure his defeat rather than being within striking distance of the nomination as he is now.

The fact that Trump is selling the public a lie about this election is beside the point. In a year in which a critical mass of Republicans are prepared to consider political experience or even devotion to conservative principles as negatives while viewing Trump’s belligerence and inexperience as positives, the notion that he is being robbed by a malevolent political establishment is a compelling narrative. We have known since last summer that Trump’s wild, crude, mendacious, and often hateful statements about a variety of topics that would end the political career of any other politician are seen as a sign of his honesty and strength. But we now must also realize that they see his political weaknesses in the same way. Along with the shortcomings of his remaining opponents (Cruz will never live down “New York values” in the Empire State), that sets up Trump to sweep the Northeastern states in a manner that may well put him back on track to get close to the magic number he needs to avoid a convention fight he can’t win.

The only catch here for Trump and his supporters is that even as his compelling narrative about being an outsider has strengthened his grip on the GOP nomination, his vile character assaults on opponents and efforts to divide the nation are making him even less electable than he was when this battle started. The same polls that show Republicans unhappy about a brokered convention and therefore perhaps more willing to accept Trump as the nominee, also show that his negatives continue to be sky-high with women, minorities and independents. As strong as his “we wuz robbed” narrative may be with primary voters now, the expiration date on this piece of political misdirection is staring Republicans in the face. Trump may win by losing in Colorado and Wyoming. But in November, the party he is hijacking will see that the general election is where the real losing for this man who talks incessantly about winning will begin.