The Republican Presidential race is now all but officially over: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, after losing to billionaire Donald Trump in Indiana on a day when Trump suggested his father helped JFK’s assassin and Cruz forcefully responded by denouncing Trump, is ending his presidential race:
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is ending his campaign after suffering a devastating loss to frontrunner Donald Trump in the Indiana primary, campaign manager Jeff Roe told the Texas Tribune.
With about 43 percent of the vote in, Trump was projected to beat Cruz by about 2o points, 54 percent to 35 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who had struck a deal with Cruz to effectively concede the Hoosier State, was winning less than 10 percent of the vote.
Trump was on track to win most — if not all — of Indiana’s 57 delegates, significantly easing his path to the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the Republican National Convention. Eyeing a contested convention, Cruz has vowed to stay in the race regardless of the outcome in the Hoosier State.
Minutes after major TV networks projected Trump’s victory, he renewed his call for Cruz to leave the race.
“Lyin’ Ted Cruz consistently said that he will, and must, win Indiana,” Trump tweeted. “If he doesn’t he should drop out of the race-stop wasting time & money.”
Will Cruz endorse Trump in the end? If so it will prove what a silly ballet American politics has become.
Trump suggesting that Cruz’s dad was associated with Lee Harvey Oswald was a new low, and Cruz’s denunciation was one of the fiercest we’ve ever seen in a Presidential campaign.
Ever.
And if he doesn’t endorse Trump, will Cruz’s now admittedly not huge group of followers support Trump, or stay home? I’m betting on the first one.
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.