Still, Trump won the other big prize of the night: the Florida primary and its 99 delegates.
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Its last favored candidate, Mr Kasich, appears to believe that by depriving Mr Trump of a clean sweep on Tuesday, he could emerge as a consensus candidate.
The race for the Republican presidential nomination continues after Donald Trump won a decisive victory in the key state of Florida but lost to John Kasich in Ohio.
Throughout his 2016 bid for the White House, Rubio repeatedly stated he was uninterested in returning to the Senate, instead focusing his campaign efforts exclusively on the Republican Party’s nomination.
On the Democrats’ side, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saw victory in the states olf Illinois, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina – putting more distance between herself and rival Bernie Sanders.
Those delegates must validate the designation of the party’s presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention in July.
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. The victories bolster Clinton’s claim that she is her party’s only candidate who can win diverse states that will be pivotal in the November general election, CNN reported, even despite her surprise loss in MI last week.
Her wins on Tuesday put Ms Clinton in a commanding position to become the first woman in U.S. history to win a major party nomination.
“We are going to go all the way to Cleveland and secure the Republican nomination”.
Trump also clobbered his rivals in IL where he got 49 delegates courtesy of a 38.9 percent victory over Cruz, his nearest rival, who got 30.5 percent. His wife, Karen, and daughters, Emma, left, and Reese listen.
Five states went to the polls on Tuesday, in what has been labelled the most important day in the primary election calendar to date.
Gov. John Kasich managed to best Trump in his home state of OH, ridding him of 66 crucial delegates.
But arch-conservative Ted Cruz insisted the battle was a “two person” race between him and Mr Trump. Cruz has 370 delegates. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, speaks during a Republican primary night celebration rally at Florida International University in Miami, Florida.
In spite of Trump’s pet talk, the results are a significant blow to the Florida senator, a one-time rising star in the GOP.
“I want to congratulate Marco Rubio on having run a really tough campaign”.
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In a speech that served as a thinly-veiled rebuke of Trump’s campaign tactics, Rubio warned that the politics of division will leave America a “fractured nation”. His campaign slogan was “a new American century” – as he tried to send the message that America needed a new generation of leadership.
