Ted Cruz suspends campaign, clearing path for Trump to get nomination
Texas
senator quits the race after losing to Donald Trump in Indiana, while
Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton
Ben Jacobs in
Indianapolis, Dan Roberts in Washington and Ed Pilkington in New York
Wednesday 4 May 2016
01.46 BST
Ted Cruz suspended
his campaign on Tuesday after a crushing defeat in Indiana’s
primary, leaving the way clear for Donald Trump to become the
Republican nominee for president.
The Texas senator,
who rose to fame with his quixotic 17-day attempt to shut down the
government, was the last remaining competitor to Trump with a clear
shot at the nomination. However, after staking his campaign on a win
in Indiana, Cruz suffered an overwhelming loss in the Hoosier State.
In an inclusive
victory speech in which he tried to heal some of the open wounds of
the past year and begin the long and very difficult process of
unifying the party, Trump had kind words for his vanquished rival.
“I don’t know if
he likes me or doesn’t like me,” he said of the senator for
Texas. “But he is one hell of a competitor. He has an amazing
future.”
In the Democratic
race, Bernie Sanders pulled off a shock victory, beating Hillary
Clinton by 52.7% to 47.3%, with 93% reporting.
“The Clinton
campaign thinks this campaign is over,” he said. “They’re
wrong.”
Cruz leaves the
Republican race having won 565 delegates and 11 states, including the
first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses in January. Despite successfully
building a strong base among evangelicals and social conservatives,
he was unable to expand his following and to pivot to the
unpredictable Trump, who repeatedly bashed him as “Lyin’ Ted”.
In an emotional
address, Cruz told a room of supporters in Indianapolis: “From the
beginning I’ve said I will continue on as long as there is a viable
path to victory – tonight I am sorry to say it appears that math
has been foreclosed.”
As an emotional
crowd shouted “no, no,” Cruz told attendees: “Together we left
it out on the field. We gave it everything we got. But the voters
chose another path, and so with a heavy heart but with boundless
optimism for the long-term future of our nation we are suspending our
campaign.”
Cruz repeatedly
referenced his idol Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful attempt to wrest
the Republican nomination from Gerald Ford in 1976, ending by
promising: “There is no substitute for the America we will restore
as the shining city on the hill for generations to come,” a
reference to Reagan’s farewell address.
Cruz’s exit leaves
John Kasich the only remaining candidate in the race against Trump.
In a statement, the Ohio governor’s chief strategist, John Weaver,
told the Guardian: “The senator ran on strong conservative
principles and his views are part of the broad Republican party.
Donald Trump’s mad hatter ramblings are outside the conservative
reform movement and we will continue onward to deny him the
nomination.”
Kasich did not
compete in Indiana as a result of a pact with Cruz and has so far
only won his home state of Ohio. In a memo sent out earlier Tuesday
night, Kasich vowed to stay in “unless a candidate reaches 1,237
bound delegates before the Convention”.
Victory speech
Trump celebrated
victory at his looming Fifth Avenue tower in New York, marking the
seminal moment in which he was transformed from a maverick and
implausible candidate into presumptive Republican nominee.
He delivered his
victory speech from a podium poignantly positioned just in front of
the escalator in his midtown Manhattan skyscraper where he had
launched his unlikely bid for the White House 10 months ago.
Flanked by his wife
Melania and children, with his controversial campaign manager Corey
Lewandowski and convention manager Paul Manafort close by, he made
soothing noises towards the Republican National Committee and its
chairman Reince Preibus. “It’s not an easy job dealing with 17
egos,” he said, referring to the initial crowded pack of Republican
presidential hopefuls, before adding: “I guess he’s now down to
one ego
Trump effectively
takes the nomination with a personal rating among voters stuck in the
doldrums, with 67% of Americans thinking of him unfavorably. That
makes him the least well-regarded presidential nominee of either main
party since at least 1984 – and the hostility shown towards him by
leaders of the Republican party is unprecedented.
But none of those
hard facts appeared to take any shine off Trump’s moment of
victory. “We want to bring unity to the Republican party. We have
to bring unity,” he said.
Trump glossed over
his terrible poll ratings among female voters by saying: “Women. I
love winning with women.” He similarly shrugged off similar
evidence of the major problem he faces with Hispanic voters and
African Americans.
“We are going to
win, we are going to win in November. And we are going to win big,”
he said.
Recognizing the
shift in gear that faces the Trump campaign, he put a marker in the
sand. “Now we are going after Hillary Clinton,” the candidate
said. “She will not be a great president, she will not be a good
president, she will be a poor president.”
He indicated that he
intended to go after Clinton on the issue of trade and the loss of
American jobs to foreign countries. “She doesn’t understand trade
and her husband signed perhaps in the history of the world the single
worst trade deal, Nafta.”
He also highlighted
Clinton’s comments on the coal industry and the need to restrict it
in the fight against climate change. “Hillary Clinton talked about
the miners as though they were just numbers, and she said she wanted
the mines closed and she would never let them work again. Let me tell
you, the mines are going to start to work again.”
