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, limiting Trump to just a handful.
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 99.8% of the results in, Sanders was winning by more than 13 points, though 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 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?”
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’s 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 all but four precincts reporting, Sanders had 56.5% to Clinton’s 43.1%, while Cruz could boast 48.3% to Trump’s 35.1%. The Ohio governor, John Kasich, was on 14.1%.
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’s 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.
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