“Trump and Gov. John Kasich are in a dead heat for the Buckeye State’s GOP delegates”. The same poll from the CT university a week ago gave Mr. Trump a six-point lead over the governor.
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“Ohio is a real contest on both sides”, said Peter A. Brown, the poll’s assistant director. Bernie Sanders has closed a nine-point deficit to the smallest of margins. The following day in OH brought a fresh security scare as a protester tried to rush on stage towards the candidate. The race is within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points among Democrats.
A week after saying that it would be “illegitimate” and “wrong” for Washington insiders at the Republican National Convention to nominate a presidential candidate against the wishes of most voters, Ted Cruz said Sunday it would actually be fine if the convention chose between him and front-runner Donald Trump as long neither had achieved the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination automatically.
“Neither one of them have any possibility of beating Donald Trump”, Cruz said.
Slightly more than a quarter of Trump supporters (28 percent) selected Cruz as their second choice, while 18 percent chose Rubio and 10 percent chose Christie. Sanders wins among the very liberal by nearly 2:1 (64/36), but also has a majority of the “somewhat liberal” (50/46).
Under these parameters, Texas Sen. Despite Rubio’s public optimism, the new poll suggests Florida – where Rubio has staked his campaign’s future – might serve as a humbling barrier for his White House bid.
A loss there is expected to signal an end to Mr. Marco’s as would a loss in OH for Mr. Kasich. But Clinton had a double-digit lead in most polls before the MI primary and wound up losing that in a squeaker.
By Wednesday morning – early Wednesday morning, presumably – Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Missouri will have doled out their 286 delegates.
“The plan is to win OH, and some other states, and if that happens, nobody is going to have enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot”, said John Weaver, Kasich’s chief campaign strategist, who also worked on Republican Senator John McCain’s losing presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2008.
Elsewhere, in the Midwest states and industrial regions surrounding the Great Lakes, Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, has snatched up victories with promises of a political revolution. Yet he seemed to soften ahead of Tuesday’s five nominating contests in which, for the first time, all delegates in a given state will pledge to support that state’s victor rather than splitting up to reflect vote share.
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In a tight race, that means the loser would still walk away with a healthy dose of delegates.
