Cruz has emerged as the best positioned to stop Trump from claiming the nomination before the convention.
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Cruz really needed a win to blunt Trump’s march to the nomination-it’s arguably his biggest night since the Iowa caucuses, where voting began-and he easily trumped Trump thanks to the endorsement of the Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and the state’s conservative radio hosts.
Even if Trump does not win the statewide count of votes and the delegates they represent, he could still lessen the damage through winning in districts seven and eight, which are predominately blue collar, and rural covering much of the northern half of the state.
The loss is more damaging to Trump, because he is in greater danger of failing to lock up the party’s nomination ahead of the July convention.
“We’re seeing a turning point playing out over the last several weeks”, adding that a win in Wisconsin would “make a powerful statement all across the country” and “have a powerful impact on the states that are coming up”.
Sanders would need to win 67 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates to catch up to Clinton.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll on Tuesday (local time) showed Cruz about even with Trump nationally, with Cruz’s recent gains the first time since November that a Trump rival has threatened his standing at the head of the Republican pack.
Cruz received 35.2 percent of support to Trump’s 39.5 percent, the poll of 568 Republicans taken April 1-5 found. The numbers put the two within the poll’s 4.8 percentage-point credibility interval, a measure of accuracy. “I’m glad they’re both nervous about me taking delegates cause the more that we can get a message out there the better we’ll do”, said Gov. John Kasich, (R) Presidential Candidate.
He said that would help convince super delegates, who have so far been flocking to Clinton, to back him.
Cruz, a USA senator from Texas, and Trump were also briefly in a dead heat early last week.
Cruz has intensified calls for Kasich to drop out of the race, prompting Kasich to bristle on Monday, “Don’t push me around”.
The polls are close going into Tuesday’s primary, and for Democrats, it isn’t winner-take-all. Because Democrats award delegates proportionally, a narrow victory by either candidate on Tuesday would mean that both Sanders and Clinton would get a similar number of delegates.
That could leave the Democratic race to be decided elsewhere, so watch how the candidates do along the Minnesota border and in the Green Bay area. That’s because the rest of the primaries this month – in NY on April 19 and in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island on April 26 – are in Trump-friendly territory.
For Cruz, Wisconsin is all about the delegate math. His own path toward the nomination is all but closed.
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“Frankly, if we had leadership in the Republican Party, they would have disqualified him for what he did in the state of Iowa”, Trump said at a rally Monday.
