Donald Trump’s path to the GOP presidential nomination got a little narrower on Tuesday as Senator Ted Cruz handily defeated him in Wisconsin.
“Tonight is a turning point,” Cruz told supporters. “It is a rallying cry. It is a call from the hard-working men and women of Wisconsin to the people of America: We have a choice.”
At 1:15 a.m. ET on Wednesday, NBC News reported that Cruz won 33 of the state’s 42 delegates, with Trump taking three delegates. Two districts had yet to be allocated.
The difference matters because Trump’s margin of error to win the nomination is getting extremely small. Each candidate needs 1,237 delegates to clinch it before the convention in July and it’s still plausible Trump gets there. Anything short of that, however, and Cruz becomes the favorite to win at convention, at which the complicated state-by-state delegate selection process means many of Trump’s delegates are unlikely to support him past the first ballot.
Betting markets now give Trump less than 50 percent chance of carrying the party standard into the general election, mainly due to his expected weakness in a contested convention.
Cruz used his remarks in Wisconsin to prepare supporters for a long war that would unlikely to be settled before July.
“Either before Cleveland or at the convention in Cleveland, together we will win a majority of the delegates and together we will beat Hillary Clinton in November,” Cruz said.
Trump, by contrast, warned of a shadowy conspiracy by unnamed opponents within the party to derail his campaign at the convention.
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“Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet — he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump,” the Trump campaign said in a statement responding to the Wisconsin results.
In the same statement, the campaign accused Cruz, without any evidence, of illegally coordinating with super PACs opposed to Trump.
A major question now is whether Wisconsin, which some analysts saw as a weak state for Trump to begin with, was a predictable bump in the road for the front-runner or a sign of things to come. The race turns to the Northeast and Trump’s home state of New York on April 19, where recent polling shows him with a massive lead, while Cruz’s best natural states have mostly already voted.
In the meantime, there was plenty for Cruz to like in the exit polls on Tuesday night. He performed unusually well with groups where Trump has often dominated, namely voters without a college degree (winning 48 percent to Trump’s 38 percent) and non-evangelical voters (43 percent to Trump’s 35 percent).








