Trump sees knockout in Indiana; Cruz edgy
OSCEOLA, Ind. — Sen. Ted Cruz’s conservative crusade for the presidency fought for new life Monday ahead of Indiana primaries today.
Republican front- runner Donald Trump, for his part, held a pair of rallies in the state Monday. But he was already looking past Cruz and setting his sights on Democratic front- runner Hillary Clinton.
“Indiana is very important, because if I win that’s the end of it,” Trump said at an unscheduled stop at Shapiro’s Delicatessen in Indianapolis.
At a concert hall in Carmel, near Indianapolis, Trump again said that winning the state would end the Republican race. “I’m going to start focusing on Hillary,” he said. “That’s going to be so easy. It’s going to be so great.”
The senator from Texas hinted at an exit strategy, even as he vowed to compete to the end against Trump.
“I am in for the distance — as long as we have a viable path to victory,” Cruz told reporters after campaigning at a popular breakfast stop.
Like Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Cruz is already mathematically eliminated from reaching a delegate majority before the Republican Party’s national convention in July. He retreated to Indiana more
than a week ago, hoping a win could at least help him deny Trump an outright primary victory and lead to a contested convention.
After six straight victories across the Northeast late last month, math and momentum are on Trump’s side.
The anti- Trump movement’s only hope is to deny the businessman a 1,237- delegate majority by defeating him in Indiana and the handful of contests remaining over the next month.
Then, Cruz or another candidate would have to beat him when delegates gather in Cleveland in July.
Indiana will award 57 delegates in the Republican primary, 30 to the statewide winner and three in each of the state’s nine congressional districts. Trump has 996 of the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination.
“Millions of Americans are praying for this state,” Cruz said. “The entire country is depending on the state of Indiana to pull us back from this cliff.”
Trump’s team sensed an Indiana knockout.
“Indiana is Ted Cruz’s firewall. It’s where he says that it’s make- or- break for him,” Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Monday. “And if he loses [ tonight], he has to once again try and articulate why he is still in this race.”
The Republican presidential nomination may be in his sights, yet Trump has so far ignored vital preparations needed for a quick transition to the general election.
The New York businessman has collected little information about tens of millions of voters he needs to turn out in the fall. He’s sent few people to battleground states compared with Clinton, accumulated little if any research on her, and taken no steps to build a network capable of raising the roughly $ 1 billion needed to run a modern- day general election campaign.
Yet his aides acknowledged they’ll tap into the resources of the party’s establishment — the Republican National Committee, above all — as the scale and scope of the 2016 contest grow exponentially. That’s even as he rails daily against his party’s establishment as corrupt, and they predict his unique success so far will pay off again in November.
Trump has taken steps in recent weeks to add experienced political staff to expand his bare- bones organization. Yet the team has been consumed by playing catch up with Cruz, devoting almost no energy or planning to the next phase.
On the Democratic side, Clinton has already begun to send waves of campaign workers to battleground states. Advisers are starting to consider locations for a convention rally in Philadelphia, and lawyers are scrutinizing more than two dozen possible vice presidential picks.
The day features a primary on the Democratic side, too. New signs emerged that Clinton’s chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is fading as well.
Clinton brought in more campaign cash in April than Sanders, the first time in months that she has bested Sanders and his juggernaut of fervent supporters willing to donate over and over.
Clinton’s campaign said Monday it raised about $ 26.4 million in donations for the primary. Sanders’ campaign said Sunday that it brought in $ 25.8 million in April.
Clinton’s success in April was due more to a dramatic drop- off in Sanders’s donations rather than a big spike in hers. Sanders had brought in about $ 44 million a month in February and March; Clinton’s haul for March was about $ 27 million.
Shrugging off the numbers, Sanders, like Cruz, vowed to “fight hard as hard as we can for every vote.”
He called the Democratic primary process “rigged,” noting that he has won 45 percent of the pledged delegates awarded after primaries or caucuses, but only about 7 percent of superdelegates, the Democratic officials and party leaders who can support the candidate of
Democratic presidential candidate their choice.
Polls show a close vote is likely.
Campaigning Monday in Evansville, Sanders said he needed to record some big wins to become the nominee. Addressing a riled- up crowd, Sanders took aim at “the billionaire class,” prompting a supporter to cry out that the superrich should get lost, in earthier language.
Laughing, Sanders replied that he was “constrained” from using such language. “I can’t quite phrase it like that, but that’s not bad,” he said. “You get to the point very succinctly. I like it.”
If some voters remain passionately supportive of Sanders, the delegate math, however, is against him. Clinton has more than 90 percent of the 2,383 delegates needed for the nomination, including superdelegates. She has nearly 300 more pledged delegates than Sanders.
Clinton faced some angry
voters Monday during a campaign swing through West Virginia. Bo Copley, an unemployed coal worker, asked Clinton why voters should believe her pledge to help revitalize the region’s economy during a stop at a health center in Williamson.
“Still supporting her hurts you,” he told Sen. Joe Manchin, D- W. Va., who joined Clinton at the small round- table event. “It’s not a good outlook here.”
Clinton released a $ 30 billion plan last fall aimed at aiding communities dependent on coal production, and she’s promised that her husband would focus on revitalizing the region.
Her efforts haven’t been helped by a remark she made in a March interview with CNN, when she said she would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” She was responding to a question about how her policies would benefit poor white people in Southern states.
Clinton called the comment a “misstatement.”
She is in the midst of a two- day campaign swing through Appalachia ahead
of voting in that region later this month.
CRUZ PUSHES FOR VOTE
With Sanders struggling for traction, Cruz barnstormed Indiana with five stops on Monday alone in a sprint for support alongside his latest high- profile supporter, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
“We need every single vote,” he declared at Bravo Cafe in Osceola, where he predicted a tight finish the next day.
Trump was leading in polls, even after Cruz took extraordinary steps to boost his chances in the state.
He announced his pick for vice president last week, unveiling former businesswoman Carly Fiorina as his running mate at an Indiana stop. Days earlier, he declared an alliance of sorts with Kasich in which the Ohio governor agreed to pull his advertising from Indiana airwaves.
The strategy seemed to unravel even as it was announced. And it may have backfired. An NBC poll found nearly 6 in 10 Indiana primary voters disapproved of the Cruz- Kasich arrangement.
Cruz is also counting on his data- driven, grassroots organization to counter Trump’s appeal to displaced middle- class workers and other disaffected voters. Cruz also is tapping a network of social and religious conservatives in Indiana that is naturally aligned with his candidacy and has been active in legislative fights in the state over religious liberty and gay rights.
“Without it, it’s a Trump state,” said John Hammond, the state’s national Republican committeeman and a party delegate. “It is a very strong base that is used to being mobilized.”
Still, while Cruz’s campaign said it has five offices in Indiana, about a dozen paid staff members and more than 3,000 volunteers “in a sign that grassroots conservatives are rising up and coalescing behind Ted,” Trump has four offices and 40 paid workers also making calls and knocking on doors, said campaign manager Lewandowski. He said opponents ignore Trump’s ground game at their peril, and the results are obvious in the states he has dominated — including South Carolina and Alabama, where he won over evangelicals.