Can Donald Trump Be Stopped on Critical Primary Night?
The day of reckoning is upon us. There are six Republican contests on this Super Tuesday sequel, with 367 delegates up for grabs. By Wednesday morning, 1,423 of a possible 2,460 Republican delegates will have been awarded. We won’t know decisively who will get the nomination — no candidate will be close enough to the magic 1,237 threshold (that’s half the delegates plus one) to clinch it — but we will have a pretty good idea whether Donald Trump will have to fight for it on the convention floor come July.
Three of Tuesday’s contests are winner-take-all: Florida, Ohio and the Northern Mariana Islands. If Trump sweeps all of those, he’ll have a good chance of amassing the delegates he needs to become the GOP nominee. But if he loses Ohio and Florida, the chances increase that he won’t be able to hit the 1,237-delegate mark, opening the door for a contested convention.
All eyes are on Ohio and Florida, but Illinois and Missouri could play significant roles in Tuesday’s outcome as well — in recent days Ted Cruz has been ramping up appearances and ad buys in both states, while functionally abandoning Ohio and Florida to Kasich and Rubio, respectively.
Here’s what to watch for in each state (and one territory).
Northern Mariana Islands
Nine delegates (winner-take-all)
The results from the caucuses in the Northern Mariana Islands are already in: Donald Trump will take all nine of the territory’s delegates. No polls were taken, but Trump had been widely expected to win the contest since the islands’ governor endorsed him a few days ago. Jason Osborne, executive director of the Northern Mariana Islands GOP — and a member of Trump’s delegate-selection team and former advisor to Ben Carson — helped deliver the endorsement.
Florida
99 delegate (winner-take-all)
Florida looks to be the hill Marco Rubio will die on. He’s spent the last two weeks campaigning almost exclusively in his home state — and polls have shown his support rapidly eroding even as he does. Most surveys taken this month have had Trump up by 20 points or more. Some of the more recent numbers have even shown Ted Cruz pulling ahead. That’s a particularly dispiriting data point, considering that the Cruz campaign has pulled its ads off Florida airwaves and the candidate has stopped making appearances in the state. There is at least one bright spot for Rubio going into Tuesday: early voting turnout has been high in Miami-Dade County, a stronghold for him.