Lately, Cruz has been playing the delegate game, trying to take advantage of the party’s complicated rules to ensure delegates loyal to him attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
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“My friends, we can not afford a Republican nominee that brings us down-ticket decimation”, Wilson said in an unscheduled appearance at the state’s Republican convention in Burlingame.
Trump, a billionaire businessman and former reality TV star, has continued to notch up wins in the nation’s nominating contests, including a five-state sweep of the latest string of contests last Tuesday.
The ads seek to compare Trump’s positions on taxes, Obamacare, firearm bans and North Carolina’s law banning transgender people from using bathrooms that differ from their biological sex.
The numbers are bad news for Cruz, who has pinned his hopes on keeping Trump below the 1,237-delegate threshold necessary to clinch the Republican nomination on the first ballot by stopping Trump in the Hoosier State.
Encouraged by a new poll giving him a double-digit lead in the state and eager to pivot to the general election, the Republican front-runner stressed the importance of Indiana’s Tuesday GOP primary more than he or his top advisers have previously.
Trump is arguing that his lead is already insurmountable and that he is the likely nominee, particularly given his 17.4 percentage-point lead in California, the final delegate-rich prize on the Republican calendar.
The Cruz slate won virtually all of the 28 at-large national delegates and roughly split the 27 delegates selected by congressional district.
(AP Photo/Bob Christie). Arizona state Treasurer Jeff DeWit addresses hundreds of delegates to the Arizona Republican Party Convention in Mesa, Ariz., Saturday, April 30, 2016. “The media has given $2 billion in free advertising to Donald Trump”, Cruz said.
Trump won another 12 delegates with his statewide win. The recent NBC News/WSJ/Marist poll finds Clinton ahead of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders by four points, 50% to 46%.
But at a news conference in Washington, Sanders refused to get out, saying he believes the Democratic battle will end up in a contested convention.
Trump on Sunday also targeted Cruz, dismissing his closest Republican rival’s criticism of Trump’s endorsement by former boxing champion Mike Tyson, whom Cruz called a rapist.
Cruz described Trump and Clinton “flip sides of the same coin”.
“It’s true. If she were not a woman, she wouldn’t even be in this race”.
Many in the Republican establishment have fought hard to stop Trump, anxious his nomination will help elect another Democrat to the White House, and perhaps even help Democrats win back control of the Senate.
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Trump said “every move we made in the Middle East was wrong” over the past 15 years, with lives and money wasted. Cruz and Carly Fiorina criss-crossing the state – now do-or-die for the duo. “We lose the Supreme Court for a generation, religious liberty is taken away, our kids are bankrupted”, he said.
