Donald Trump took another step closer to the Republican nomination on Tuesday night with crushing victories in Florida and Illinois, and a narrower victory in North Carolina – cementing his GOP front-runner status and knocking Marco Rubio out of the race.
In Missouri, the race went down to the wire between Cruz and Trump, with The Donald only 1,726 votes ahead (0.18 per cent) out of 620,000 when counting stopped early on Wednesday.
The state was judged too close to call, and the tiny margin of less than one per cent means second-place Cruz could challenge the result if it stands.
Florida Sen. Rubio suspended his White House campaign after surrendering his home state to Trump, who won 45% of the vote to his 27%. Trump tipped his hat to the man 25 years his junior, and then slammed him for spending so much money to try to defeat him.
‘I want to congratulate Marco Rubio on having run a really tough campaign,’ Trump told a crowd of socialites and journalists at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. ‘He’s tough. He’s smart, and he’s got a great future.
‘But I have to say, nobody has ever, ever in the history of politics, received the amount of negative advertising I have,’ Trump carped.
Most of it, he claimed, was ‘false, vicious, horrible’.
‘It added up to over $40million’ in Florida alone, Trump said. ‘And you explain it to me, because I can’t. My numbers went up!’
‘We’re going to do a lot of trips over the next month,’ he pledged. ‘And we’re going to have a lot of great victories.’
Ohio Gov. John Kasich won in his home state, offsetting what might otherwise have been a devastating night for the rest of the GOP field. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz – like Rubio – won no primaries all night.
In the Democratic race, Hillary Clinton struck a devastating blow against Bernie Sanders by winning Florida, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina. But the contest was again too close to call in Missouri.
While Florida was a Trump-friendly bloodbath, Ohio’s 66-delegate race ended as a rare defeat for him – and the only one so far at Kasich’s hands.
Trump’s appearance was billed as a ‘press conference’ like the others he has hosted on primary election nights. He delivered brief remarks on stage, accompanied by his senior staffers and a few family members, but took no questions from the people he referred to as ‘disgusting reporters’ who write ‘lies, deceit, viciousness’.
‘Some are nice. [There are] some really disgusting people back there,’ he jabbed.
Journalists and camera crews were kept behind nearly 500 chairs set up for Mar-a-Lago members and Trump’s other high-society friends.
Election watchers called the Florida race for Trump at 8pm once polls in the state’s panhandle region – in a separate time zone – closed for the night.
With 98 per cent of votes counted, Trump had collected 45.7 per cent in the Sunshine State – a gargantuan lead of more than 440,000 votes over home-state-senator Rubio, who was supported by just 27 per cent.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was in third place with 17.1 per cent. Kasich brought up the rear with 6.8 per cent.
Cruz pushed for relevance despite coming up empty in the first four races of the night, insisting that the Republican nomination fight was now a head-to-head competition.
‘Only two campaigns have a plausible path to the nomination, ours and Donald Trump’s,’ he told supporters. Nobody else has any mathematical possibility whatsoever.
‘The choice is straightforward,’ he insisted: ‘”Do you want a candidate who shares your values, or a candidate who has spent decades opposing your values?
‘The mainstream media, the network suits who makes the decisions, want Donald Trump as the nominee. That’s why they’ve given him hundreds of millions in free advertising – because they are partisan Democrats “ready for Hillary”‘ in November.’
In Florida, Rubio won only his home county, Miami-Dade. His margin there was decisive – more than 70,000 votes – but a drop in the bucket compared with the rest of Florida’s urge to jump on the Trump train.
Trump was his usual overstated self on Twitter, writing: ‘Word is that, despite a record amount spent on negative and phony ads, I had a massive victory in Florida.
The result was a knockout blow for Rubio, whose communications team told newspapers on Monday that he would campaign later in the week in Utah – the site of a March 22 primary – but wouldn’t commit to any times or places.
‘After tonight it is clear that while we are on the right side, this year we will not be on the winning side,’ Rubio told supporters in Miami.
By officially ‘suspending’ his campaign instead of folding it permanently, Rubio sent a signal that he’s maintaining control over the 164 delegates who are pledged to him so far.
Those could give him leverage at the Republican National Convention in July if no one arrives with enough delegates to win the nomination.
‘While it is not God’s plan that I be president in 2016, or maybe ever,’ he told supporters, ‘and while today my campaign is suspended, the fact that I have even come this far is evidence of how special America truly is, and all the reason more why we must do all we can to ensure that this nation remains a special place.’
Kasich opened a sizable and decisive lead of more than 28,000 votes over Trump in the first hour of counting in Ohio, and never looked back.
