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Donald Trump Overwhelms GOP Rivals From Alabama to Massachusetts
| New York Times | - |
Donald
J. Trump won sweeping victories across the South and in New England on
Tuesday, a show of strength in the Republican primary campaign that
underscored the breadth of his appeal and helped him begin to amass a
wide delegate advantage ...
Donald Trump Overwhelms G.O.P. Rivals From Alabama to Massachusetts
Donald J. Trump
won sweeping victories across the South and in New England on Tuesday, a
show of strength in the Republican primary campaign that underscored
the breadth of his appeal and helped him begin to amass a wide delegate
advantage despite growing resistance to his candidacy among party
leaders.
Mr.
Trump’s political coalition — with his lopsided victories in Alabama,
Georgia, Massachusetts and Tennessee, and narrower ones in Arkansas,
Vermont and Virginia — appears to have transcended the regional and ideological divisions that have shaped the Republican Party in recent years.
With
strong support from low-income white voters, especially those without
college degrees, he dominated in moderate, secular-leaning Massachusetts
just as easily as he did in the conservative and heavily evangelical
Deep South.
Brandishing
his Super Tuesday victories as proof of his political might, Mr. Trump
said he expected to consolidate the Republican Party behind his
campaign.
“I
am a unifier,” he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm
Beach, Fla., after the winners of about half the day’s contests had been
declared. “Once we get all of this finished, I am going to go after one
person: Hillary Clinton.”
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Senator Ted Cruz
reasserted himself with victories in his home state, Texas, and in
neighboring Oklahoma, earning a reprieve as he fends off questions about
his viability. The wins strengthened his case that he is the only
alternative capable of overtaking Mr. Trump.
The results were a grievous setback for Senator Marco Rubio
of Florida, who has insistently argued that among the Republican
candidates, only he has the political standing to compete with Mr. Trump
in a head-to-head race. Mr. Rubio’s backers have urged other candidates
to stand down and allow him a clean shot at Mr. Trump, who is a
polarizing figure even among Republican primary voters.
Mr.
Cruz outpolled Mr. Rubio in many of the states that voted on Tuesday,
however, especially in the South, and was the only candidate other than
Mr. Trump to win more than one state. Though Mr. Rubio handily won the
Minnesota caucuses, his otherwise limp finish may have cost him any
leverage he had to demand that other candidates defer to him.
Still, Mr. Rubio urged Republicans not to give up hope of thwarting Mr. Trump.
“Do
not give in to the fear, do not give in to anger, do not give in to
sham artists and con artists who try to take advantage of your
suffering,” he said in Miami. “I will campaign as long as it takes and
wherever it takes to ensure that I am the next president of the United
States.”
In
the states Mr. Trump carried, there was a smattering of resistance in a
band of relatively affluent suburbs, including areas outside Atlanta
and Washington that supported Mr. Rubio, and areas around Boston that
voted for Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.
Cruz Revels in His Two Victories
Senator Ted Cruz spoke in Stafford, Tex., after he captured the Texas and Oklahoma primaries on Super Tuesday.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish Date March 1, 2016.
Photo by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times.
Watch in Times Video »
Republican
strategists have expressed fear that in the general election, Mr. Trump
would struggle to win the support of suburban women and white-collar
voters who might otherwise lean Republican but might recoil from his
caustic and racially charged approach to politics.
Several
of the states that Mr. Trump won, including Massachusetts and
Tennessee, had appeared at one point to be favorable to a mainstream
opponent, and Mr. Rubio and Mr. Kasich both visited those states often.
But
no candidate invested more in success on Super Tuesday than Mr. Cruz,
who spent many days last year campaigning across the South, far afield
of the first nominating states, Iowa and New Hampshire.
Mr.
Cruz has argued consistently that only a candidate with an unblemished
conservative record could mount a strong challenge to Mr. Trump over the
long run. The outcome in Texas, the most populous state to vote on
Tuesday, will also increase his delegate count as candidates jockey for
position in a potentially contested Republican National Convention.
Still,
Mr. Cruz also showed the limits of his political reach: He did not come
close to Mr. Trump in much of the South, he failed to resonate in more
moderate Massachusetts and Virginia, and the lineup of states that vote
later in March may be less hospitable to his brand of rigidly
ideological politics.
Mr.
Cruz, appearing in Stafford, Tex., boasted of his victories but
acknowledged that the splintered opposition would make Mr. Trump
difficult to stop.
Rubio Assesses Super Tuesday Results
Senator Marco Rubio spoke at a rally in Miami about the results of the voting Tuesday.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish Date March 1, 2016.
Photo by Eric Thayer for The New York Times.
