Summary
We’re going to close our rolling coverage for the day with a summary.
- Donald Trump’s new top aide accused Ted Cruz of “gestapo tactics” and the Republican frontrunner suggested Cruz bribed delegates with “goodies”. If they don’t get what they want, they blow it up,” convention manager Paul Manafort told NBC. “That’s not going to work.”
- Barack Obama defended Hillary Clinton in his first interview with Fox News in years, saying: “She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy.” The president acknowledged “a carelessness” in the way she handled a private email server while secretary of state, but praised her skills and dedication effusively.
- Obama also said he will keep Merrick Garland as his nominee for the supreme court no matter what happens in the presidential election. He also repeated his call for Republican senators to meet Garland in the public: “I think if they go through the process they won’t have a rationale to defeat him.”
- The president added that partisan politics endanger the US far more than any external threat. “This can be our century just like the 20th century was, as long as we don’t tear each other apart because [of] our politics, values, sensationalism, conflict.”
- Bernie Sanders said he has “doubts about what kind of president [Hillary Clinton] would make” and “In terms of her judgement, something is clearly lacking.” But he added he would support a nominated Clinton: “we will do everything possible to prevent this country from seeing Donald Trump or some other Republican in the White House.”
- Hillary Clinton declined to criticized Sanders returned the favor of hypothetical support: “I’d take him over Donald Trump or Ted Cruz any day.”
- She also defended her husband’s legacy as president during the 1990s, including his decision to sign a now controversial crime bill. “There were a lot of people very scared and concerned about high crime back in the day, and now we have to say OK, and deal with the consequences.”
Hillary and Bill Clinton are campaigning in New York City today, after a black-tie dinner on Saturday night with lawmakers, lobbyists and reporters in midtown Manhattan.
Per her campaign’s pool report, the event featured a musical performance by reporters and Leslie Odom Jr, of the cast of Hamilton, and a third act with mayor Bill de Blasio.
“Thanks for the endorsement, Bill,” she told the mayor. “Took you long enough.”
“Sorry, Hillary,” de Blasio said. “I run on C.P. time.”
“Cautious politician time,” she said. “ok, there are a lot of things I could ask you of international, national, city and state importance,” she said. “Will you just fix those MetroCard slots? It took me like five swipes,” she said. “Fix the turnstiles.”
On Sunday morning, the former president hit Harlem, with a stop at the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street. He’s touring the area with Representative Charlie Rengel – seemingly as part of an effort to make up for his confrontation with black protesters in Philadelphia, and subsequent not-an-apology apology last week.
At the church, Reverend Floyd Flake praised Clinton for creating more opportunities for black Americans. The presidential candidate also spoke, saying she knows people are “frustrated” with politics and “heartsick” over gun violence.
And she concluded by talking about the vicious primary contest she fought against Barack Obama in 2008 – and their eventual reconciliation and teamwork. It sounds like a coded message to any Bernie Sanders supporters in the room, and to the senator himself.
“At the end he won, I lost and I supported him,” Clinton said. “He asked me to be secretary of state and I said yes for the same reason: we both love our country.”
She threw in a few kind words for the president, too. “I don’t think President Obama gets the credit he deserves. Saving the economy, passing the affordable care act insuring 20 million americans and for doing so much else that has been good.”
Stepping away from the campaign trail for a moment, Ed Pilkington has this:
The governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, has until midnight on Sunday to decide whether to bring back the electric chair as a compulsory method of execution.
Should the Democratic governor sign the bill currently sitting on his desk, the Virginia department of corrections would be empowered to kill condemned prisoners using a contraption known macabrely in the state as “Old Sparky”.
Should McAuliffe abstain tonight from doing anything, the law will come into effect on 1 July – only his active veto would stop it.
“Like most death penalty states,” Ed writes, “Virginia has struggled in the face of a tight boycott imposed by the European Union and major drug companies that refuse to send medical drugs used in executions to the US on ethical grounds.”
