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As the Republican presidential race has narrowed to a contest between two candidates the Republican elites despise, each one with a razor-thin path to the nomination, the conversation among party figures in Washington has rapidly shifted from the desperate to the absurd. They talk of an “open convention” in Cleveland, where party leaders could parachute in a third, more favored candidate and render the entire GOP primary process null and void. House Speaker Paul Ryan, one focus of such talk, ruled himself out at a press conference on Tuesday. “I do not want, nor will I accept, the Republican nomination,”...

He won a big victory in Wisconsin. He pierced the Donald Trump mystique. He even got some of the Capitol Hill lawmakers who regard him as a revolutionary and renegade to slink cautiously into his corner. By all logic, this should be a Ted Cruz moment — if only the next primary weren’t in New York. But on Tuesday, New Yorkers go to their polling places, and though Cruz has been the beneficiary of the calendar before — his performance on Super Tuesday helped force out of the race Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a demographically identical and philosophically similar...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- Donald Trump's presidential campaign has all but thrown in the towel in Wyoming ahead of Saturday's Republican convention. The billionaire businessman's campaign made a conscious decision not to commit resources to Wyoming, according to Alan Cobb, a senior Trump adviser. Trump picked only up a single delegate in last month's Wyoming county conventions while rival Ted Cruz scored nine. There are 14 more delegates at stake at this weekend's state convention. In a telephone interview with The Associated Press from the convention site in Casper, Cobb said Friday that he expects Cruz to sweep what remains of...

Why are the Trumpists so angry at Cruz? In fact, doesn’t it seem like they are always angry at something or someone? It’s true. It’s either “lyin’ Ted,” the Washington insiders, the press, which is bit surprising considering how much free air time he is given, or whatever. It almost appears Svengali Trump has figured out that he must continually invent new villains to keep his followers amped up. This reminds me a bit of the leaders of the hard left, who must keep some form of “The Man” in perpetuity, holding down the oppressed democrat faithful, who are then...

Probably one of the most unlikely scandalettes of the 2016 primary has to be the National Enquirer “exposé ” of Senator Ted Cruz’s alleged serial infidelity. Nobody knows to this day where the story originated, although some reporters suggested after it was run that the Rubio campaign had shopped it to them earlier in the cycle. But Donald Trump is known to be quite close to the publisher of the Enquirer (a man aptly named David Pecker) so it’s always possible the story was run for his benefit. Cruz denied it and it faded in the excitement of the campaign,...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Donald Trump's presidential campaign has all but thrown in the towel in Wyoming ahead of Saturday's Republican convention. The billionaire businessman's campaign made a conscious decision not to commit resources to Wyoming, according to Alan Cobb, a senior Trump adviser. Trump picked only up a single delegate in last month's Wyoming county conventions while Cruz scored nine. There are 14 more delegates at stake at this weekend's state convention. In a telephone interview with The Associated Press from the convention site in Casper, Wyoming, Cobb said Friday that he expects Trump's rival Ted Cruz to sweep...

After Ted Cruz won every delegate up for grabs at the Colorado Republican convention, Donald Trump began complaining that the process at such conventions is unfair. His claim is that party insiders should not be making these choices, but rather that the power should be vested with the voters. As a consequence, Cruz is “stealing" delegates from Trump, and in so doing defying the will of the voters. Trump's accusations are specious and disingenuous. The process that has been playing out is perfectly legitimate. Trump's real problem is that he is being outhustled by the Cruz campaign. The Republican nomination...

Former State Rep. Joe Carr is challenging incumbent Tennessee Sixth Congressional District Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) 67% in the Republican primary. The vote will be in August. Carr, who narrowly lost to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) 19% in the 2014 Republican U.S. Senate primary in the Volunteer State, says Black is not a conservative. The winner of that primary is expected to easily win the Congressional seat in the heavily Republican district in November’s general election. “Millions of Republicans across the country have voted overwhelmingly to reject the business as usual ‘insider games’ in Washington. We have elected Republican majorities...

Arizona State Senator Kelli Ward, challenging U.S. Senator Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), leads the five-term Washington insider for the first time in a poll. Her lead stands at nine percent. Ward was the choice of 45 percent of the registered Arizona voters polled, while McCain only garnered 36 percent. 1,271 of the more than 1,400 voters polled say they intend to vote in the 2016 primary election. Approximately one fifth remained undecided at this early stage of the race. Independent polling company Gravis Marketing conducted the August 15 poll. It surveyed 844 Republican primary voters and 427 Democratic.

Local politicians and activists are apprehensive about the upcoming Republican convention in July. “The fight I hope to lead once we get to Cleveland is that the rules that we started with are the rules that we end with,” former State Rep. Joe Carr, a delegate for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, said. Carr was a Newt Gingrich delegate in 2012, when the RNC changed the requirements for winning the nomination. Prior to 2012, a nominee was required to have won a majority of delegates from at least five states to be on the ballot at the convention. Then, the GOP...