Watch in Times Video »
“So
long as the field remains divided, Donald Trump’s path to the
nomination remains more likely, and that would be a disaster for
Republicans, for conservatives and for the nation,” he said, referring
to Mr. Trump as “profane and vulgar.”
Mr.
Cruz did not directly mention Mr. Rubio, but pleaded with those rivals
who had not had similar successes in the primaries to “prayerfully
consider coming together” to halt Mr. Trump.
Both
Mr. Cruz and Mr. Rubio have adopted a survival strategy geared less
toward defeating Mr. Trump outright than toward denying him the
delegates he needs to clinch the nomination before the summer
convention.
But the stakes for the party’s anti-Trump forces have risen in recent days: With Mr. Trump’s initial refusal on Sunday to disavow the support of the Ku Klux Klan
and its former grand wizard David Duke, only his latest inflammatory
episode, he reinforced the fears of Republican leaders that nominating
him would be a historic mistake for the party.
Republicans have been increasingly outspoken in recent days, warning that if Mr. Trump is the nominee, it will consign the party to a general election catastrophe.
Party leaders embarked on a last-ditch effort
in recent weeks to throw up a united front of resistance to Mr. Trump,
perhaps by clearing the field of opponents so that a single challenger
can compete with him, or by directing a late wave of negative
advertising against Mr. Trump in the biggest states that award their
delegates in March.
Trump on His Super Tuesday Victories
Donald J. Trump spoke on Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., after he dominated most of the contests.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish Date March 1, 2016.
Photo by Damon Winter/The New York Times.
Watch in Times Video »
On
Tuesday, several financial patrons of the Republican Party organized a
phone call to drum up funding for an anti-Trump effort. Helping lead the
call were the hedge-fund manager Paul E. Singer, the Chicago Cubs
co-owner Todd Ricketts and Meg Whitman,
the Hewlett-Packard executive and former candidate for governor of
California. It is unclear what kind of political offensive may emerge
from those discussions.
A
handful of outside groups have announced plans to attack Mr. Trump in
television commercials in the coming weeks, including a “super PAC”
backed by Mr. Ricketts and a conservative nonprofit group, the American
Future Fund, that has unveiled ads blasting Mr. Trump for backing a
failed education company that is being sued for fraud.
Without
some sort of extraordinary external intervention or an act of political
sacrifice from one or more of his opponents, the only real prospect of
stopping Mr. Trump’s nomination may come through the political
equivalent of a gang tackle, with a cluster of candidates effectively
banding together to accrue delegates and deny Mr. Trump a majority.
Advisers
to Mr. Rubio and Mr. Kasich have acknowledged that a contested
convention may be their most realistic chance at claiming the Republican
nomination, and that they may have a better chance of blocking Mr.
Trump from winning the 1,237 delegates he needs to be nominated than of
taking a majority themselves.
Mr.
Trump added at least 190 delegates, for a total of over 270, extending
his advantage to more than triple the delegates of Mr. Cruz, his nearest
rival. But because Tuesday’s contests allocated delegates
proportionally, his victories fell short of offering him an impregnable
lead. Mr. Rubio, however, was in danger of failing to reach the vote
threshold, 20 percent, to receive any at-large delegates in Alabama,
Texas and Vermont.
In
a sign of his determination to lock up the nomination swiftly, Mr.
Trump visited two symbolically important states on Super Tuesday: Ohio,
where Mr. Kasich is governor, and Florida, Mr. Rubio’s home state.
Both
states are set to award their delegates on March 15, and Mr. Trump
hopes that by winning both, he can drive his opponents out of the race.
Mr.
Trump trained his fire on Mr. Rubio in his Palm Beach news conference
Tuesday night, belittling him as “a lightweight” and a “little senator.”
He
dismissed threats from a handful of Republicans who have said they may
back a third-party candidate over him. On the contrary, he insisted he
would expand the Republican coalition. “We are going to be a much bigger
party, and you can see that happening,” he said.
Two other candidates, Mr. Kasich and Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, appeared unlikely to gain any momentum on Tuesday.
While
Mr. Kasich ran close to Mr. Trump in Vermont, he will have to enter a
third contest he has targeted, Michigan’s primary on March 8, with no
particular improvement in his fortunes.
Mr.
Kasich sought to put the best face on the wide losses he suffered
Tuesday, crowing to a small crowd in Jackson, Miss., “Tonight, I can say
that we have absolutely exceeded expectations.”
Straining
to find a bright spot on the map, he noted, “We are running, right now,
neck and neck with Donald Trump in the state of Vermont.”
Mr.
Carson has ceased to be much of a factor in the race. He has languished
at the bottom of polls and has not broken through in any recent
debates.
He
spent Tuesday night in a state that did not vote, holding his party in
Baltimore, where he was a longtime neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins
University.
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