Hence, the possible return of the chair, which 300 religious leaders have opposed.
Ed also writes this:
The dilemma is further intensified by McAuliffe’s close ties to Hillary Clinton, and the likelihood that any decision to facilitate the return of the electric chair will reverberate on the presidential campaign trail. McAuliffe was chairman of Clinton’s last presidential campaign, in 2008, and before that helped Bill Clinton earn a second term in the White House in 1996.
And this:
The decision confronting the governor is a fraught one, given the dark track record of the electric chair in Virginia’s racially skewed history. The chair was first used in 1908 to kill a black man convicted of the rape of a white woman. Since then, 217 of the 267 people who have died by electrocution have been African American.
Here’s Ed’s piece in full:
Bernie Sanders makes another appearance, this time on NBC’s Meet the Press. Host Chuck Todd asks about the delegate gap between Sanders and Hillary Clinton – how even though he’s won seven states in a row he’s cut into Clinton’s lead only by 10 delegates.
“We’re feeling really good with a path toward victory,” Sanders insists. “New York is extremely important,” but he says he can “absolutely” win the nomination without winning the state.
Americans understand that “it’s just too late for establishment politics”, Sanders says.
Todd asks about the harsh tone that seeped into the Democratic race last week. “Secretary Clinton has been going after us, along with her surrogates, very, very hard,” Sanders says.
He notes a Washington Post headline that read “Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified”, although Clinton herself never said Sanders was unqualified. She said “he hadn’t done his homework” on specific issues, but the Sanders campaign homed in on the word “unqualified” and made its criticisms in turn.
Sanders has walked some of those back, saying Clinton is qualified, but he tells NBC: “In terms of her judgement, something is clearly lacking.”
His argument for lapses in judgement: “When you vote for virtually every trade agreement that has cost the workers of this country millions of jobs. When you support and continue to support fracking, despite the crisis that we have. And essentially when you have a super pac that’s raising tens of millions of dollars from every interest out there, including $15m from Wall Street.”
Ohio governor John Kasich, meanwhile, is in Greece, New York, where he is “running equal with Donald Trump” and where he says he will win more delegates than he has been winning, which has not been very many. Kasich is a way off the Republican pace, heading for what he hopes will be a contested convention.
“If we get blown out in the fall, which I think we could with Cruz or Trump, we could lose the Senate,” he says. He’s the man to stop that, he says.
He’s not biting on whether Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan might descend from the heavens on to such a contested convention and take the nomination – he is the second choice of most Trump and Cruz voters, he says. But he does invoke a figure with a certain place in Republican heaven, “old Honest Abe” – Lincoln – who went into his convention in 1860 “third or fourth” and ended up one of the greatest presidents of all.
Kasich continues:
I’m going to have more delegates than I have now and I am going to be viable. I am the only person who can beat Hillary Clinton in the fall. Are we going to nominate someone who isn’t viable? It’s nuts!
He can attract conservative Democrats, independents, he says. But he won’t attack Clinton herself. Everyone else will, John.
Kasich is now asked about North Carolina’s controversial anti-anti-discrimination law, which this week cost the state a Bruce Springsteen gig. Would he have signed it? “Probably not.” Religious institutions should be protected, Kasich says, but “when you get beyond that it can become … a contentious issue.”
“I wouldn’t have signed that law,” he says. “Nathan Deal, the governor of Georgia, vetoed another one… why do we have to write a law every time we turn around. Can’t we just get along with each other?”
Kasich, forever protesting his viability in the face of what Ben Carson would call “horrible numbers”, is perfecting a new mood in this campaign: the genially cross. The affably aggravated. The pleasantly peeved. He’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore but aw shucks, can’t everyone be nicer to each other? Call it what you will.
