Donald Trump, the billionaire businessman, reality TV star and ultimate political outsider, has become the “presumptive” Republican presidential nominee after a landslide victory in Indiana on Tuesday that has prompted both his rivals to quit the race.
While Senator Ted Cruz, the only formidable opponent, quit as soon as the Indiana results came out on Tuesday evening, Ohio Governor John Kasich decided to end his long-shot bid on Wednesday. He was slated to make a formal announcement later in the day.
Their actions have effectively cleared the field for Trump, who has dominated the Republican race right from the start. There were as many as 17 aspirants and one by one, they all bowed out in the face of the Trump juggernaut.
In the Democratic field, front-runner Hillary Clinton suffered a hiccup after a string of victories as Senator Bernie Sanders defeated her in Indiana and vowed to take the battle for nomination all the way to the party convention in Philadelphia in July.
Clinton, however, is way ahead of Sanders in the overall delegate count and her campaigners are supremely confident that she will be anointed the Democratic nominee to take on Trump, her projected Republican rival, in the November election.
For Trump, things fell into place dramatically as he swept Indiana and Cruz, after
having pledged to battle all the way to the Republican convention, sprang a surprise by calling it quits. And, soon enough, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus declared Trump the presumptive nominee and asked the party to unite to defeat Clinton.
The New York billionaire, who has defied all predictions by pundits, let it be known that he is already gearing up for the projected clash with Clinton. “I am honoured to be the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party. It is time to unite our party and defeat Hillary Clinton,” he said in a victory speech to supporters at his Trump Tower in Manhattan.
An hour earlier, Cruz had dropped out of the race, telling a sombre crowd of his supporters in Indianapolis, “I’ve said I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory; tonight I’m sorry to say it appears that path has been foreclosed…We gave it everything we got. But the voters chose another path.”
Kasich initially decided to hold out, but by Wednesday morning, he changed tack even as it became clear that Trump was all set to cross the 1,237 delegate threshold to clinch the nomination without any further ado. With 1,047 delegates under his belt, Trump required less than 200 of the remaining pool of 445 delegates, while Kasich, with a meagre 153, required a mathematically impossible 1,084 delegates.
Cruz’s refrain till as late as Tuesday afternoon used to be that neither Trump nor anyone else will get to the 1,237 mark and hence there is no escape from a “contested” Republican convention in Cleveland in July. But the stinging Indiana defeat, where Trump has 51 of 57 delegates with the remaining six still to be decided, made Cruz hastily press the quit button.
That prompted to Trump praise Cruz after the two had waged a protracted campaign marked by intense personal animosity and rancour.
“I don’t know if he (Cruz) likes me or he doesn’t like me, but he is one hell of a competitor. He is a tough, smart guy. And he has got an amazing future,” Trump said. Cruz himself made no reference to Trump in his speech.
On the Democratic side, there was jubilation in the Sanders camp as he rebounded after having lost five of the last six primaries to Clinton. “I know that the Clinton campaign thinks this campaign is over. They’re wrong,” Sanders said, reaffirming his declaration to battle to the bitter end.
Sanders, however, faces a near impossible task of getting close to Clinton’s delegate tally. Needing 2,383 delegates to win the nomination, Clinton has 1,700 pledged delegates and 520 superdelegates, against Sanders’ tally of 1,410 delegates and 39 superdelegates, according to a New York Times count.
The Clinton campaign, virtually taking the nomination for granted, has already started pivoting to the general election. Reacting to Trump’s status as presumptive nominee, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said: “Throughout this campaign, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he’s too divisive and lacks the temperament to lead our nation and the free world. With so much at stake, Donald Trump is simply too big of a risk.”