Plus, the earliest states to select delegates are in areas where party insiders sympathetic to Cruz’s more conservative views. But they were all included on the senator’s slates and are largely state party officials who said they were barred from signing a formal pledge for Cruz but have promised to back him in balloting at the convention.
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That means Florida, the most important swing state in the November election, also could play a key role buttressing Trump at the July convention in Cleveland if he doesn’t secure the necessary 1,237 delegates before then, which seems increasingly likely. He compared it to a winner-take-all state where a candidate can win all the available delegates with a simple plurality. This is evidence that Cruz’s support is largely a Never Trump phenomenon.No doubt many factors contributed to Trump’s unmasking: the violence at rallies, his talk of punishing women who have abortions, his campaign manager facing charges from an altercation with a female reporter, the cockamamie ideas Trump has offered to make Mexico pay for a border wall and to cut the debt in half.
The state is overwhelmingly Republican: More than 140,000 residents are registered with the GOP, compared with about 41,000 registered Democrats.
Thirty-five percent of Republicans said they’d actually be scared about what Trump might do as president, and an additional 20 percent colored themselves concerned.
“We’re understanding every delegate in the country, tracking them, understanding where they came from, what their interests are”, said Saul Anuzis, a former Republican National Committee member who is helping the Cruz campaign on delegate outreach.
Of Cruz’s frosty relations with his colleagues, Roberts said: “I think that’s obvious”.
Among the questions on the delegate application: How much time have you volunteered working for the North Dakota GOP, and how much money have you donated? “So what we started doing in August was finding those people around the state that would take on the task of making phone calls and driving people in their own communities to caucuses”.
He still needs to repel the late revolt by rival Ted Cruz as the two gallop toward the campaign season’s final primary races along with third-placed John Kasich.
Trump lost the state of Wisconsin this week to Cruz, who has been fighting tooth and nail in recent weeks. “They’re the values of liberal Democratic politicians, like Andrew Cuomo, like Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, like Charlie Rangel, all of whom Donald Trump has supported” financially. “If they (Republicans) can’t deal with that, I don’t need them”, he said. Ted Cruz at 28 percent and Ohio Gov. John Kasich at 27 percent. But he said it’s become increasingly tough for Trump to grow his base of support.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review recently surveyed Pennsylvania’s delegate candidates and found that 61 of the 110 respondents said they would cast at least their first ballot for the presidential candidate who wins the state’s primary.
The March 15 presidential primary was the first step toward North Carolina Republicans having a say in choosing their party’s presidential nomine. Cruz-backed slates have already swept several congressional-district votes, and by all accounts he’ll win the rest.
Trump supporter Elizabeth Oerther, 40, of Louisville, Kentucky, said she would switch parties and vote for the Democratic nominee if the Republicans denied Trump the nomination.
The real takeaway here is just how many Trumpers say they’re willing to stick with the party this fall even if Trump gets shafted in Cleveland.
So there appears to be a bit of a problem with the Donald Trump campaign in Colorado.
This process would bring the Trump and Cruz campaigns back toward the Republican mainstream. “I didn’t look at the calendar to see when it would be, but I said to myself, ‘Watch, pay attention, he’s going to be running'”.
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One such event was held at the Knickerbocker Club on New York’s East Side last week, the traditional home of the city’s patrician class.
