Ted Cruz won a big victory in Wisconsin, taking 51.8% to Donald Trump’s 30.7% and winning in enough congressional districts to take all or nearly all of the state’s 42 delegates. Trump must now win 70% of the remaining delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot.
Bernie Sanders also beat Hillary Clinton, taking 53.4% of the vote, compared to her 46.4%.
From Cruz stops Trump in Wisconsin – POLITICO:
Ted Cruz scored a decisive victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday, defeating Donald Trump and seizing most of the state’s 42 delegates in a win that boosted the odds of a historic contested convention this summer.
Cruz’s margin of victory was large enough that three television networks called the contest soon after the polls closed. With 19 percent of precincts reporting, The Associated Press showed Cruz with 51.8 percent of the vote, compared to 30.7 percent for Trump. John Kasich lagged far behind with 15.3 percent.
The loss for Trump marked only the second time in the nominating contest — and the first since Iowa — that the Manhattan businessman suffered an election day without winning a state.
Cruz had entered the Wisconsin primary as the favorite after leading Trump in the state’s last six major polls and he and his team sought to magnify the state’s significance as a “turning point,” as Cruz put it on Monday, predicting a win would “change the outcome in states to come all across this country.”
Whether that’s true won’t be clear until the coming weeks, but what was clear Tuesday is that Cruz had handed Trump his most consequential defeat since the Iowa caucuses and made the frontrunner’s path to the 1,237 delegates he needs even steeper. Trump now needs to win nearly 70 percent of the remaining delegates to avert a convention floor fight that he has already said could cause “riots.”
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