Updated
Manafort: Cruz uses 'gestapo' tactics
Todd asks Manafort about how he’s planning on clinching the nomination with 1,237 delegates, which would avoid a contested convention – the scenario that Ted Cruz is hoping for. Who’s running this campaign, you or the manager?
“Donald Trump is running this campaign,” Manafort says. “And I’m working directly for Donald Trump, but I’m working with the whole team as well. And a lot of what’s being talked about is much ado about nothing. Yes, there’s a transition. It’s a natural transition.”
Manafort says that as the months have worn on, “a more traditional campaign has to take place, and Donald recognizes that.”
What about campaign tactics? A friend of Trump recently threatened to send the businessman’s supporters to delegates hotel rooms, for instance.
“I’m not giving him my hotel room,” Manafort tries to joke. Todd presses the point – is this kind of rhetoric acceptable?
Trump’s top aide doesn’t exactly denounce the implied threat: “It’s not my style, it’s not Donald Trump’s style. But it is Ted Cruz’s style.
“You go to these county conventions, and you see the Gestapo tactics, the scorched earth tactics…
Todd: Gestapo!?
Manafort says the campaign is going to file some complaints, even as it tries to do woo delegates however possible from Cruz. “There’s the law, there’s ethics, and there’s getting the votes.”
He says his main strategy is to get Trump talking to delegates more directly.
Donald Trump’s “convention manager” Paul Manafort is on NBC’s Meet the Press, where host Chuck Todd asks him about the businessman’s recent defeats in winning delegates in Colorado and Wisconsin.
“I acknowledge that we weren’t playing in Colorado, and they did,” Manafort says, regarding Cruz’s sweep of the 34 delegates there.
“I acknowledge that they’ve taken an approach to some of the county conventions where they’ve taken a scorched earth policy, and they don’t care about the party. “
“If they don’t get what they want, they blow it up. That’s not going to work.
“And in fact, it’s all secondary games, because when your’e talking about delegates, you know to distinguish between actual delegates or Trojan delegates, which are people that are committed to support someone on the first ballot, regardless of who they’re for.”
It’s CBS and it’s Bernie Sanders. So how about winning the vote but splitting the delegates with Clinton in Wyoming?
“There is no question that we have the momentum,” he says, like he said 15 minutes ago on ABC. Then he was in George Stephanopoulos’s shiny blue studio. He’s now in front of a wall of books, speaking to John Dickerson who is in DC. Does ABC’s New York HQ have a library? A smoking room? You have to hope so.
Bernie details his electoral map and says, again, that “our message is resonating” and in the east and west he will do well.
Does his lack of appeal in the south damage his chances of being a successful president? “We are waging what we call a political revolution,” he says, which means no president can achieve it all alone. “What we need is a strong political movement, where millions of working people, young people, stand up and fight back.”
This is happening with the $15 minimum wage, he says, as it has passed in California and elsewhere.
Dickerson turns to the contested convention of 1980, when Ted Kennedy took his “movement” to the convention and fought, and lost.
“Obviously we will use our role to shape the platform,” Sanders says – which involves a roll call of his policy positions.
So that’s a …yes?
Then it’s into the spat over whether Hillary Clinton is qualified to be president again. Sanders says again it was a remark about her judgment, but he “wants to get away from this stuff” and have a proper debate. Dickerson presses. Is her judgment a disqualifying factor for the presidency?
“No.”
And the press attention to his interviews this week, in which some people said he had no detail about his sweeping calls for reform and revolution, for example on Wall Street. He dodges.
Updated
Partisan politics endanger the US, Obama says
Finally, Obama is asked about the 2016 campaign and the movements of frustrated voters who’ve coalesced around Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
“We’re still shell shocked from what happened in 2007 and 2008,” Obama says, alluding to the financial crisis that nearly wrecked the world’s economy. The US has inched back to recovery, he says, “but people lost homes, lost jobs, lost life savings, and they still don’t fully” feel that recovery.
