Five key states —
Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina — are holding primaries
for both parties Tuesday, but it’s the Republican race that’s attracting the
most attention.
Trump — who leads the
field in nominating contest wins, he count of delegates needed for a show of
strength at the party convention in July, and polls — could become unstoppable.
Completely in dread
of that prospect, the party establishment, a loosely defined body of insiders
and past and present elected officials, is fervently hoping for one of his
rivals to stop him.
Rubio, a first-time
Cuban-American senator from Florida, is their current favourite and leads the
stop-Trump campaign in his home-state funded by party surrogates and donors.
Unfortunately for the
establishment, and him, Rubio is in a bad shape in the polls in Florida —
trailing Trump 24.4% to 43%, which makes defeat a certainty, unless the polls
don’t hold.
Rubio is hoping for a
miracle because if he loses, he will come under pressure to quit the race to
make way for the consolidation of anti-Trump votes behind a better placed
challenger.
Trump’s opponents
believe he is vulnerable in a two-man contest because he has failed to poll
more than 50% in surveys and in the primaries and caucuses so far.
Most Republicans,
they argue, remain unconvinced about him, but are currently split among his
many rivals giving him a
numerical advantage in polls and votes.
But if they coalesced
behind any one of his rivals — Rubio, Ted Cruz, who is currently second to
Trump, or Kasich — they could easily bring down the frontrunner, goes the
argument.
Trump leads the
national average of polls with 36% with Cruz next at 21.8% and Rubio 18%. And
he leads the count of delegates 460 to Cruz’s 370 and Rubio’s 163.
All fie Republican
primaries Tuesday follow the winner-takes-a format, and are crucial for that
reason too — with the potential to bolster a campaign with just one wins thus
as he leads his rivals in all but one of the five states polling Tuesday. The
exception is Ohio, where he is trailing Kasich.
But even if Kasich
were to win, he is unlikely to gain much from it, according to pundits and
experts, this being only his first win in the nominating contests so far.
Cruz, who is running
second to Trump in polls and nominating contests, may look like the best-placed
alternative in numbers, but he is thoroughly despised by party leaders and
colleagues.
Barnstorming across
Florida last week, Cruz made a case for himself arguing he can stop Trump, and
not the local hero Rubio, which some said, was actually a strategy to stop
Rubio.
On the Democratic
side, Clinton is leading decisively in Florida, Ohio and North Carolina and is
locked in a close connotes with Sanders in Illinois Missouri.
How many medals can India win in the Paris Paralympics 2024?