Republican tide beginning to turn against Trump
COLORADO Republicans are busy this weekend making it harder for Donald Trump to get 1 237 bound and committed delegates by June 7, when the final primaries are held.
Colorado’s initial caucuses were held on March 1, but only now has a state party convention gathered to choose its 37 delegates for the national convention in July. Those delegates will be bound to a candidate if they announce their support before the final vote. If not, they will be free to choose whom to support.
And with a huge gap between the organisational incompetence of the Trump campaign and the solid Ted Cruz effort, Cruz is dominating.
Colorado was expected to be good for Cruz, but not quite this good. A panel of experts projected that Trump would win seven delegates in the state. If he is shut out, as appears likely, he will fall further behind the pace he needs to wrap up the nomination. That would put him on a path to reach only 1 175 delegates — 62 shy of a majority for the nomination.
Trump can still win, but he has run out of a margin of error. He has to maximise victories on April 19 and 26 in the northeast, win in Indiana on May 3, and win big on June 7 in California.
If he does not win by then, he will go into the pre-convention period needing to make up the difference. But if the party continues to oppose him, he will be fighting an uphill battle to get more than a handful of the 150 or so unbound delegates.
Meanwhile, Trump’s national lead over Cruz continues to slump. His campaign has also been uncharacteristically quiet since losing in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and we have yet to see what will happen to his vote share if he cannot command media attention.
In the Democrat camp, tensions between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders cooled on Friday when Sanders said “of course” Clinton was qualified to be president, walking back from his attack on Wednesday.
“On her worst day, she would be an infinitely better president than either of the Republican candidates,” Sanders said on NBC’s He urged reporters to focus on “real issues” rather than attacks.
Further lowering tensions was Sanders strategist Tad Devine, who said the senator would “do everything to make sure that the next president is a Democrat” in an interview with the Washington Post. “Bernie understands that having someone like Trump or Cruz become president of the US would be destructive to the future of this nation.”
The remarks came after a heated 24-hour stretch when Sanders refused to back down from his comment that Clinton was “not qualified”, despite demands from her camp.
Clinton, who said on Thursday that she would prefer Sanders to Trump or Cruz any time, seemed content with her rival’s change of heart.
“We are glad Senator Sanders reversed himself,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon. “To call Secretary Clinton unqualified was absurd on its face, but if he persisted . . . it would have been dangerous in its potential to spark disunity in the Democratic Party.”
The return to civility serves as a reminder that the Democratic Party is, overall, in healthier shape than the Grand Old Party, at least on the presidential level.
“The cleavages inside the Democratic Party are not comparable to what we’re seeing in the Republican Party right now. You know, the argument inside the Democratic Party is a little bit more about means, less about ends,” President Barack Obama said on Thursday at the University of Chicago Law School, arguing that Clinton and Sanders shared the same goals on major issues.
But divisions in the party linger. A McClatchy-Marist poll released on Wednesday found that a potentially devastating 25% of Sanders supporters say they would not support Clinton in an election, with 69% saying they would. — PAVEMENT POLITICS: A man in a Donald Trump mask harangues a supporter of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders after Sanders spoke at a rally in the Greenpoint neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, this week. New York state will hold its presidential primary on April 19