Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reinforced their leads in Democratic and Republican parties respectively, with strong performances in primaries and caucuses on Tuesday in five states.
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The brash billionaire, who won at least three more states on Tuesday but doesn’t yet have the needed majority of delegates, predicted on Wednesday he’d collect enough support before the Republican convention this summer. While Kasich was badly beaten in Florida, the OH governor won his home state, collecting 46 percent of the vote and taking in a total of 66 delegates. He leads Ted Cruz (406 delegates) and John Kasich (142).
Florida voters gave 99 Republican delegates in the race for president.
Some Republican operatives have said the more conservative Cruz has the best chance of stopping Trump’s momentum, but Kasich said he has no plans of dropping his presidential bid in order to cooperate with Cruz. As Mr. Trump is never exhausted of pointing out, those who took him on have fallen sooner – Mr Rubio being the latest example.
“The longer Kasich stays in the race, the more it benefits Trump”, Cruz said.
“People are angry, people are frustrated”, he said, adding it would have been easy to stir up those frustrations and make people more angry. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state won the Florida primary in 2008 over Barack Obama in what largely was a symbolic showing because the state didn’t get delegates after failing to follow the national party calendar.
Among pledged delegates, Clinton is ahead of Sanders 1074 to 762.
But any victory keeps Sanders going in terms of fundraising and keeps him in the spotlight for weeks to come.
Clinton was heavily favored to win the Sunshine State.
“I think you’d have riots”, Trump told CNN about losing the nomination in a contested convention.
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“Our commander-in-chief has to be able to defend our country, not embarrass it”, Clinton said in a speech that largely ignored rival Bernie Sanders. “I am really totally committed to bringing back manufacturing”, Ms. Clinton said after Tuesday victories. “And so if you actually want to defeat Donald Trump, there’s only one campaign that has done so over and over and over again”.