When people feel left out, he says, Americans of different politics have different reactions. For conservatives those broken promises – eg to repeal his signature healthcare act – “must be because Republicans were corrupt and not responsive”, influenced by big money, Obama says.
“If Democrats get frustrated they say why don’t we have a public option” for healthcare, he continues, noting too that most Americans are covered by their employer and many don’t want a singlepayer system.
These frustrations, the president says, obscure successes. “Our economy right now is stronger than any other advanced economy … We have the best workers. We have the best universities. We are the most innovative. We have the most advanced scientific community.
“This can be our century just like the 20th century was, as long as we don’t tear each other apart because our politics, values, sensationalism, conflict,” he says.
Obama concludes that the US will be in danger when “we don’t have the ability to compromise”.
Updated
John Podesta is next on ABC – he’s chair of the Clinton campaign and after a video of SNL mocking Clinton over her New York subway snafu this week, he laughs and says: “I think we’re going to win New York.” Of course he does.
Podesta says Sanders’ run of seven wins in a row was in territory and voting formats favourable to him, and that in the bigger states now coming along the trail, in primaries, Clinton will put together a run of her own.
He also defends Bill Clinton about the 1994 crime bill and says of Sanders: “he voted for this bill… in 2006 he campaigned for the Senate and said ‘I’m tough on crime’ and he pointed to this crime bill.”
Podesta is also asked about Hillary Clinton’s enduring problem with being seen as honest and trustworthy by voters of any and every stripe.
“As she has said,” he says, “maybe she is better at doing the job than campaigning for the job.”
Well, quite.
Does she need to get the email issue wrapped up, Stephanopoulos asks? “That’s up to Mr Comey,” Podesta said, referring to the FBI director. “If they want to talk to her they can talk to her but they haven’t.”
Updated
Obama defends Clinton over emails
Then Wallace asks Obama about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as his secretary of state.
“She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,” Obama says, before saying that there’s a problem of semantics in how the government does its business.
“I handle a lot of classified information,” he says. “There’s classified and then there’s classified.”
“There’s stuff that is really top secret top secret, and theres stuff going out to the president or secretary of state, stuff you don’t want on the transom, or going out over the wires,” he continues, but is basically “open-sourced” material.
“I also think it is important to keep this in perspective,” Obama said. “This is somebody who has served her country for four years as secretary of state, and did an outstanding job.”
He adds, though, that Clinton herself has acknowledged the server was a mistake: “There’s a carelessness in terms of managing emails that she has owned.”
No one has suggested, he says, “that that detracted rom her excellent ability to carry out her duties”.
Wallace asks about the investigation itself. “I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI.”
The president is emphatic. “Guaranteed. Period.”
Updated
Obama is next asked about terrorism, and his call for Americans to live their lives normally in the face of it. Is he not worried about it, Wallace asks.
“I don’t think we make too big a deal of the terror threat,” Obama says. “My number one priority is going after Isil,” he adds, using the acronym for the terror group Islamic State.
“My point is how we do it is important. That we have to make sure that we abide by our laws. We have to make sure that we abide by our values.”
He criticizes Republican candidates for president.
“When I hear some candidates saying we should carpet bomb innocent civilians” – Ted Cruz – “that is not a productive solution.”
“When I hear someone saying that we should ban all Muslims from entering the country” – Donald Trump – “that is not a good solution.”
He boasts of his own record fighting terrorism.
“There isn’t a president who has taken more terrorists off the map,” he says, than him.
“I’m the guy who calls the families, or meets with them or hugs them or tries to comfort a mom or a dad or a husband or a kid after a terrorist attack. … This is my number one job.”
Then he repeats an argument he made after the Brussels attacks, while he was on a historic diplomatic trip to Cuba. “It has been my view consistently: the job of the terrorists in their minds is to induce panic, induce fear, get societies to change you they are.”
But he says: “You can’t change us. You can kill some of us but we will hunt you down and we will get you.”
