If he’s only 20, 30 or 40 some votes short, he could successfully lock down enough commitments to come into Cleveland confident of a first ballot win.
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The 36 delegates that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, complicating Trump’s path to winning the nomination outright and increasing the possibility of a contested convention when Republican delegates gather this summer in Cleveland.
The poll was conducted by phone from April 3-5. His campaign put out a biting statement accusing Cruz of being “worse than a puppet – he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump”.
After his overwhelming win in the Wisconsin Republican primary Tuesday, Ted Cruz is claiming a “turning point” in the GOP race which he believes could propel him to victory – though the conservative firebrand faces some tough challenges ahead. “Tonight, Wisconsin has lit a candle, guiding the way forward”.
Trump also lost to Cruz by double digits among those making between $100,000 to 200,000 annually, according to the same poll.
Despite the concern among some Wisconsin Republicans about Trump becoming president, almost 6 in 10 GOP voters there said the party should nominate the candidate with the most support in the primaries, which so far would be Trump. He’s a senator from Texas, one of the most conservative states in the nation, and he’s running in one of the most conservative presidential primaries in recent history.
Trump also failed in Wisconsin to match many of his previous performances among Republicans who described themselves as “dissatisfied”, as opposed to angry. If no one gets a majority of delegates on that first vote, all bets are off: almost three-fourths of delegates won’t be bound on the second vote, and the percentage of unbound delegates keeps going up from there. Trump lost those voters in Missouri and North Carolina on March 15, but generally not by such wide margins.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who hopes the year will play out in Cruz’s favor, said the Republican race was “very likely” headed to an open convention.
Of course, we’ve never seen Cruz in a position where he has needed to appeal to moderate voters to win. So far, he’s won just 46 percent. That’s not out of line with what he had drawn from similar voters in earlier states, but Cruz managed 68 percent support from those voters – the highest total any single Trump opponent has managed aside from Kasich in his home state of Ohio.
The good news for Democrats is that even with the voter ID law, Republicans are doomed in Wisconsin if Donald Trump is their nominee.
The candidates were losing no time, with Trump holding a rally in Bethpage on Long Island later in the day.
Another major state coming up is the June 7 primary in California. None of them has publicly endorsed Trump.
As The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza wrote after the Mussolini retweet incident, Trump’s unpredictability is more unsafe for Republicans than anything else this presidential campaign could throw at them. He added that the Trump campaign has the “most cohesive, loyal staff, the most loving staff I have every had the privilege of working with on a campaign”.
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He was embroiled in controversy over retweeting an unflattering image of his rival’s wife Heidi Cruz; he had to walk back comments he made on abortion; and his campaign manager was charged with misdemeanor battery after grabbing a reporter at a campaign event.
