Tuesday was a big day, and a big win for Senator Ted Cruz, as Wisconsin held their important primary. 42 delegates were in the mix, as well as a potential deciding factor in how the primary season will shake out.
Over a million votes were counted in the GOP primary. Here’s what went down.
Wisconsin (Republican): In the end it really was all Senator Ted Cruz, who took a crushing 48.5% of the vote. Donald Trump came in second with only 34.9%, and Governor John Kasich hung on for a majority spoiling 14.1%.
As a result, Cruz took 36 delegates, Trump came up with a mere 6, and spoiling John Kasich took none. (And Trump was not happy [or sane] about it.)
Wisconsin (Democrat): We’re changing it up a bit and including the Dem results this week, because the fact that Senator Bernie Sanders smoked it at 56.3% of the vote to Secretary Hillary Clinton’s 43.3% is just too good to pass up.
The delegate result for the Dems, therefore, is 45 for Sanders, and 31 for Clinton. Ha!!
For Republicans, 24 delegates are assigned by each of 8 congressional districts, which each district being a winner-take-all. There are 18 assigned to whoever wins the most votes in the state, for a total of 42. Trump won two districts, which is why he won 6 delegates.
So perhaps being denied 50%, probably because of Kasich, is not something that affected the delegate count for the evening. But it does matter. Winning a majority in a state is something that Donald Trump has not been able to do. That is to say, in every state that has voted so far, the number of people voting NOT TRUMP is higher than those voting TRUMP.
In ten of the states that have voted so far, Ted Cruz was the winner, and of those ten, he won two by a majority. As opposed to a plurality. More people voting for Ted than not voting for him. That thing we just talked about that Donald Trump can’t seem to do. Without Kasich in the race, this win would probably have been a third majority for Cruz, showing clearly that while the vote remains split, Trump wins states, but consistently more people vote against him than for him. That seemed worth pointing out.
Note: as always, these are the results as they stand at the time of publication. There may be slight changes as the day wears on.
And now for the big moment: the delegate totals.
The Day: RedState puts the new total delegates to date (for the remaining three) at:
DONALD TRUMP: 740
SEN. TED CRUZ: 514
GOV. JOHN KASICH: 143
The chances of a contested convention just went way up.
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