The billionaire campaigned doggedly in the Buckeye State all weekend with stops in Dayton, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Youngstown, but he fell short.
The race was called for Kasich with just 19 per cent of the votes counted there.
By night’s end, the affable governor held 46.8 per cent to Trump’s 36 per cent.
Neither Cruz nor Rubio was a factor in Ohio, with 13.2 and 2.3 per cent, respectively.
Kasich was expected to perform better in his home state than Rubio did in his own, but he never led by more than 5 percentage points in statewide polls.
The over-performance was easily as dramatic as Trump’s in Florida.
Kasich and Rubio were far, far in the distance with 12.6 and 7.7 per cent.
But even a minimal showing in the Tarheel State could yield them some delegates since the North Carolina Republican Party awards delegates proportionately, not all in one lump.
Of the 72 delegates at stake there, 39 are awarded to winners in the state’s congressional districts. The rest are split up according to the statewide vote totals.
Missouri and Illinois will also award their delegates proportionately.
With Missouri’s polls closed, exit polls broadcast by CNN showed a 3-point edge for Cruz over Trump.
But the first trickle of votes told a different story, with Trump holding a 4-point lead among the first 2 per cent of ballots.
That race widened and narrowed all night.
Trump began the day with pundits and pollsters expecting him to win handily in Florida, Illinois and North Carolina.
Cruz was breathing down his neck in Missouri, however. The state adjoins Iowa, the site of Cruz’s highest-profile victory so far.
And the Show-Me State held a ‘closed’ primary on Tuesday, meaning that only registered Republicans could vote.
That’s a kind of contest that doesn’t favor Trump’s strength – wrangling in disaffected Democrats and luring independents
Illinois tallies were slow to come in, but the earliest numbers favored Trump – as he would say, ‘big time.’
With 88 per cent of the ballots counted, 38.9 per cent went to The Donald. Cruz was in second place with 30.5 per cent.
Kasich took the bronze with 19.7 per cent. Rubio could muster just 8.4 per cent.
Trump, the businessman-turned-politician was widely expected to prevail in Florida despite the presence of Rubio in the race.
The last time a non-billionaire led a statewide presidential poll there, the leader was former governor Jeb Bush. That was in mid-July.
Trump, a legendary real estate developer made even more famous by a 14-year run at the helm of NBC’s ‘The Apprentice’ franchise, has cruised past both Rubio and Bush on their home turf as the winter has worn on.
Bush withdrew from the race nearly a month ago, and Rubio has stayed around long enough to be humbled by the voters who sent him to Washington in 2010.
The man Trump rebranded as ‘Little Marco’ had put on a brave face, declaring that he would surprise everyone at home.
But the young favorite of party elites faded from view in the contest’s final two weeks following a bout of political schizophrenia involving his on-again, off-again tough posture against Trump’s gruff taunting.
Rubio began the presidential primary season casting himself as a patient and positive voice of reason with a rock-ribbed national security profile.
But by the time the first handful of states were decided last month, he briefly experimented with mocking Trump’s hair, his skin tone, and even the size of his nether-region body parts.
His poll numbers plummeted as voters in his own state lost their sense of his political identity, freeing Trump to proclaim that Rubio ‘couldn’t get elected dog-catcher’ in his native Florida.
By comparison with Trump’s extravagant election night festivities, Rubio’s were low-key and minimalist.
While the atrium at Florida International University’s basketball arena can hold up to 700 supporters, just 22 chairs were set up as polls began closing.
As the clock ticked down to 7:00, the Fox News Channel was playing – muted – on small overhead TVs.
Trump’s channel of choice was CNN, but the broadcast couldn’t be heard over the din of more than 150 reporters, photographers, cameramen and broadcast technicians.
High drama almost extended voting hours in Orange County, the central Florida region that includes Orlando, when about a dozen polling places ran out of Republican ballots.
Faced with a crushing demand, election officials appealed to Gov. Rick Scott for permission to keep accepting voters for an hour past the legally required 7:00 p.m. cut-off time.
Scott denied the request. Given the gulf between Trump and his competitors, there’s practically no chance his decision altered the election results.
Bill Cowles, the Orange County supervisor of elections, said some frustrated voters went away without casting ballots.
At the beginning of the evening, Trump led the overall GOP delegate count with 469 on the strength of a 9-delegate win overnight in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory.
Cruz was in second place with 370.
Behind them were Rubio with 163 delegates and Kasich with just 63.
Winning the Republican presidential nomination will require 1,237 delegates when the party holds its quadrennial convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in mid-July.