“And in the meantime, just as we did in Boston after the marathon bombing, we’re going to go to a ball game. That’s the message of resilience.”
Updated
It’s over to ABC – home, if you didn’t know, of the great Gore Vidal-William F Buckley debates of 1968, which essentially created what we know of confrontational, partisan, shouty talk show political TV today. So you can blame those two for what follows, if you want.
Bernie Sanders is here with George Stephanopoulos, live and in person: “Here’s the point, George: in the last three and a half weeks we have reduced her margin by her third. We are moving to New York, Pennsylvania, California, Oregon – a lot of big states. We believe we have the momentum.”
Stephanopoulos asks if he is planning a floor fight at the convention? Sanders dodges, saying it’s really about making sure we defeat “Trump, Cruz or whoever”. But he is most qualified to do so, he says.
Of his heated disagreements with Clinton, Sanders says the Clinton campaign has decided to take the gloves off, not him. Asked about his suggestion Clinton is not qualified for the presidency, he mentions – of course he does – Iraq, super pacs, trade agreements, fracking, the minimum wage.
And of Bill Clinton and criminal justice reform, a hot topic this week, discussion turns to the 1994 crime bill Sanders himself supported. “It had good and bad things in it”, Sanders says, suggesting if he hadn’t voted for the bill measures within it such as assault weapons bans – in the Senate bill, Stephanopoulos says, not the House where Bernie was – and violence against women would now be brought against him. Interesting exchange.
But Bernie’s main problem, he says, is with Bill Clinton’s language about “young blacks” – the “superpredator” issue.
ABC then play tape of Sandy Hook families slamming Sanders over his gun control record. Sensibly, he avoids confrontation: “Let me just say this, Bernie Sanders comes from a state with virtually no gun control. I am a D- from the NRA.” He details his support for President Obama’s gun control efforts.
He won’t apologise for his opposition to legislation on liability for gunmakers, though.
His taxes? “My wife does our taxes and she’s been out on the campaign, she’s been pretty busy. But we’ll get them out.”
Is New York a must win? He won’t say so, but he thinks he has a chance.
Garland will remain Obama's nominee
Barack Obama is on Fox News, speaking with Chris Wallace for the first time on the show as president.
The interview was taped at the University of Chicago Law School, where Obama taught for a decade and recently spoke about his supreme court nomination, Merrick Garland. That’s what Wallace asks about first: Republican opposition to any nominee.
“I think that things’ll evolve as people get familiar with Judge Garland’s record, as it becomes apparent that the overwhelming majority of the American people believe that the president nominates somebody to the supreme court and the Senate should do its job and give him a hearing.”
“The questioning that’s being done privately with Judge Garland should be done publicly, in a hearing,” he adds.
“Democrats and Republicans have gotten into a fix inside the Senate in which the confirmation promise becomes too much of a tit for tat.”
But this scenario is unprecedented, he says. “Never has a Republican president’s nominee not received a hearing, not received a vote. I don’t object to Republicans saying Merrick Garland may be a fine man, may be a fine judge, but I disagree with him philosophically.”
“I think if they go through the process they won’t have a rationale to defeat him.”
Obama says he will stand with Merrick Garland through the end of his term, no matter what the Senate does or who wins the presidential election.
Updated
Trump: Cruz hates New York
Donald Trump is shying away from national television, but has given an interview with the billionaire and radio show host John Catsimatidis.
He went after Ted Cruz, who swept the floor with Trump at the Colorado convention. “Cruz is a guy who hates New York. He hates New Yorkers, and he’s trying to put a different spin on it,” Trump said.
The businessman noted that Cruz voted against disaster relief for the north-east after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but supported federal aid for Texas after it suffered floods in 2015. Cruz has also criticized “New York values”, which he has vaguely defined as liberalism.
“He’s a very anti-New York guy, and I guarantee if he ever made it to president, New York would forget about the federal government,” Trump said.
