Republican presidential hopeful, Donald Trump holds a plane-side rally in a hanger at Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport in Vienna, Ohio, March 14, 2016.
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The property magnate’s chance of winning the Republican nomination were boosted on Tuesday after he scored critical victories in five state primaries. Ted Cruz in the delegate count, but Mr. Kasich’s win complicates the billionaire businessman’s path to the GOP nomination. “We are going to go all the way to Cleveland and secure the Republican nomination”, Kasich told an ecstatic crowd of supporters as he declared victory Tuesday night. Clinton won Florida, Illinois, North Carolina and OH, potentially sweeping the Democratic contests if she wins Missouri.
“I wouldn’t lead it”, Trump added, “but I think bad things would happen”. “The way to beat Donald Trump is at the ballot box”, the Texas senator said on “New Day”.
He later claimed to MSNBC that several Republican senators who were attacking him in public were calling him in private to back what he was doing and saying.
Kasich still trails far behind Cruz, who ranks second in the delegate count and even Florida Sen. Marco Rubio pulled out Tuesday night after he lost his home state big to Trump.
In the Democratic race, Clinton’s victories in Florida and North Carolina were expected, but Sanders, a Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist, had hoped to take the industrial states of OH and IL, both of which Clinton won. Even if he is a little short, Trump said he should still be awarded the nomination if, as expected, he has a large delegate lead over competitors. Cruz has to win something like 83% of the remaining delegates, which may not be mathematically impossible in a two-man race but it’s likely only a theoretical possibility. Those delegates, which is roughly 15 percent of the delegates needed to win the nomination, could be important if Trump cannot receive a majority of the pledged delegates by July’s convention. By Wednesday morning, Missouri was still too close to call.
Trump also said Clinton, the former secretary of state and first lady, would be “a major embarrassment for the country” and added that she “doesn’t have the strength or the stamina to be president”.
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Clinton has at least 1,561 delegates of the 2,383 needed, including the superdelegates who are elected officials and party leaders free to support the candidate of their choice. Cruz lags behind with 396. Rubio left the race with 168. “I have long thought the false idea of Rubio’s plausibility only served to keep party elites and donors and some in the press from looking at the reality of what was happening – Trump and Cruz – and jumping out the window”, Brock said.
