The next primary is scheduled in IN next Tuesday where Cruz and Trump has entered into a strategic alliance to prevent Trump from getting 1,237 delegates. The campaign finished March with only $1.2 million in the bank, and limiting its focus to two states in cooperation with Cruz is good cover to essentially shrink its footprint to a more manageable level. Trump can afford to lose only one.
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He is poised to sweep all five Northeastern states holding primaries Tuesday: Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland. For the Democrats, it’s worth a whopping 189 delegates to be awarded proportionately.
Donald Trump need to win the nomination on the first ballot because Sen. By no means is it a sure thing.
Sanders and Clinton are competing for 384 pledged delegates on Tuesday. That’s 392 short of the 1,237 needed to win the Republican nomination. They now intend to co-ordinate efforts. Sen.
Ted Cruz and John Kasich are joining forces in a last-ditch effort to deny Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination. Yet the shift offers increasingly desperate Trump foes a glimmer of hope in their long and frustrating fight to keep him from amassing enough delegates to seal his nomination and avoid a contested national convention in July. A Fox News poll suggests Kasich supporters are, in fact, nearly as likely to prefer Trump (33 per cent) as Cruz (41 per cent) for their second choice.
In Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was selected over the weekend as a delegate to the convention in Cleveland this summer.
What follows is not a prediction, but a plausible path for Trump to stay on track Tuesday.
The biggest single delegate prize is in Pennsylvania, but the delegate counts are more problematic, because they’re not all bound to the winning candidate.
That can hardly be called great news for Cruz, who needs to win blowouts, not squeakers. The other 54 – three from each congressional district – are directly elected by voters.
It wouldn’t be shocking if some of them now feel a little cheated, as if they put their support behind a candidate who suddenly seems less than fully committed, at least in Indiana.
If that happens, many delegates would be unbound and free to vote for any candidate. “I don’t expect any of the Trump delegates in Alabama to alter their support for Trump”. In other words, Trump received about 20 percent of the vote from the candidates who dropped out during this time.
“That is a state where he and Trump are running very close”.
Maryland has a total of 38 delegates. Fifteen of California’s 53 Congressional Districts are held by Republicans, and some of them are among the most conservative in the Congress.
In a phone-in interview Wednesday, the billionaire real estate mogul told CNN that “I may tone it down”. If he does well, he might get 22 delegates. Sanders claimed Rhode Island.
Clinton’s big wins, meanwhile, help bolster her campaign’s argument that it is time for Sanders to make a decision to stop personal and political attacks on the former secretary of state that could weaken her ahead of a showdown in November with Republicans.
DE has 16 delegates and all of them go to the statewide victor, increasing the importance of this small state. And that could make it very hard for Trump in many swing states.
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Many observers thought Trump’s lack of organization would give him headaches in the primaries, especially in the larger states.