I win a state in votes and then get non-representative delegates because they are offered all sorts of goodies by Cruz campaign. Bad system!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2016
He’s also doing media criticism of newspapers that publish full transcripts of their interviews with him.
The @nytimes purposely covers me so inaccurately. I want other nations to pay the U.S. for our defense of them. We are the suckers-no more!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2016
Updated
Finally the CNN host asks Sanders about his campaign’s chances against such a large deficit of pledged delegates and superdelegates.
“I think we have a path to getting more pledged delegates,” Sanders says. He argues that should his campaign continue to poll better than Donald Trump in a hypothetical general election, “I think a lot of those superdelegates will say what’s most important is we don’t have a Trump in the White House.”
“If neither candidate ends up not having the votes they need, yeah, sure,” he says, there will be “a discussion” about the nomination at the convention.
Sanders: Israel had disproportionate response in Gaza
Tapper asks Sanders about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the senator’s criticism of how Israel handled its last war with Gaza, in which more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed and 66 Israeli soldiers and seven civilians were killed in Israel.
“Was Israel’s response disproportionate? I think it was,” Sanders says.
Israel “has the right to live in freedom, independently, and in security, without having to be subjected to terrorist attacks,” he goes on. “But I think we will note succeed in bringing peace to that region unless we also treat the Palestinians with dignity and respect.”
Tapper starts to say that this is a remarkably “critical” position for a Jewish politician, and Sanders says it’s “a more balanced position”.
“Whether your’e Jewish or not Jewish, I would hope that every person in this country wants to see the misery of never ending, warring conflict in the Middle East” come to an end, he says.
Sanders describes himself as “someone who is absolutely pro-Israeli, absolutely 100% supports Israel’s right to exist in peace and security”.
“But you cannot ignore the needs of the Palestinian people,” he says, noting the poverty and enormous destruction of Gaza.
Updated
Sanders: I have doubts about Clinton
Bernie Sanders is next up on CNN, also via a pre-taped interview. This one was held along the East River in Brooklyn. Jake Tapper
“I appreciate Bill Clinton being my psychoanalyst, that’s always nice,” Sanders jokes.
“Ever since Wisconsin, when that became the sixth out of seven states that we have won,” he says, the Clinton campaign has become “very negative”.
“We are going to fight back, he says, though he still intends to run an “issues-oriented campaign”.
Then he questions her vote for the Iraq war and her highly paid speeches to Wall Street firms. “I have my doubts about what kind of president she would make.”
But he says he would still support her as the Democratic nominee. “We will do everything possible to prevent a Donald Trump or some other Republican from entering the White House.”
Tapper tries to ask about Bill Clinton’s confrontation with black protesters in Philadelphia. Sanders refuses to criticize the former president or the former secretary of state, noting that she has expressed regret for using the phrase “super predator”. “Not gonna go there, sorry, Jake!”
Updated
The CNN host then asks Clinton about a few of the issues: minimum wage is first, apropos a law just signed in New York to increase the wage to $15.
“I have been in favor of what’s called the fight for $15 for a year. I have been supportive of the unions and activists and officials who come together,” Clinton says. The Sanders campaign has characterized Clinton as coming late to the issue.
Clinton adds that she supports “a phase-in” process for states, and that she wants to make the national minimum wage $12. “But I want to encourage places, both locally and statewide, to go further.”
Tapper moves on, asking the former secretary of state about Israel and its conflict with Hamas and Palestinians. Clinton says she supports Israel’s right to self-defense. “It did not go seeking this, it was promoted by Hamas.”
Then it’s a remark by Sanders’ campaign manager that Clinton’s foreign policy contributed to the rise of the terror group Isis.
“That is beyond absurd,” Clinton says. “You know, they’re saying a lot of things these days and I’m going to let them choose to say whatever they choose to say.”
And finally it’s back to campaign politics. Is Clinton preparing for a possible contested convention, which Sanders (and Republicans) seem to want?
