Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton scored easy hometown victories in yesterday’s presidential primary elections throughout New York State, moving both closer to winning their parties’ presidential nominations for the election to be held in November.
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Trump is focused heavily on clinching the Republican nomination through voters’ balloting in state primaries, thus avoiding a contested national convention in Cleveland in July.
Kasich, while conservative, has been seen as more centrist than either Trump or Cruz and more measured in his persona as well. Trump took the overwhelming majority of Republican delegates, while Clinton claimed a net 33 delegates over Bernie Sanders.
Trump now leads the GOP race with 845 delegates, ahead of Cruz with 559 and Kasich with 147.
Trump needed a strong showing in NY to keep alive his chances of sewing up the GOP nomination before the party’s July convention – and to quiet critics who say the long primary season has exposed big deficiencies in his campaign effort.
Tom Wolf said Wednesday that Hillary Clinton’s decisive victory in Tuesday’s NY primary will only help her in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary. About 14 percent of voters said they wouldn’t vote for Clinton in the general, majority Sanders supporters; 19 percent, almost all Clinton supporters, said they’d vote against Sanders if he were the nominee.
“I think Cruz will be successful in some places”, said Val DiGiorgio, chairman of the Chester County Republican Committee, a county north of Philadelphia, who is not endorsing a candidate.
A relaxed and confident-looking Clinton, 68, dressed in a colorful tunic, voted with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, in the leafy Chappaqua suburb they call home, taking time to greet well wishers outside.
Having spent months relying on a slim staff, Trump has started hiring more seasoned campaign veterans. Mind you, he won’t drop out because of NY, but in the end, NY will be viewed as the beginning of the end of his campaign.
But to get there, Trump must win every state in the Northeast yet to vote – including Maryland, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New Jersey – as well as in and California, two delegate-rich states.
CNN predicted Trump would take at least 89 of the 95 Republican party delegates up for grabs in NY. Donald Trump won bigger.
Trump has alienated many Republican Jews by saying at times that he would remain neutral in brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace, and also with his broadsides against minorities, including Hispanics and Muslims. Otherwise, the candidate with the most votes over 20 percent won two delegates and the next highest tally got one.
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But there were deep frustrations over New York’s strict rules governing the vote, particularly among independent voters not allowed to participate and who could have been expected to favor Sanders. His speech after the NY polls closed was brief, but angry, blasting the Republican primary process as a “crooked system” that has been “rigged” against him. Bernie Sanders, by nearly 16 percentage points, consistent with major polling forecasts. The areas where the most votes were lost was in Brooklyn-which she won with 60% of the vote, better than throughout the state as a whole.
