Trump sweeps northeast
Rivals fail in effort to thwart billionaire; Clinton easily captures 4 of 5 primaries
WASHINGTON— The Stop Trump movement is not, at the moment, stopping Donald Trump. Not even close.
The billionaire earned another series of resounding victories on Tuesday, winning all five of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island and Delaware by huge margins to keep himself on a narrow path to clinching the Republican presidential nomination.
Trump’s rivals weren’t competitive anywhere. At press time, he was up 36 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 30 points in Connecticut, 33 in Maryland, 40 in Rhode Island, and 41 in Delaware.
His massive night will give him about 111 delegates of the 118 that were available.
That is a major setback for Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and the motley collection of outside forces unsuccessfully attempting to thwart the demagogue who is wildly unpopular with the general electorate.
The campaign now approaches another pivotal moment in Indiana, where Trump appears to hold a slight lead over Cruz, a Texas senator. If he wins there next Tuesday, he will likely have a realistic chance to seal the nomination with a strong showing in California on the last day of voting in early June.
“I consider myself the presumptive nominee, absolutely,” he said in his victory speech at Trump Tower in New York.
He said Hillary Clinton has “nothing else going” except for “the women’s card.” He promised to beat her easily, though he trails her by 10 points in the polls, and said his unfavourable rating has been declining, though it has been rising.
“I unify people,” he said. “We’re going to have such unity.
Clinton, the former secretary of state, senator and first lady, won easily in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware and narrowly in Connecticut, with Bernie Sanders winning Rhode Island.
Her victories will identify pressure on Sanders to drop out of a race that appears essentially over.
Clinton vowed in her victory speech to unify the party. She emphasized the issues where she and Sanders agree, and she thanked him and his supporters for bringing income inequality to the fore and for “challenging us to get unaccountable money out of our politics.”
“Whether you support Sen. Sanders or you support me, there’s much more that unites us than divides us,” she said.
With just 10 states left to vote in the Republican race, neither Cruz nor Kasich, the Ohio governor, has any chance to win the 1,237 delegates needed to secure their party’s nomination. But they do have an opportunity to keep Trump slightly below the 1,237 threshold. That would allow them to attempt to win the nomination on the second round of voting — or third or fourth or fifth round — at a contested convention in July.
Tuesday’s failure, though, will make their quest much more difficult. Trump far outperformed opinion polls that had showed him with big leads. He won even with evangelicals and people who called themselves “very conservative,” Cruz’s core demographic group.
Cruz’s brand of aggressive Christian conservatism has proven toxic in the northeast.
Kasich, who has positioned himself as a moderate alternative, has failed to connect with voters anywhere outside his home state.
Still to be determined, and potentially decisive, is how Pennsylvania’s delegation will vote. Trump earned 17 of the state’s 71 delegates by winning the state. But the other 54 are “unbound,” free to vote however they want when they get to the convention in Cleveland.
Many have pledged to pick whichever candidate won their local district, which would be good news for Trump given his statewide landslide.
Whatever they end up deciding, Indiana will be important. In an indication of just how essential Cruz believes the state is, he agreed Sunday to stop spending money in Oregon and New Mexico in return for Kasich butting out of Indiana. But their non-aggression pact appeared to collapse nearly as soon as it began: Kasich advised his Indiana supporters Monday to vote for him.
Trump called the alliance “collusion,” though it is not illegal, and said it was more evidence of a “totally rigged” Republican primary system.
Sanders had claimed “momentum” after he won six of seven states between late March and early April. But he has now lost at least four since last week.