Trump meanwhile is looking for big wins across the board. Several other party officials have said they would back the real estate mogul if he does become the nominee, though some say their support would be reluctant.
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How confident is Trump that he’ll be able to pull it off?
A lot hinges on what happens next week in the 11 states – mostly in the South – holding GOP nominating contests on what’s known as Super Tuesday. “Donald Trump likes to sue people, he should sue whoever did that to his face”.
Rubio has campaigned since Friday as if the Republican campaign has already settled into that two-man contest.
Starting her morning with stops at two Memphis churches, Clinton offered an implicit critique of Trump, issuing a call to unite the nation and asking worshippers to reject “the demagoguery, the prejudice, the paranoia”.
But movement in the GOP horserace was negligible, according to the re-contact interviews: Trump, Rubio and Cruz kept about 90 percent of their supporters; Carson kept about 80 percent of his; but Kasich kept only about 60 percent of his backers.
Our new NBC/WSJ/Marist polls out yesterday showed leads for Trump and Clinton in Tennessee and Georgia, but Ted Cruz still led in his home state of Texas.
Many observers see the day as potentially the last chance for the anti-Trump crowd to prevail over the front runner.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump drew sharp criticism from his rivals in both parties Sunday for refusing to denounce an implicit endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, raising the specter of racism as the presidential campaign hits the South.
Although Rubio appeared to enjoy the attacks, he apologized to some audiences for stooping to Trump’s level. Trump is challenging Richard Nixon for the title of the most thin-skinned frontrunner is presidential election history. Fortunes are revered in Texas where Ted Cruz garners 42%, giving him an eleven point advantage over Trump at 31%. Donald Trump is unfit to be President.
Another rival, Ohio Governor John Kasich, tweeted: “Hate groups have no place in America”. Democrats assign delegates proportionally in each state.
She made nearly no mention of her primary rival, Sen. Pundits agree the Rubio campaign will struggle to carry on if he loses in his own state.
“Our campaign from the beginning has been the highest level of integrity”, Cruz says, adding that when his team is insulted “we don’t respond in kind”.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton tops Bernie Sanders 55 percent to 38 percent in the new poll, a slightly wider margin than she held in late January before any primaries or caucuses were held.
Pundits believe Sanders will try to stay close to Clinton in the South while focusing most of his attention on states in the Midwest and Northeast, including the senator’s home state of Vermont. And the polling also reportedly found that should former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg run as an independent, an idea that has been floated, he would likely pull votes away from Clinton in the highly Democratic city and its surroundings. In terms of delegates, 595, or 24 percent, of Republican delegates and 1,001, or 21 percent, of Democratic delegates are at stake. She was also favored in Arkansas, Oklahoma Minnesota, Colorado and Alabama.
The calendar will get better for Sanders in later March, as states such as Nebraska, Kansas and ME take their turns.
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However, all those scenarios rely on Sanders winning a bigger portion of the African-American voter – a core component of the Democratic base and the majority of the Democratic electorate in Tuesday’s southern states.
