It’s a do-or-die battle for Senator Ted Cruz in Indiana on Tuesday in what pundits regard as his last chance to stop front-runner Donald Trump from clinching the Republican presidential nomination outright.
Cruz’s challenge has got tougher in the past 24 hours with a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll giving Trump a 15 per cent lead in Indiana, thus reversing another poll projection the previous day that had put the Texas Senator ahead by 16 points. A Real Clear Politics average of five poll gives Trump a near 8 point lead.
Buoyed by his recent sweep of six East Coast States, the New York billionaire believes he has the momentum to win Indiana, a victory which could seal the nomination in his favour instead of dragging the issue to the Republican convention in Cleveland in July. Cruz, despite having been mathematically eliminated from securing the nomination through the primary route, believes he can still prevent Trump from garnering the requisite 1,237 delegates, thus ensuring a “contested convention” in which he can possibly outmanoeuvre the front-runner. Trump has 996 delegates right now, against Cruz’s 565. “In Indiana, Trump is positioned to corral all the (57) delegates, which will be a big prize toward winning the nomination outright,” lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, said in a statement, after their joint poll with NBC and WSJ gave Trump 49 per cent, Cruz 34 per cent and Ohio Governor John Kasich 13 per cent.
Trump, just as Cruz, is leaving nothing to chance in Indiana.
In a separate interview to Fox News, Trump said: “I think it’s over now…Cruz cannot win, he’s got no highway, he’s got nothing, he’s way behind. I’m leading him by millions and millions of votes and I’m leading him by 400 or 500 delegates. He can’t win.”
Hours later, Cruz, speaking at a late night rally, said: “The people of this great State, I believe the country is depending on you to pull us back from the brink.”
Cruz campaign has gone for the kill in Indiana, spending $3.4 million on television commercials, on top another $3 million blitz by anti-Trump groups, while Trump himself is reported to have spent just over $1 million on his own ads. Although Indiana’s Republican Governor Mike Pence said he will vote for Cruz, it was at best a tepid endorsement of the Senator, since the Governor balanced his action by praising Trump’s campaign that has generated much enthusiasm for Republicans this election cycle.
On the Democratic side, NBC/WSJ/Marist poll reported a virtual statistical dead heat, with front-runner Hillary Clinton at nearly 50 per cent and Senator Bernie Sanders at 46 per cent, given the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points. Sanders, who otherwise trails way behind Clinton in overall delegates, notably super-delegates, also believes that it will be a “contested” Democratic convention to decide the nomination since, in his estimation, Clinton won’t get the requisite number of pledged delegates in the remaining primaries.