Delegates’ support for Cruz wanes
Donald Trump’s recent primary landslides are drawing more Republican delegates to him — and away from U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, despite the Texan’s courting of them.
Even as Donald Trump trounced him from New Hampshire to Florida to Arizona, Sen. Ted Cruz could reassure himself with one crucial advantage: He was beating Trump in the obscure, internecine delegate fights that could end up deciding the Republican nomination for president.
“This is how elections are won in America,” Cruz gloated after walking away with the most delegates in Wyoming.
But it turns out that delegates — like ordinary voters — are susceptible to shifts in public opinion. And as the gravitational pull of Trump’s recent primary landslides draws more Republicans toward him, Cruz’s support among the party’s 2,472 convention delegates is softening, threatening his hopes of preventing Trump’s nomination by overtaking him in a floor fight.
With each delegate Trump claims, he gets closer to the 1,237 he needs to clinch the nomination outright, and Cruz’s chances of stopping him — even if he pulls out a victory in Tuesday’s Indiana primary — shrink.
Before Trump’s crushing victory in Pennsylvania last week, Cruz’s campaign boasted that it had 69 people devoted to acquiring as many as possible of the state’s 54 unbound delegates — who are free to vote as they please on the first ballot, making them potentially decisive players in a contested convention. Cruz won only three. In North Dakota, where the Cruz campaign declared victory after the state Republican convention on April 3 and declared that it had won “a vast majority” of the state’s 28 unbound delegates, Cruz’s support appears to be weakening. In interviews, delegates said he really had only about a dozen firm commitments to begin with, and some of them appear to be wavering as he falls farther behind Trump.
And in states across the South, which was supposed to be Cruz’s bulwark, some delegates are now echoing a growing sentiment inside the Republican Party: a sense of resignation to the idea that Trump will be their standard-bearer.
“Honestly, we didn’t think he could get this far. And he did,” Jonathan Barnett, the Republican national committeeman for Arkansas, said of Trump.
Barnett, who supported former Gov. Mike Huckabee’s f ailed campaign, said his focus had shifted to winning in November, even if that meant unhappily falling in behind Trump.
The changes of heart have little to do with any epiphany about Trump’s electability or his campaign’s recent efforts to cast him in a more serious light. Instead, delegates and party officials said, they are ready to move on and unite behind someone so that Republicans are not hopelessly divided heading into the general election.