Wisconsin, the US state famous for its cheese making, put a wall of hard cheddar in Donald Trump's path to the Republican presidential nomination, but still left Hillary Clinton with a smoother float to the Democratic top.
The front-runners suffered heavy defeats in the midwestern state but the victories by senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Ted Cruz of Texas merely prolong the Democratic primary race and increase the chance that the Republican nominee will be picked in a floor fight at their convention in July.
Cruz won 36 of the 42 nominee-choosing delegates in Wisconsin’s Republican primary by beating Trump with 48 per cent of the vote (531,129 votes) to 35 per cent (386,290 votes). This leaves the first-term senator trailing Trump by 226 delegates, or 743 to 517 in the race to the finish line of 1,237.
The businessman should perform well in the next primary in New York in a winner-take-most of the 95 delegates on April 19th, but Indiana (57 delegates) on May 3rd and California (172) on June 7th, the final Republican primary day, will determine whether he nails down the nomination before the convention.
Trump needs to win about 60 per cent of the delegates in the remaining 16 Republican state contests over the next two months to become the nominee on the first ballot of votes. This is looking like too great a task given that he has won about 46 per cent of the delegates in the 40 state and territory ballots so far.
Sanders’s victory, a sixth win in the last seven state contests, may give him momentum heading to New York, the state of his birth and Clinton’s home electorate state, but it handed him a net gain of just 10 delegates.
This has done little to hurt Clinton’s lead of 1,279 delegates to Sanders’s 1,027 in the race to the Democratic target of 2,383 needed to win the nomination. Add the “super-delegate” party leaders and elected officials (who could still switch allegiance), and her lead rises to 1,748 delegates to Sanders’s 1,058.
Given how the party’s race awards delegates proportionately, Sanders needs to win big in the remaining 21 Democratic contests to show he can do more than raise doubts about Clinton’s candidacy, but rather beat her convincingly.