Give Donald Trump credit for planning ahead. He is preparing to be a sore loser. Trump’s complaints that he is being undone by a rigged system crafted by a corrupt Republican Party is the dress rehearsal for his campaign’s closing argument should it come up short in Cleveland. Trump will, in his telling, have been stabbed in the back by insiders and be fully justified in wreaking a terrible revenge on the party that he briefly sought to lead. Facts and logic don’t particularly matter to Trump or his mouthpieces, yet the “rigged” charge is absurd even by the standards...

* Trump convention manager Paul Manafort told Sean Hannity that Cruz will “probably finish third in delegates in April.” But… Cruz has already won 88 of the 107 delegates awarded in the month. * There is no way Kasich can catch Cruz.* Finally, even giving Trump 81 out of 95 delegates in New York, there is a strong likelihood Cruz may still finish first in delegates for the month. Trump convention manager Paul Manafort’s delegate skills may be a little rusty. He claimed on Hannity last night that Ted Cruz will “probably finish third in delegates in April.” An absurd...

Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno has accepted an administrative law judge’s decision ruling that Sen. Ted Cruz meets the criteria for a natural born citizen and should be allowed to run in New Jersey’s GOP presidential primary on June 7. “After full consideration of the record, as well as Judge Masin’s thorough and well researched initial decision and the exceptions filed with my office, I, Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno, as Secretary of State and chief election official of the State of New Jersey, adopt Judge Masin’s initial decision in its entirety,” Guadagno said in a statement posted to the state Division...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/04/14/ben-carson-could-trump-spoiler-new-york-primary/83036318/

Candidates like Donald Trump are exciting. Trump is guaranteed to bring out thousands to his events and generate copious decibels of noise. He has built a campaign on telling it like it is and refusing to be politically correct. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, is boring. He brings hundreds to his events and utters Ronald Reagan’s name a few times to get the crowd going. His demeanor is confident but not quite as in-your-face as Trump is. But for those afraid of what Trump stands for, Cruz may be the far more dangerous candidate. For one, Cruz is much...

It’s a well known story: When Ted Cruz went to work for the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 2000, he had a lot going for him. He was in his 20s, a Texan, and smart, boasting a Harvard Law degree and a Supreme Court clerkship. It didn’t hurt to be young Hispanic man in a campaign looking for Latino votes. But Cruz was so self-aggrandizing and irksome that he managed to annoy folks at the headquarters in Austin so much that he never won a coveted slot at the White House. When Bush took office, Cruz was relegated to...

A boy can dream. And I'm dreaming of a Ted Cruz-Bernie Sanders matchup in November. I know, I know. It's unlikely. But it's not impossible. And it's the anticlimax American needs to regain a little perspective. Let's agree at the outset that I'm not just hallucinating here. As formidable as Hillary Clinton's and Donald Trump's leads may be, there is evidence that both their campaigns could be tipping toward a late-stage collapse. Sanders is behind, but he's on a major winning streak, taking eight of the last nine contests. Neither New York nor California is in the bag for Clinton....

It could all come down to 53 micro-primaries in California. Three weeks ago, when we last took a detailed look at Donald Trump’s quest to win 1,237 delegates, his path looked rocky but endurable. The panel of eight experts FiveThirtyEight assembled projected Trump to wind up with 1,208 by the time California and four other states finished counting their votes on June 7, a number that would leave him tantalizingly close to clinching the Republican presidential nomination — probably close enough that he’d be able to get over the hump by persuading some uncommitted delegates to come his way before...

The leading pro-life group in Oregon today issued its endorsement for pro-life Republican candidate Ted Cruz for President. Oregon Right to Life says Cruz has a sterling pro-life record that it described as “impeccable.” “ORTL PAC is pleased to endorse Senator Cruz,” said Gayle Atteberry, executive director of ORTL. “His record on pro-life issues is impeccable. We can trust that as president, he will do all he can to protect unborn babies. That includes the all-important decisions he would make in nominating new Supreme Court justices. “Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders,” said Atteberry, “support abortion on demand, from conception...

With two weeks to go until Marylanders vote in their Republican primary, Donald Trump has a small lead over both Ted Cruz and John Kasich, who are currently splitting the non-Trump vote evenly, according to a new Washington Free Beacon poll. The poll of 600 likely Republican voters found Trump earning 33 percent of the vote, with single-digit leads over Cruz and Kasich, who earned 26 and 25 percent of the vote, respectively. The poll indicates that Trump’s lead in the state is shrinking, but it may not matter unless one of his rivals can consolidate voters unwilling to support...