But the poll highlighted a trouble spot for Trump in the general election: while two-thirds of likely Republican voters said they would vote for Trump this fall if he becomes the Republican nominee, one in three said they would choose Clinton, a third-party candidate or wouldn’t vote at all.
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Donald Trump dominated Virginia’s coal country in the March GOP primary, but Texas Sen. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) is in second with 25 percent, and Cruz lags in last place with 17 percent.
Needless to say, Trump won that exchange – and Kasich’s campaign took note. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders picked up another win in Wyoming – but it did nothing to help him gain ground in the delegate chase.
The Donald camp has also just hired veteran Republican strategist Paul J. Manafort to lead his delegate-corralling efforts, which is a serious move to win regardless of how many delegates Trump has going into Cleveland.
New York’s delegates are awarded proportionally.
He now has 528 pledged delegates, compared to Trump’s 760.
Paterson noted that Trump carried St. Lucie County with 57.8 percent of the vote. According to Nate Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight, Trump will need to win 58 percent of the remaining delegates to reach the required 1,237 delegates necessary to win the GOP nomination.
Kyle Cheney of Politico reports, “Indiana GOP insiders are working to engineer slates of delegates – three from each of nine congressional districts – that will turn their backs on Trump at a contested convention in July”.
On Good Morning America on Thursday, Cruz tried to explain what he meant when he referred scornfully to “New York Values” during one debate, which may be the reason for his poor turnout. Cruz-favored delegates won 21 of the 37 delegate posts at the state’s GOP convention in Colorado Springs over a course of three days this past week.
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Ted Cruz says he isn’t intimidated by recent polls showing him badly trailing Donald Trump in New York’s critical primary contest later this month – and he’s standing by his criticism of “New York values”. “The people that I was talking about are the liberal New York Democrats who have hammered this state”, Cruz told ABC News on Wednesday. “Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet – he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump”. He has to maximize victories on April 19 and April 26 in the Northeast; win in IN on May 3, and win big on June 7 in California.
