On the Republican side, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio head into a Thursday debate searching for new ways to take voters away from front-runner Trump. It may not be because he’s won over a plurality of the hearts and minds of Republicans. Trump, too, padded his lead over Texas Sen.
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Cruz as a candidate would not lay waste the Republican Party in the same way that Trump would.
Republican Donald Trump swept to victory in Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii, overcoming fierce efforts to blunt his momentum. In Alabama, for example, GOP turnout was up over 300,000 from 2008 while Democratic turnout was down about 138,000 from 2008. South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia show a similar pattern. He could continue to lose some primaries and caucuses in “closed” elections where only Republicans can vote – states where he has performed weakest – and still win the nomination by running up totals in the Mid-Atlantic, Pacific Coast and industrial Midwest where some analysts believe Cruz will struggle.
Trump entered Tuesday’s contests facing questions about his durability and ended the night with a pair of convincing victories.
The kinds of candidates the Republican establishment has chosen – from Romney and McCain in recent times, all the way back to Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 – have had an nearly unbroken record of losing, even to Democrats who were initially unknown (Carter, Clinton) or unpopular (Obama, Truman).
But it is the Republican contest that is generating more headlines.
That leaves us with several takeaways. In fact, Kasich said he could win over Trump voters by giving them what they want: job security.
The party nominees will not be made official until the Republicans and Democrats hold their conventions in July. Its extremely well-financed favorite – Jeb Bush – never got anywhere with the voters in the primaries, and has already been forced out of the contest. “Marco Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich in any way he can”, the spokesperson told CNN.
Mr. Trump won more than two-fifths of male voters, but his support dropped by 15 points among women, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.
On Monday, the most prominent potential independent candidate, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, shut the door on a 2016 run, saying that he feared his inclusion in the race would ultimately help Trump win the presidency over the Democratic nominee. California (172), CT (28), Florida (99), Pennsylvania (71), New Jersey (51) and NY (95), for example are all closed primaries. But it doesn’t change the fundamental delegate maths that make Clinton very hard indeed to beat overall.
Fiorina, Donald Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson were the anti-establishment candidates in the race, and Fiorina and Carson were winnowed out of the field.
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Roughly 50,000 Idaho Republicans turned out to vote in 2012. As the next few weeks play out, we will see just how well Trump can do without his security blanket of non-GOP voters.
