The Republican party establishment seized on Ted Cruz’s convincing victory in Utah on Wednesday, as Jeb Bush endorsed the Texas senator and rallied other conservatives around the hope, however slim, that he could stop Donald Trump.
Cruz won an overwhelming majority in Mormon-heavy Utah on Tuesday, easily exceeding the 50% threshold that, under the state’s rules, secured him all 40 delegates.
“To win, Republicans need to make this election about proposing solutions to the many challenges we face, and I believe that we should vote for Ted as he will do just that,” Bush said in a statement.
There was a strong dose of wishful thinking, however, in the endorsement from the former governor of Florida, a candidate who dropped out of the presidential race after a string of disastrous performances.
Trump secured the largest delegate prize of Tuesday – the winner-takes-all state of Arizona – with 47% of the vote to Cruz’s 45%, in a state that is far larger and more representative of the wider country than Utah, which is dominated by a largely white and Mormon population.
The billionaire frontrunner remains comfortably on track to finish the Republican race with the most delegates, which would give him a mandate for the nomination, even if he falls short of the 1,237 delegates needed to win outright.
His opponents maintain the best way to block his nomination would be to first prevent him from securing the necessary tally of delegates, and that to do so they must coalesce around an alternative candidate at a brokered convention.
The Democratic results on Tuesday followed a similar pattern. Frontrunner Hillary Clinton easily defeated Bernie Sanders in delegate-rich Arizona, while the Vermont senator registered resounding victories in Utah and Idaho, the latter of which was at stake only for Democrats on Tuesday.
Sanders’ victory margins in Utah and Idaho, in which he secured close to 80% of the vote, were by far the largest of the night, and are likely to energize his supporters, who maintain he still has a fighting chance of overcoming the former secretary of state.
The senator is also projected to perform well in the next three Democratic states to hold contests in a few days – Alaska, Hawaii and Washington – and could end the month with a growing momentum.
But Sanders’ path to the nomination remains steep, and would probably require a dramatic turnaround in the race.
The state he lost, Arizona, was the more significant contest in the Democratic race both because of its larger haul of delegates, and because its demographics could foreshadow voting trends in parts of neighbouring California, which holds its primary on 7 June.
The last state to vote in presidential nomination contests, California is usually an afterthought to campaigns. But this year the state’s delegate bonanza has the potential to play a decisive role in both the Democratic and Republican contests.
Clinton probably has less to fear than Trump, not least because the delegates she won in primaries and caucuses are bolstered by the support of party officials, who also get a say in the nomination process, unbound by state results, as so-called superdelegates.
They won’t say it publicly, but Clinton’s top campaign officials are privately confident that on the current trajectory, Sanders will face intense pressure to pull out of the race before the July convention so that Clinton can turn to attacking her Republican opponent.
At her victory speech in Seattle on Tuesday, Clinton immediately positioned herself as the Democratic commander-in-chief in waiting, with a staunch critique of how her Republican rivals responded to the terrorist attacks in Brussels earlier in the day.
Trump, who recently suggested the US should reconsider its role in the Nato defense alliance – a cornerstone of Washington’s foreign policy for decades – responded to the terrorist atrocity by repeating his call to waterboard terrorism suspects.
On Wednesday, he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that Muslim communities were “absolutely not reporting” terror suspects in their midst.
Cruz, meanwhile, has been widely criticized for reacting to the attacks with a call for law enforcement patrols of Muslim neighborhoods.
“In the face of terror, America doesn’t panic, we don’t build walls or turn our backs on our allies,” Clinton said during her address. “We can’t throw out everything that we know about what works and what doesn’t and start torturing people.”
She added: “What Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and others are suggesting is not only wrong, it is dangerous.”
Widely disliked by his fellow senators of both parties, Cruz has mounted an improbable campaign to cast himself as the man who can unify the Republican party and defeat Trump. That push is complicated by Ohio governor John Kasich, who has remained in the race despite winning only a single state, his own.
Bush’s endorsement signals a shift in the tide, and adds pressure on Kasich to withdraw. Bush said the party had to overcome “the divisiveness and vulgarity” perpetuated by Trump.
The tenor of the race seems unlikely to change soon, if an election night Twitter squabble between Trump and Cruz is any indication. On a night when world leaders were grappling with the repercussions of terrorist bombings in Brussels, Trump and Cruz trolled one another over their wives.
The businessman wrongly accused Cruz of being responsible for an ad in Utah, which used a nude photograph of Trump’s wife from a magazine shoot 15 years ago. “Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife,” Trump wrote.
Cruz responded: “Pic of your wife not from us. Donald, if you try to attack Heidi, you’re more of a coward than I thought.”
