After Sunday night’s Democratic debate, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver raised eyebrows when he referred to Clinton as a “regional candidate” who struggles to win outside the South.
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“I will win Ohio”, Kasich said on ABC’s “This Week”.
Among Democrats, Clinton had accumulated 1,134 delegates and Sanders 502, including superdelegates.
Clinton had her own, less-pointed, assessment of the recent GOP smack-down. “We would like to wrap it up as soon as possible because you don’t want the Republican nominee to get, if they wrap up soon, we don’t want to be far behind them”.
But the 2012 GOP nominee is nevertheless leaving the door open – just a crack – to the possibility of being drafted by his party at a contested convention in July. Cruz made his appeal to voters in north Idaho, especially if they had been supporting another candidate. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida.
The results were a setback for rival John Kasich, governor of OH, who had hoped to pull off a surprise win in neighbouring MI, and Marco Rubio, a USA senator from Florida who has become the establishment favourite but lagged badly in MI and MS and appeared unlikely to win delegates in either.
Cruz posted impressive margins in both Kansas and ME, and he beat Trump in the closed caucuses, where only registered Republicans could vote.
In addition to Michigan, Republicans hold primaries in MS and Idaho, as well as caucuses in Hawaii.
“I think it’s time for [Rubio] to drop out of the race”, Trump said.
“John Kasich is the best of the bunch, but if you measure a candidate by the caliber of his campaign, Kasich’s lack of traction and organization make a vote for him count for little”.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump was scheduled to campaign in the Jackson suburb of Madison on Monday evening, ahead of the Tuesday primaries.
The Kasich campaign, despite finishing no higher than third Saturday, said it was committed to the “long-term”.
Take a look at the map above of the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
The snapshot of Florida comes before the state’s crucial 99-delegate, winner-take-all primary set for March 15. But if one were to add in all of Florida’s and Ohio’s delegates to Trump’s tally now, giving him 14 wins in the first 21 states, he would still have won only 53 percent of the delegates to date-meaning he’d still have to win about 48 percent of the delegates across the remaining 29 states.
So something’s definitely going on in the Republican race, and Louisiana may well beget Cruz’s emergence as the single strongest Trump rival.
Meahwhile, Trump said on Sunday that, as president, he would push to change laws that prohibit waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, arguing that banning them puts the U.S. at a strategic disadvantage against Islamic State militants.
Stressing the importance of voter turnout, he said, “when large numbers of people come – working people, young people who have not been involved in the political process – we will do well, and I think that is bearing out tonight”.
In Kansas, things fared better for Cruz, who secured 24 delegates and 48.2 percent of the votes to win the primary. But in terms of delegates, Clinton continues to dominate with at least 1,117 to Sanders’s 477.
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Winning Ohio could help Kasich play a small role in denying Trump the delegates he needs to win the GOP nomination outright.
