“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” writes Jim Rutenberg of Times. “To the very end, we got it wrong.” He was speaking of the “political prognosticators” in television and the press who reckoned that Senator Cruz’s campaign against Donald Trump would hold the line at Indiana. In the end, he confessed, “you have to point the finger at national political journalism.” And the only good news, he reckons, is that the news organizations will get a second chance.

Good luck, we say. Our advice to the sages who own all that printing and broadcast equipment would be to call R. Emmett “Bob” Tyrrell, Jr., of the American Spectator. As near as we can tell, he’s the first editor who nailed this story. He did so at the outset. By “nailed,” we don’t mean that he tacked it to the wall with some kind of brad. John Henry himself couldn’t have nailed anything as convincingly as Mr. Tyrrell clobbered this story.

We started getting email and phone calls from him a year ago about how the press was underestimating The Donald. It’s not that Mr. Tyrrell was in the Trump camp. Or against him. Mr. Tyrrell is friendly with the whole Republican spectrum (and, by the way, a more than a few Democrats). The Spectator’s annual Robert L. Bartley Dinner honorees have included in recent years Congressman Paul Ryan and Senators Cruz, Rand Paul and Thos. Cotton.

At the dinner for Mr. Cruz, in 2013, the Spectator also bestowed its T. Boone Pickens Award on Mr. Trump. The billionaire stayed for the whole dinner. Aides were trying to get him back to his car, but he insisted on sticking with it. Mr. Tyrrell tells me he was jovial, friendly, engaging. “He charmed the room,” Mr. Tryrrell tells me. “But but mainly, Mr. Trump listened intently, to Mr. Cruz and the other speakers.” He was, Mr. Tyrrell suggests, drinking in the substance.

We wouldn’t want to suggest that banqueting is Mr. Tyrrell’s only reportorial method. His incessant pursuing of sources may be the reason shoe leather is at such a premium. Despite his cantankerous reputation, he’s peculiarly secular in his friendliness. In the midst of his long expose of William Clinton, he spotted the presidential party entering the dining room of Washington’s Jockey Club. He promptly sent over a bottle of champagne.

The maitre d’ shortly showed up at his table and invited the editor to share a drink with the President. That’s the encounter at which the irascible editor, who’d been digging up dirt in Arkansas for months, extended his hand and exclaimed, “Mr. President, at last we meet.” Mr. Clinton soon grew irked by his conversation with Mr. Tyrrell and ended it by turning his back on him. Then again, the editor would have plied him with questions for hours.

When we called Mr. Tyrrell after Senator Cruz’s concession, we found him at work on a column about conventional wisdom. He reminded us that he’s been a critic of conservatives as well as of liberals (one of his books is “The Conservative Crackup,” and another, “After the Hangover,” was brought out in 2010 and sketched a road to recovery for the right. “The conventional wisdom is almost always wrong,” he warned therein.

We mark the point only because the Times suggests that in this season the press has been “so remarkable in its failings.” It has, Mr. Rutenberg writes, “been ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ on a relentless, rolling basis.” Not in the case of Mr. Tyrrell. In our reckoning it’s no coincidence that he was among the first to perceive that GOP grass roots had moved. He’s an underestimated figure. It may be, in respect of Mr. Trump, that it takes one to know one.