Cruz
crushes Trump as Sanders beats Clinton in Wisconsin primaries
Cruz’s
win comes at a crucial time for the Republican party as Trump has
lost his top spot in some polls and faces a difficult path to
securing the delegates needed
What
we learned from the Wisconsin primaries
Dan Roberts in
Madison, Wisconsin and Ben Jacobs and Megan Carpentier in Milwaukee
Wednesday 6 April
2016 04.00 BST
Ted Cruz raised
fresh hope of forcing Donald Trump to a contested party convention on
Tuesday, beating the Republican frontrunner in a Wisconsin primary
amid signs his brash campaign style may finally be turning off GOP
voters.
Cruz was projected
by the Associated Press to have won the important midwest showdown
just over half an hour after polls closed at 8pm CDT. As the scale of
his victory across the state became clearer, the Texas conservative
was estimated to have won at least 33 of the 42 delegates on offer,
possibly limiting Trump to just a handful by the end of the night.
In his victory
speech, Cruz looked ahead to the convention in July and vowed he
would win the 1,237 delegates needed “either before Cleveland or at
the convention in Cleveland”.
The Texas senator
said: “Tonight is a turning point [in the Republican primary]. It
is a rallying cry ... We have a choice, a real choice.” And he
echoed John F Kennedy in saying “Wisconsin lit a candle guiding the
way forward” for Republican voters in future primaries.
Hillary Clinton also
stumbled on her path to the White House, losing to Bernie Sanders in
a Democratic primary that marked a sixth straight win for the Vermont
outsider and shows his continued appeal among voters looking for
radical change.
With more than half
the results in, it looked as if Sanders could win by more than 10
points, but the Democrats’ proportional system of allocating their
86 pledged delegates will limit the impact of his victory on the
national race. Clinton had a commanding lead of 263 delegates at the
start of the night.
Sanders’ victory
speech came at a rally in Laramie, Wyoming, where the campaign has
its eye on the next caucus this Saturday and was in defiant mood
despite the difficult mathematical challenge ahead.
“If you ignore
what you hear in the corporate media, the facts are pretty clear: we
have a path toward victory, a path toward the White House,” said
the visibly-energised senator to excited shouts of “Bernie,
Bernie”.
“Let me say a
word, well perhaps two words, about what momentum is all about,” he
added, describing how the media had dismissed him as a fringe
candidate who started by 60-70 points behind in polling but had
failed to realise what was motivating voters.
“From coast to
coast ... people are saying why is it we have grotesque levels of
inequality? ... Why is it the great middle class of this country has
been shrinking?”
Sanders hails
Wisconsin victory in campaign ‘by the people for the people’ –
video
He raised recent tax
disclosures in Panama for the first time on the campaign trail,
claiming the revelations in the Guardian and elsewhere were “one of
the reasons I oppose the [2011] free trade agreement with Panama”
and showed “exactly what I feared would happen ... with wealthy
people and large corporations figuring out how to avoid paying their
fair share of taxes.”
Sanders said he
could close the remaining delegate gap in the nomination race by
persuading Democratic “superdelegates” – party elites, the vast
majority of whom are backing Clinton – to change their minds,
prompting a fierce response from Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook.
“Your vote is your
voice, and the Sanders campaign shouldn’t be trying to circumvent
the process – or the nearly 9 million (and counting) people who
have made their voice heard for Hillary in this election,” he wrote
in an email to supporters.
With almost 80% of
the vote counted, Sanders had 56.2% to Clinton’s 43.5%, while Cruz
could boast 49.1% to Trump’s 34.2%. Ohio governor John Kasich was
on 14.3%.
Both victories were
in line with recent opinion polls in Wisconsin, but the win for Cruz
– his ninth in the 2016 nomination race – comes at a crucial time
for the Republican party in particular.
Trump has lost his
top spot in some national opinion polls and faces a difficult path to
securing the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination outright,
even though he is still comfortably ahead of Cruz.
Recent controversial
remarks suggesting women should be “punished” for having
abortions also seem to have cemented a growing and significant
unpopularity among female voters.
And the Wisconsin
defeat follows similar losses in the neighboring states of Iowa and
Minnesota, a region where polite traditions of “midwest nice” do
not always sit easily with his aggressive New York rhetoric.
“Wisconsin nice means we’re nice but we’re not pushovers,”
said Wisconsin governor Scott Walker at Cruz’s election night
victory party.
Cruz won the state’s
presidential primary on Tuesday after receiving the support of most
of the state’s power structure. Influential governor and former
presidential candidate Walker as well as nearly every conservative
talk radio host in the state rallied behind the Texas senator in a
last-ditch effort to stop Trump in the Badger State.
Cruz had long led in
polls of the mid-western state, but Trump had criss-crossed the state
in recent days, even bringing out his wife Melania in an attempt to
close the gap. He touted one outlier poll that showed him ahead,
bragging on Monday night: “You see what’s happening with the
polls? Boom, like a rocket ship.”
However, in a state
where according to exit polls only 6% of Republican voters saw
immigration as their top issue and a majority said they would be
scared or concerned if Trump was the nominee, it wasn’t enough.
In the week
preceding the primary, Trumnp’s campaign manager was arrested for
battering a reporter and the candidate repeatedly flip-flopped on
abortion after his controversial initial remarks. This, combined with
a series of controversial remarks on foreign policy, including saying
that “nuclear proliferation is going to happen anyway”, had left
Trump at his most politically vulnerable in months. By the eve of the
state’s primary, the frontrunner had fallen out of first place in a
national tracking poll for the first time in months.
The real estate
mogul didn’t help his cause by repeatedly bashing Walker. Trump
attacked the Wisconsin governor’s stewardship of the state’s
economy and boasted that he had “sent him packing like a little
boy” from the presidential race. Unusually for a Republican
candidate, Trump even attacked Walker for not raising taxes.
While the attacks
were well-received at his rallies, where many attendees – such as
Sheila Roth of Wausau – were Democrats who had voted for Obama and
against Walker but thought the GOP candidate would “be good at
bringing the jobs back to America where we need them”, in a state
where Walker has won three elections in the past five years, this
approach did not play well with many conservatives.
Trump still
maintained some pockets of strength in rural, heavily Catholic areas
in the north and west of the state, however, but these were eclipsed
by Cruz’s strong performances in the so-called “WOW counties”
of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington that ring Milwaukee. The Texas
senator had counted on a strong performance in these areas, which had
been crucial to Walker’s electoral success and provided Mitt Romney
with his winning margin over Rick Santorum in the state’s 2012
presidential primary. Cruz even held his election eve rally in
crucial Waukesha County, the most populous of the three, to shore up
his base there.
In a statement,
Trump raged about “lyin’ Ted”, saying: “Ted Cruz is worse
than a puppet – he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party
bosses to steal the nomination from Trump.”
The Cruz campaign
brushed this off, with top aide Jason Miller simply saying “Donald’s
gonna Donald”.
Yet Cruz’s win
still leaves him more than 200 delegates behind Trump in the race to
reach the 1,237 mark needed to clinch the nomination and the Texas
senator conceded tonight that a contested convention which he once
derided as “a fever dream” is now a likely scenario.
Further, the
Republican primaries for the rest of April occur on Trump’s home
turf. On 19 April Republicans will vote in Trump’s home state of
New York and the so-called “Acela Primary” will be held on 26
April when Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode
Island hold their primaries.
Polling and
demographic data indicates that these states should be strongholds
for Trump. But the Republican race still remains uncertain. All the
normal rules of politics have seemingly been suspended so far, and,
as Trump said at a campaign rally Monday night: “I don’t care
about rules, folks.”
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