The Sanders campaign
hopes his victory in Indiana will mark one last turning point in a
Democratic race characterised by a series of surprise comebacks that
have prolonged Clinton’s otherwise relentless path toward the
nomination.
He is well placed to
pull off similar wins in West Virginia on 10 May and Oregon on 17
May, before a final showdown next month in California, whose 546
delegates present the biggest prize of the contest.
But even though
Sanders has pledged to keep competing until the party convention in
Philadelphia this July, he has acknowledged that catching up with
Clinton is an “uphill struggle”.
“We are in this
campaign to win and we’re going to fight until the last vote is
cast. There is nothing I would like more than to take on and defeat
Donald Trump, someone who must never become president of this
country,” he said on Tuesday night, calling for a debate with
Clinton in California.
Before Indiana, the
former secretary of state was nearly 300 pledged delegates ahead of
her Vermont rival and within 200 delegates of crossing the finish
line including the controversial superdelegates – party figures who
are able to vote independently of election results and overwhelmingly
back Clinton.
Nonetheless, the
Sanders team will view the Indiana result as an important vindication
of their decision to keep pressuring superdelegates to change their
minds.
On Tuesday night
Clinton ignored her Democratic opponent in favour of an attack on the
man she called “the presumptive Republican nominee”.
“Chip in now if
you agree we can’t let him become president,” she urged her
supporters.
‘Abyss’
Trump’s victory in
Indiana ended the best hope of blocking a presidential nomination
Cruz had claimed will plunge America into the political “abyss”.
The Texas senator’s
decision to drop out had been the subject of debate with the campaign
but some Cruz aides urging that he still had a better chance of being
the nominee after his loss in Indiana than he did when he declared in
March.
Then Cruz was
considered a conservative gadfly who would have to claw and fight
rivals to be the favorite among even his Tea Party base but Cruz
fended off rival after rival to win the Iowa caucuses and become the
conservative standard-bearer in the field.
Despite a day of
dire warnings from Trump’s conservative rival, the New York
businessman was declared victor by the Associated Press within
seconds of polls closing in the Hoosier state.
With the second
highest number of delegates left on offer before the Republican party
convention, Indiana offered a chance for Cruz to repeat his success
in Iowa and Wisconsin by urging midwest voters to reject Trump.
“The country is
depending on Indiana,” he warned on Tuesday. “If Indiana does not
act, this country could well plunge into the abyss … We are not a
proud, boastful, self-centered, mean spirited, hateful, bullying
nation.”
Cruz, whose campaign
had built a formidable grassroots operation, with volunteers knocking
on 70,000 doors in Indiana in the three days before the primary and
making 100,000 calls on the day before the election, but it was all
for all naught. As one top aide said of the campaign as a whole:
“Sometimes you can make all the right moves and still lose.”
With 93% reporting,
Trump had won 53.3% of the vote in Indiana, with Cruz getting 36.6%
and Kasich 7.5%. Trump now has 1,047 pledged delegates as well, of
the 1,237 he needs to be the party’s nominee.
Trump now looks
almost certain to inherit a party he has left bitterly divided
through a brand of politics defined by innuendo, race-baiting and
outright demagoguery.
His latest sally
came in a telephone interview with Fox News on Tuesday, in which the
Republican frontrunner alleged that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, had
met with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of John F
Kennedy and implied that Rafael Cruz was somehow involved.
Cruz attacks Trump
for linking his father to JFK assassination – video
Trump had previously
threatened to “spill the beans” about Cruz’s wife and has
spread a variety of clearly false stories, starting from his June
announcement speech that Mexico was deliberately sending rapists into
the United States and including the repeated claim that American
general John Pershing committed war crimes in the Philippines. The
latter story appears to have originated via an internet hoax spread
by email.
Cruz’s
campaign-ending loss in Indiana came after a significant investment
of resources by anti-Trump forces in the state. Cruz and anti-Trump
Super Pacs spent $6m in the state on television advertising while
Trump spent less than a million.
Further, in a vain
attempt for a boost in the Hoosier State, Cruz unveiled former rival
Carly Fiorina as his running mate if he receives the nomination and
was able to cajole the state’s sitting governor, Mike Pence, into
an endorsement. In contrast, Trump was endorsed in the state by a
number of prominent former college basketball coaches, led by
legendary Indiana University coach Bobby Knight.
With his loss on
Tuesday night, Cruz had not won a primary election for over a month
since his April 5 win in Wisconsin. Despite Cruz doing well in
delegate selection contests in Colorado and Wyoming, Trump won seven
consecutive primaries and over 200 delegates over the last two weeks.
Earlier, Trump had
called for Cruz to drop out of the race in a tweet: “Lyin’ Ted
Cruz consistently said that he will, and must, win Indiana. If he
doesn’t he should drop out of the race-stop wasting time &
money.”
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