Below are updates on Ted Cruz’s Tuesday night win in Wisconsin’s primary. The big takeaways:
- Ted Cruz won the Wisconsin primary and looks set to pull in either 36 or 39 of the state’s 42 delegates.
- He beat Donald Trump by about 8 points more than polls predicted, which suggests that Trump might generally be losing ground after a string of embarrassments.
- It’s certainly possible for Trump to still win the nomination by arriving at the Republican convention in July with 1,237 or more delegates. But he’ll have to win more than half of remaining delegates to do so, which could be tough with both Cruz and John Kasich still in the race.
Cruz! Cruz! Cruz!
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Update, 10:55 p.m.: Here’s Ted Cruz’s victory speech, in which he expresses much enthusiasm, claims dubiously that he might be able to win a majority of delegates before the Republican convention, and quotes a number of dead people (JFK, Churchill, etc.) in orotund fashion.
The Trump campaign, meanwhile, has issued a statement about the results in Wisconsin that might be best characterized as “whiny”:
Update, 10:22 p.m.: The New York Times currently projects a 14-point Cruz victory, which would be a big deal since he was only up by about 5 points in RealClearPolitics’ polling average. In other words, we could be seeing bad press and seeming gaffes actually hurt Trump for once—in the past week or so he’s endorsed and then hastily disavowed the idea that women should be punished for having abortions, made a crass attack on Heidi Cruz’s appearance, and seen his campaign manager charged with battery.
Original post, 9:56 p.m.: How about that Ted Cruz? All the major outlets are now projecting the Texas senator to win Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary by a wide margin. As of this morning, Donald Trump needed to win 54 percent of remaining delegates to ensure that he’d enter July’s Republican convention with a 1,237-delegate majority; what remains to be seen Tuesday night is how much that number will rise when the full Wisconsin results are in. It’s seeming possible right now that Cruz could win all 42 of the state’s delegates, 24 of which are assigned based on vote totals in congressional districts. We’ll also be watching to see whether Donald Trump underperformed his polling average of 35 percent after a run of news that made him look pretty bad even by his low standards. Check back here early and often to feed your insatiable hunger for information about Ted Cruz’s electoral prospects!
