Wisconsin trips up Trump
Donald Trump hit a chassis-bending pothole on the road to the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday in Wisconsin. His double-digit loss to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz increases the likelihood of a rare contested GOP convention in July and exposes Trump's vulnerabilities in an industrial state with a large working class, the kind of demographic turf that had been favorable to him.
Donald Trump hit a chassis-bending pothole on the road to the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday in Wisconsin.
His double-digit loss to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz increases the likelihood of a rare contested GOP convention in July and exposes Trump's vulnerabilities in an industrial state with a large working class, the kind of demographic turf that had been favorable to him.
It could be a turning point. At one point, Trump led in Wisconsin polls and then slipped as the Republican apparatus coalesced around Cruz, and Trump stumbled into a succession of controversies.
"This takes the winner's sheen off Trump," said Christopher Nicholas, a veteran Republican consultant in Harrisburg. "It's a new day in the campaign. Now we'll see how people react when he's on a downward track, and we'll find out how the Trump people handle falling from rockstar-ville. Do they bounce back?"
He's still the front-runner, but now Trump needs to win 62 percent of the remaining delegates available to accumulate the 1,237 needed to clinch the nomination on the convention's first ballot, CNN estimates.
So far, Trump has won 46 percent of the delegates at stake.
Each delegate is crucial, and now there are more twists and turns in the hunt for them. Campaigns need to have the organization to make sure their people are elected to delegate slots at county and state conventions to preserve what they won in primaries and caucuses.
Already, Trump's campaign has been outmaneuvered in states that allow delegates to remain uncommitted to a candidate. In North Dakota over the weekend, Cruz backers were picked at the state GOP convention for 18 of 25 unbound delegate slots. Delegates to be elected in coming weeks from Colorado and Wyoming aren't required to back a specific candidate, nor are 54 of Pennsylvania's 71 delegates, who will be elected in the April 26 primary.
"It's going to look like 1976, when Gerald Ford went into the convention 100 delegates short of the nomination," said Pennsylvania pollster Terry Madonna of Franklin and Marshall College. "The problem for Trump is he doesn't seem to have much organization."
Trump was on track to win at least 32 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, suggesting there might be a ceiling to his support. His best performance was Massachusetts, where he won 49 percent of the popular vote.
Anti-Trump forces likely will be emboldened by Tuesday's results and seize on Trump's perceived vulnerability. Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump group, spent $2 million in Wisconsin on television and digital ads, billboards, direct mail, phone calls, as well as absentee and get-out-the-vote programs.
Club for Growth's PAC spent $1 million in ads attacking Trump.
"Tonight marks a major pivot in the GOP race away from Donald Trump and toward Ted Cruz," said Club for Growth Action president David McIntosh.
Wisconsin awards 18 at-large delegates to the statewide winner, but also three delegates to the winner in each of its eight congressional districts. Trump was leading in two districts and projected to get six delegates.
Analysis of early exit polls by ABC News showed that voters' opinions in Wisconsin differed vastly from the electorate where Trump has won.
Nearly half of Wisconsin GOP voters said they were interested in an experienced candidate, rather than an outsider, up from 41 percent in previous contests on average - and Cruz was winning two-thirds of those voters, twice his average.
More than 60 percent of Wisconsin Republicans supported legal status for undocumented immigrants. And "anger" at the federal government, at about a third, was lower than its average in previous states, 40 percent.
Trump did poorly in the populous white-collar Milwaukee suburbs but had strong levels of support in the rural northern and western regions of the state.
On Monday, Trump said it would be a mistake to write him off
"I've been given the last rites how many times, like 10? Every week, it's the end of Trump," the billionaire said during a rally in Superior, Wis. "They walk in, 'Sir, I don't know what happened, but your poll numbers just went through the roof.' "
Maybe not this time.
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@tomfitzgerald
Inquirer wire services contributed to this report.