We’re still a half-day away from finding out who won Mega Tuesday’s major prizes, but Donald Trump is already on the board with a victory in the Northern Mariana Islands (where it’s already Wednesday).
According to Jason Osborne, the executive director of the local Republican Party, Trump won handily with 73 percent of the 471 total votes cast in the GOP’s winner-take-all caucus, which will add another nine delegates to his field-leading total. Ted Cruz finished a distant second with 24 percent of the vote, followed by John Kasich and Marco Rubio with 2 percent and 1 percent, respectively.
While the rest of Tuesday is shaping up to be a battle between Trump and the establishment-backed #NeverTrump movement—particularly in Ohio and Florida—the celebrity billionaire actually had the support of the local Republican apparatus in the Northern Marianas. Osborne, a former adviser to Ben Carson, joined Team Trump after Carson left the race, and the territory’s Republican Gov. Ralph Torres, endorsed the GOP front-runner over the weekend.
It’s only nine delegates, and I don’t want to overstate the importance of a presidential caucus victory in a remote chain of Pacific Islands. Still, every delegate counts. Furthermore, under the current GOP rules, a candidate needs to have the support of a majority of delegates in eight states or territories to be eligible for the nomination—which means Trump’s win there denies his rivals a chance to get one step closer to that threshold. (Ultimately, though, Republicans will almost certainly rewrite those rules if they think they can force a contested convention.)
What might the rest of the day hold? We’ve got you covered here.
Elsewhere in Slate: An Extremely Detailed Guide to What the Heck Might Happen at a GOP Contested Convention
