Voters are flocking to the polls in IN, where senator Ted Cruz has drawn a line in the sand, making his stand against Donald Trump. “Tonight, I’m sorry to say it appears that path has been foreclosed”, Cruz said. “For people in IN, who long for a day when we were nice to each other, when we treated people with respect”. In Indianapolis, he said the state’s voters will decide “which path we should go down”.
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Had he succeeded in his quest, Cruz would have been the first USA president of Hispanic descent, although he often downplayed his heritage on the campaign trail, instead, touting the need for tougher immigration laws, for a border wall along the border with Mexico, protecting gun rights, repealing President Barack Obama’s health care law and instituting a flat tax.
On the Democratic side the race is much less dramatic. Cruz railed against what he called the “Washington cartel”, trying to appeal to an electorate that is craving political outsiders.
GOP elites now face the long-feared reality of Trump as an outsider nominee who will lead them into the fall campaign after splitting the party, overturning establishment and conservative power bases and alienating key general election voters with incendiary rhetoric.
A new national NBC News/Survey Monkey poll shows Trump increasing his lead with 56% support, 34 points ahead of Cruz. Cruz has 565 and Ohio Gov. John Kasich has 152. He campaigned aggressively in the state, securing the support of Indiana’s governor and announcing businesswoman Carly Fiorina as his running mate, but lost momentum in the closing days. “I am not suspending our fight to defend the constitution and to defend the Judeo-Christian values that built this nation”.
Donald Trump virtually clinched the Republican nomination for president Tuesday night, a stunning victory for the brash billionaire who was considered more a celebrity curiosity than a serious candidate when he entered the race less than a year ago.
In a victory tweet earlier in the evening, the NY businessman noted that “Lyin’ Ted” had considered in a must-win state, and now, the Texas senator should “drop out of the race – stop wasting time & money”.
In yet another bid to wrest the news cycle from Trump, Cruz made a decision to play the ace up his sleeve and announce his vice presidential nominee (despite the fact that he was nowhere near to winning the nomination on the first ballot). “If he doesn’t he should drop out of the race-stop wasting time & money”, Trump taunted in a tweet. “We have won in every category”. The Texas senator himself says it’s going to come down to California’s big delegate haul on June 7.
At this stage of the campaign, Mr Sanders has no chance of reaching the 2,383 delegates needed to win, but the self-described Democratic socialist has vowed to continue his campaign. The former secretary of state did not air TV ads and did not campaign extensively in Indiana.
Those same polls found 31 percent to 42 percent had favorable views of Clinton, but that more than half, 54 percent to 56 percent, had unfavorable views of her. “I think that this was Cruz’s firewall”, he said. “The reason the media wants Donald Trump to be our nominee is it represents a repudiation of conservative principles of the Constitution”, he said.
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He said Trump’s persistent accusations that the other candidates were liars were “something straight out of a psychology textbook”. “Donald Trump’s gonna look a lot like more like Hillary Clinton than he does like Ronald Reagan”. Bernie Sanders in Indiana.
