“The effort within the Republican Party to stop Donald Trump from winning the presidential nomination appears unlikely to stop him from taking Florida’s delegate-rich winner-take-all primary”, said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University poll, in a written analysis.
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He said opinion polls showing him lagging far behind Trump in Florida were not accurate.
CNN noted large majorities in both states say their home-state candidate should drop out of the race if he doesn’t win. It was a “clear two-man race”, he noted, making his now-familiar case that it’s time for the party to unify between the one candidate left who can beat Trump.
The two states could determine who the Republican nominee is. “Perhaps instead of spending their time trying to stop me, we should all come together to stop Hillary and Make America Great Again”. She told a Miami crowd on Wednesday that she’s “horrified” by Trump.
Trump also pointed to the “great talk” he had with House Speaker Paul Ryan as an example of the type of bridge-building the Republican Party should be doing.
Celebrating victories Tuesday night in Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii, the billionaire real estate declared Wednesday that “I am a uniter”.
Third, Mitt Romney, David Brooks, and others are encouraging the rank and file to vote for Rubio and Kasich as a way to deny Trump the 1,237 delegates he needs.
Cruz intensified his own bid to blunt Trump’s momentum, unveiling on Wednesday an endorsement from former rival, retired business executive Carly Fiorina, who offers Cruz an immediate dose of credibility with his party’s skeptical donor class.
If Trump is the nominee, 26 percent of Florida Republicans say they would vote for Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton (7.4 percent), not vote (9.6 percent) or they don’t know what they’d do (8.9 percent).
Trump, a former reality TV show host, has peppered his campaign with put-downs of rivals and critics. Why trade poor leadership to get bad leadership? A fiscal and social conservative, he is unpopular with fellow senators who were targets of his personal attacks and who blame him for orchestrating a government shutdown in 2013 in a failed attempt to derail Obama’s healthcare reforms.
His total delegate count now stands at 359 to Trump’s 458 and Rubio’s 151.
Wright, meanwhile, said many establishment Republicans still have not understood Trump’s appeal.
Despite Sanders’s victory in Michigan, Clinton’s landslide win in MS, replicating her other victories in the south, gave her a bigger delegate haul on the night and puts in the driving seat to take the Democratic nomination – though not as quickly as she would like.
Clinton had a 2-1 lead over Sanders in a Washington Post/Univision Poll last month among Latino voters. But Sanders will be hanging around and continuing to make some noise. Cruz is ascendant, and may pass Rubio, but on Wednesday was more than 20 points behind the front-runner.
While Trump and Cruz are calling for party unity on the campaign trail, there was little evidence either had reached out to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill they’d have to work with as president.
“It is true, we haven’t done as well in some of those states as we wanted to, but it’s going to come down to Florida for me, and it always has in the presidential races”, Rubio told MSNBC in a town hall.
Can Trump be stopped?
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The Republican victor in Florida next week gets all of its 99 delegates, while Ohio’s victor gets all of its 66. North Carolina and Missouri divide their delegates proportionally. Trump gains 25 delegates with the win, and Ted Cruz and John Kasich each gain 17 delegates. It was independently created by the Reuters editorial staff. SAP had no editorial involvement in its creation or production.
