Donald Trump isn’t the most popular Republican presidential nominee ever.

Sure, he got more votes than any nominee in history, but he also set a record for most votes cast against him. He cobbled together the necessary majority of delegates to win the nomination, but had one of the smallest majorities in the history of the Republican Party.

He’s backed by a large majority of Republicans in general-election polling, but only 38 percent of Republicans are satisfied with him as a candidate.

But he’s still the party nominee.

And there should be no doubt by now: He is the nominee of the Republican Party because more Republicans voted for him than anyone else.

There was a lot of subtext and strategizing behind Ted Cruz’s decision to pointedly not endorse Trump at the convention Wednesday night, but any suggestion that Cruz is a purer representative of the will of the base of the party is simply not borne out by the numbers.

Whether or not you agree that Trump is the best representative of the values of the Republican Party, Republican voters voted for Trump to be their representative in contest after contest.

Consider the 26 states for which we have exit polling data. In closed primary states, Trump did better with people who told exit pollsters they were Republican than those who identified as independents (though they were, by definition, registered Republicans) most of the time — and the margins by which he did better were bigger.

In open-primary states (where members of any party could vote), he did better with independents than Republicans, but by similar margins.

In semi-open states, where independents but not Democrats could vote, he again did better with Republicans.

Put another way: Trump consistently saw bigger average margins relative to the winner or the second-place finisher (depending on whether or not he won) in states in which only registered Republicans could vote than in open-primary states.

In contests with more Republican voters, he did better than in contests with fewer. (In closed-primary states, three-quarters of voters identified as Republicans in exit polls. In open states, the figure was two-thirds.) That holds even before the Indiana primary, when Trump put the race away.

Put still another way: In states for which we have exit polling, Trump won an estimated 7.2 million votes from Republicans and 2.5 million from independents, using a rough overlay of exit-poll data onto vote totals.

Ted Cruz, by comparison, got 4.9 million votes from Republicans and 1.6 million from independents. In Trump’s case, 74.5 percent of the combined Republican-independent vote was from Republicans. In Cruz’s, the figure was 75.6.

It is not the case, in other words, that Cruz was denied the nomination thanks to non-Republicans flooding to the polls to back Trump. Trump won the primaries by eking out more support from Republicans than his competitors.

Sure, it was less than a majority of Republicans — but Cruz got an even smaller percentage than that. Sure, more Republicans voted for non-Trumps than Trump, but by the time the non-Trumps had all stopped running, Trump started winning majorities in primary contests.

Democracy isn’t cute. But the will of the Republican Party as established in democratic contests is that Donald Trump be the nominee.

Cruz’s stand at the convention was based on a number of valid principles and concerns.

But any suggestion that he was the last representative of Republican voters against something they opposed is simply not true.

© 2016, The Washington Post