She says she’s “leading [Sanders] in the popular vote, leading him in pledged delegates” – not worried. “I feel good about the next contest and I expect to be the nominee.”
Clinton concludes by saying she wants Americans to start thinking about her ideas versus those of a Republican. “Either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz would be a terrible choice for America, so we need to run a unified Democratic campaign.”
Updated
Clinton defends 90s legacy
Hillary Clinton is first on the shows this morning, with a pre-taped interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union.
Tapper asks Clinton whether she has any doubst about what kind of president Bernie Sanders would be, and whether she would support him as the nominee.
“I’ve said repeatedly that I’d take him over Donald Trump or Ted Cruz any day,” she says. “No, I don’t. I don’t have anything negative to say about him.”
Then Tapper asks about Bill Clinton’s confrontation with protesters of his legacy on crime and welfare reform, and of his wife’s 1996 about “super predator” gang leaders. He also made a series of claims about his presidency that my colleague Mona Chalabi fact-checked (see the link below), when pressed about the huge increase in incarceration after his 1994 crime bill was signed.
“I think what Bill said is we should all be listening to each other,” Clinton tells Tapper, adding that she says she wants to end the era of mass incarceration.
“There were a lot of people very scared and concerned about high crime back in the day, and now we have to say OK, and deal with the consequences. And one of the consequences is people who should not be in the criminal justice system.”
She says she wants to “divert people from the criminal justice system” toward addiction treatment or relevant programs.
Then Clinton defends her husband, saying he’s “not only a former president, he’s my husband.”
“I think he has a great legacy, and if we’re going to talk about those eight years we should talk about everything.”
The former president say he “almost” wanted to apologize for the way he handled the confrontation.
“Clearly some things happened that were not foreseen and need to be addressed,” she continues. “You never do something and don’t keep asking: is it working?”
Updated
Hello and welcome to our rolling coverage of the 2016 race for New York, the day after Ted Cruz swept Donald Trump’s shambles of a campaign in Colorado, and after Bernie Sanders edged out Hillary Clinton in the Wyoming caucuses.
Cruz won all 34 delegates that Colorado has to offer a Republican candidate, his well-organized campaign a model of contrast to Trump’s haphazard effort and the convention itself. Hundreds of delegates took turns asking to be elected, pitching Coloradans things like “Donald Trump! Buy Colorado weed!” and “the only person better to be president than Ted Cruz is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is not a natural born citizen”.
By night’s end, someone had accessed the state party’s Twitter account and wrote what many Republicans have been hoping for weeks: “We did it. #NeverTrump”.
The New York businessman has kept an atypically low profile on the campaign trail, and has reorganized his campaign to include a new “convention manager”, Paul Manafort, to counter Cruz’s climb in the delegate race. Manafort worked for Gerald Ford in the brokered Republican convention in 1976, and more recently for a twice-ousted, Kremlin-backed leader of Ukraine and a Filipino dictator.
John Kasich’s campaign boasted about opening an office in Delaware.
In New York, Sanders and Clinton held rival events as they eye the state’s 291 delegates. Sanders’ victory in Wyoming was slimmer than polls predicted, and he and Clinton each won seven delegates. The former secretary of state retains more than 200 pledged delegates ahead of Sanders, who is hoping to cut sharply into that lead with a strong performance in New York.
He has struggled, however, to win over superdelegates, the party officials who are not bound to vote according to their states’ results, and who have overwhelmingly chosen Clinton.
Sanders and Clinton will both appear on television this morning. The former says the revolution is growing and Clinton should watch out, the latter that it’s time for Americans to think about her versus a Republican.
Cruz, Kasich and the mysterious Manafort will also appear, to talk about a possible contested convention and the chaos of the Republican party. Trump isn’t on the schedule, but he has a way of showing up anyway.
And President Barack Obama is the special guest on Fox News this morning, giving a rare one-on-one interview with the conservative network.
