– Cruz won in ME and Kansas on a night that offered scant encouragement for Marco Rubio.
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In a split decision, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump each captured two victories in Saturday’s four-state round of voting, fresh evidence that there’s no quick end in sight to the fractious GOP race for president.
It was Cruz’s fifth win of the Republican primary season, easily fending off Trump and Florida Sen. Rubio had 110 delegates and Kasich had 25. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Friday, March 4, 2016, in National Harbor, Md.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, scored an overwhelming win over Bernie Sanders in Louisiana’s delegate-rich primary that lets her maintain a solid lead for the Democratic nomination even as the Vermont senator won caucuses in Kansas and Nebraska. Each contest on Saturday was a closed primary or caucus, meaning only registered GOP voters could participate. Republicans in three other states, Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii, also will vote on Tuesday.
“The map only gets friendlier for us after tonight”, Rubio told reporters during a trip to Puerto Rico, which holds a Republican primary on Sunday.
Saturday’s GOP races in Maine, Kansas, Kentucky and Louisiana and Democratic contests in Nebraska, Kansas and Louisiana were largely overshadowed by the Super Tuesday races dominated by Trump and Clinton. Many in the Republican establishment are apoplectic over whether anyone can stop Trump’s march.
“It looks like it will be the angry Trump voters against the purist conservative Cruz voters”, said Washington-based Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. “The establishment is just being left out”.
Beyond the delegate count, Cruz and Sanders can claim momentum as they head toward critical races in MI next Tuesday and then winner-take-all races in the large states of Florida and OH on March 15.
Clinton will gain more than half of Louisiana’s 51 delegates, erasing Sanders’ modest delegate gain in Nebraska.
Trump has infamously and constantly questioned Cruz’s legal capability to serve as president because the Texas senator was born in Canada. A favorite of evangelicals, he has called for the United States to “carpet bomb” the Islamic State militant group and has pledged to eliminate the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service and four cabinet agencies and to enact a balanced budget amendment.
Candidates in Kentucky only needed 5 percent of the statewide vote to win delegates, and in Kansas and ME the bar was 10 percent.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, called Trump a phony and a fraud who was playing American voters for suckers, and 2008 nominee John McCain, a US senator from Arizona, said Trump’s foreign policy views were uninformed and unsafe.
Cruz’s momentum is thanks in large part to reliable Republican voters.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich also bid for Republican votes.
Cruz won at least 64 delegates on Saturday, Trump at least 49, Rubio at least 13 and Kasich nine, with 20 delegates still to be allocated.
– Success in Louisiana meant that Clinton and Trump feared no serious erosion of their delegate lead.
And in coming Republican contests, like Florida and OH, all delegates in a state will go to the victor, for the first time in the campaign.
Rubio put on a fearless face, saying that the states being contested on Super Saturday favored other candidates, but predicted that his fortunes would soon change. There are a total of 358 delegates at stake in the five states voting March 15, including 99 in Florida and 66 in Ohio. Including superdelegates, the party insiders who can pick any candidate, Clinton now has at least 1,104 delegates, according to the AP count, while Sanders has at least 446.
Trump and Cruz crossed paths Saturday morning at a caucus site in Wichita, Kan., where they delivered abridged versions of their stump speeches to potential supporters. Trump, still the front-runner in the hunt for delegates, bagged Louisiana and Kentucky.
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– “Donald Trump is a bigot”.
