Sanders, Cruz push to keep rivals in sight
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — The 2016 presidential campaign rumbled through Indiana on Sunday with a focus on Tuesday’s primary, even as front- runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump expressed the desire to fully engage in the one- on- one battle they cast as inevitable.
But the underdogs in both parties made clear they had no plans to exit the race.
“We’re going the distance,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said on ABC’s This Week, arguing that Trump won’t be able to get the majority of delegates required to clinch the nomination before the party’s convention in Ohio. “We’re going into Cleveland, and it will be a contested convention.”
Cruz wasn’t surrendering to the delegate math, even after a tough week in which former House Speaker John Boehner called him “Lucifer in the flesh.” Cruz pointed out on several political talk shows that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and former California Gov. Pete Wilson have endorsed him and that Trump can’t get a majority of Republicans to back him.
And on Face the Nation, Cruz said Trump “is attempting to perpetuate one of the greatest frauds in the history
of modern elections, which is he’s trying to convince people he’s some sort of outsider.”
The Cruz campaign has put an emphasis on Indiana, and a loss there could be perceived as crippling to his campaign, which analysts suspect is why the candidate has shifted to talking about competing in next month’s California primary and beyond.
Indiana, a winner- takemost state with 57 delegates to offer, is the largest of any state until the California primary June 7.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said his path to the nomination depends on the prospect of flipping superdelegates who are now committed to Clinton. Superdelegates can vote for the candidate they prefer.
Clinton, a former secretary of state, is 91 percent of the way to the nomination, according to The Associated Press. Counting superdelegates, she is 218 delegates away from winning the 2,383 need to clinch the nomination.
“We have an uphill climb, no question about it,” Sanders said, before hopping on a plane to Indiana to continue his campaign.
Sanders on Sunday faced a new round of questions about why he was still running.
“It’s difficult; it’s not impossible,” he said on Face the Nation of his increasingly bleak challenge to Clinton.
Sanders has turned to courting superdelegates, the elected officials, lobbyists and other party insiders who are free to back either candidate. He’s asking those party leaders, who overwhelmingly support Clinton, to “go into their hearts” and change their support to him.
To win the nomination, Sanders would have to flip hundreds of superdelegates, far more than the several dozens who changed from Clinton to support then- Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois eight years ago.
Sanders would need to win more than 82 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates through June to clinch the nomination; currently, Sanders has been winning 39 percent.
So far, no Clinton- backing superdelegates have flipped to Sanders, despite an aggressive lobbying campaign from his supporters that in some cases included harassing phones calls and online threats.
Sanders said Sunday that he raised about $ 26 million in April for his campaign, a steep decline from the $ 46 million he raised in March.
FRONT- RUNNERS LOOK AHEAD
Trump, campaigning in Fort Wayne, Ind., reiterated that he believes the GOP race is over even though he does not yet have the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, and he mocked Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich for not exiting the race.
“They’re hanging by their fingernails,” said Trump, who urged the party to come together behind his candidacy. But even if it doesn’t, he said, he expects to be the Republican nominee.
“I’d like to see the party pull together,” Trump said. “Now if it doesn’t pull together, I think I’m still going to win.”
At an earlier rally in Terre Haute, Trump groused that his rivals were forcing him into “wasting time” that he could otherwise spend raising “money for the Senate races.”
That offer of fundraising, incentive for Republican leaders to help push Cruz and Kasich out of the race, is new for Trump. Senior adviser Paul Manafort further telegraphed the message Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation, saying that Trump is looking to strengthen ties to “leaders of the Republican Party and various committees to help raise money for them.”
Clinton, campaigning in Indianapolis, did not mention Sanders. Instead, she criticized Trump for embracing GOP economic policies that she said have left many workers behind. And she took aim at both Trump and Cruz for wanting to “slash taxes on the wealthy” and for using “dangerous” rhetoric about Muslims.
Trump dominated the talk show conversation Sunday. On ABC, the first question posed to Robert Gates, a former CIA director and defense secretary, was about what a Trump candidacy would mean for the nation’s national security.
“I think based on the speech, you’d have somebody who doesn’t understand the difference between a business negotiation and a negotiation with sovereign powers,” Gates, who has worked for Republican and Democratic presidents, replied.
Trump, meanwhile, laid out plans to use Sanders’ attacks to weaken Clinton in the event of facing her in a general election.
Doubling down on his comment that Clinton is succeeding in the Democratic primaries only because she is a woman, Trump said that Sanders has leveled criticism that was “a lot worse” and that he will use it if he runs against Clinton in November.
Sanders “said that she almost shouldn’t be allowed to run, that she’s not qualified to run and she’s not capable,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News Sunday.
“I’m going to use that. We’ll have that teed up. … What he said is incredible. It’s a sound bite,” Trump said.
His plans lend credibility to Clinton’s argument that Sanders’ refusal to drop out of the Democratic primary race will harm her presumptive general- election campaign.
In early April, Sanders repeatedly questioned whether Clinton was qualified for the White House.
“I don’t believe that she is qualified if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in specialinterest funds,” Sanders said while campaigning in Philadelphia.
“I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. I don’t think you are qualified if you’ve supported virtually every disastrous trade agreement, which has cost us millions of decent- paying jobs.”
These are the kinds of comments Trump suggested he will use against Clinton. He said she will have to “be able to take it” if the two become their parties’ nominees for president.
“She’s a strong person — she’s going to have to be able to take it,” Trump said. “The fact is, the only card she has is the woman’s card. She’s done a lousy job in so many ways. Even women don’t like her. … If she were not a woman, she would not even be in this race.”
Clinton said Sunday that Trump’s attacks are “kind of silly.”
“Remember, I have a lot of experience dealing with men who sometimes get off the reservation in the way they behave and how they speak,” she said in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.
“I’m not going to deal with their temper tantrums or their bullying or their efforts to try to provoke me. He can say whatever he wants to say about me. I could really care less.”