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Washington, D.C. — It was billed as an attempt to win new supporters from the ranks of congressional Republicans. But after Donald Trump convened a handful of lawmakers and a number of party luminaries for lunch on Monday, the sole attendee not already backing Trump’s candidacy emerged as uncommitted as he’d gone in. Held in D.C.’s high-powered Jones Day law firm, the confab was supposed to be a congressional outreach effort, but only one attendee — Senator Tom Cotton — was neutral on Trump’s candidacy. The others — including Senator Jeff Sessions and Representatives Chris Collins, Scott DesJarlais, Renee Ellmers,...

Will you vote for trump?

Ted Cruz beats Hillary Clinton nationally in recent polls, though narrowly, and in state-by-state matchups performs better than the current front-runner for the Republican nomination. Predictably, Cruz wallops Clinton in Utah, a reliably Republican state. But — this is news — both Clinton and Sanders win there when they’re matched against Trump, according to a Deseret News/KSL poll conducted March 8–15. The best evidence we have here in March, as candidates fight for the nomination, is that Trump at the top of the ticket would remove Utah from the “solid Republican” column and put it and its six electoral votes...

Arizona's primary is Tuesday, but more than half the ballots have already been cast — including for candidates who've left the race. By the time Ted Cruz arrived Friday at the tiny border town of Douglas for his first Arizona event of 2016, he was already too late for the hundreds of thousands of Republicans who had already voted. Election day is still two days away in Arizona but well more than half of Republicans expected to vote in the state’s Tuesday primary have already cast their ballots — complicating Cruz's attempts overtake Donald Trump as both make a late...

It was one of the tea party’s few highlights in Tuesday’s congressional primaries. But laying claim to former GOP House speaker John Boehner’s old seat (in all likelihood) is a big one, both for the bragging rights and the momentum it gives House conservatives in their ongoing fight to purify their party ideologically. Warren Davidson, a businessman and former Army Ranger, won a 15-way Republican primary Tuesday in the special election for Ohio’s 8th Congressional District. The tea party candidate rather easily bested more moderate candidates, including two state lawmakers, in a campaign that quickly became ground zero for the...

In the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has won more states than anyone other than Donald Trump and runs second in delegates won. But is that enough to persuade the anti-Trump forces that the rebellious outsider is now their best hope of blocking the New York billionaire? Cruz told supporters at his post-election rally Tuesday night in Houston that only he and Trump have a viable strategy to assemble the delegates needed to capture the nomination. That assertion is based on the campaign’s internal data analysis of the contests ahead, Cruz’s confidence in the...

2016-0316 Presidential Primary Election Numbers & Analysis (click on image for full resolution) These presidential primary numbers and analysis include the primaries from the Tuesday, March 15, 2016 contests for the GOP and DNC. On the Republican side, this included Florida, Ohio, North carolina, Missouri, Illinois, and the Northern Marian Islands. On the Democrat side, it included Florida, Ohio, North carolina, Missouri, and Illinois. GOP Results: Donald Trump won Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, Illinois, and the Northern Marian Islands. Ted cruz made the contests in Missouri and North Carolina very close. In Missouri, the difference amounted to only one-fourth...

Former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson made a startling admission in a new interview, essentially saying he didn’t want to endorse Donald Trump but did so because Trump offered him an advisory role if elected. The admission comes just days after Carson endorsed Trump for the GOP nomination for president. Carson gave an interview to Steve Malzberg of NewsMax TV. First, Carson said he wished he could have endorsed someone else...

It's not impossible that Donald Trump finishes in third place in Ohio. The latest Ohio polls show a barn-burner between John Kasich and Trump, but they also show a distinctive Ted Cruz surge in the past 10 days. Snapshot Six pollsters have surveyed Ohio Republicans in March. RealClearPolitics averages the last four, and derives an average that shows Kasich up 35.3 percent, two points ahead of Trump. Ted Cruz's average over those four polls is 20 percent. Rubio is in single digits in all four polls and will finish fourth in Ohio. One of four polls (PPP) shows Trump leading....

There is a war in the GOP going on. Turn on the news every night, click over to any internet forum or social media platform and you’ll see the volleys of fire burning bright. We are told by some that this war is between ‘we the people’ and ‘the establishment’. That, of course, is the line that many politicians want you to believe so you can feel like you are part of a large group of the ‘silent majority’ finally standing up against some dark room power in Washington D.C.

Senator Marco Rubio, in his strongest and most emotional condemnation yet of Donald J. Trump’s incendiary brand of politics, who was leading the country dangerously close to a boiling point. And for the first time Mr. Rubio questioned whether he could support Mr. Trump as the Republican nominee. “Most countries around the world that are failures are because they deposit their hopes in a person, a strong leader who comes forward and says ‘Put me in power. And I will make the country better,’” Mr. Rubio said in an interview Saturday with The New York Times. “That’s exactly what he’s...

Kasich on Fox News now blaming rioters on Trump

Excoriating the GOP front-runner while mocking party establishment figures who now are urgently moving to prevent Trump from securing the nomination, Obama said the businessman's past should have served as prologue. "We're shocked someone is fanning anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim sentiment!" Obama said in jest, jabbing Republicans for acting surprised at a candidate who is "loose with the facts" or "distorts someone's record." "How could you be shocked?" the President exclaimed during a fundraiser in Austin. "This was the guy who was sure I was born in Kenya."

One of the country’s most influential conservative magazines has endorsed Ted Cruz for president, after its top editors said that they believe the Texas senator is the only Republican candidate left in the race who can defeat Donald Trump. “Ted’s the only one with a plausible path to stopping Trump,” National Review editor Rich Lowry told Politico, “either by getting a majority himself or denying Trump a majority and finishing close behind and getting it to the convention.”

Business icons Jack Welch, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina all had negative things to say about Donald Trump this week, and media reports said tech CEOs including Tim Cook and Elon Musk held a secret meeting to discuss how to stop the GOP front-runner. But do you think any of this will slow The Donald? U.S. CFOs don't. Across a wide range of industries, CFOs have conceded that Trump will be the GOP candidate, according to the latest CNBC Global CFO Council survey, conducted between Feb. 25 and March 8. It's the first time since the GOP race began that...

Ben Carson threw his support behind Donald Trump Friday morning, saying the two men had "buried the hatchet" and praising the Republican Party's front-runner as a "the voice of the people to be heard."

National Review, one of the country’s leading conservative magazines, will endorse Ted Cruz on Friday in a blow to Marco Rubio after its top editors and publisher decided that the Texas senator is the only candidate left who can defeat Donald Trump, POLITICO has learned. “Ted’s the only one with a plausible path to stopping Trump,” National Review editor Rich Lowry told POLITICO, “either by getting a majority himself or denying Trump a majority and finishing close behind and getting it to convention.”

We all know the elite are on the warpath against Donald Trump, with everyone from pundits, to major world leaders, to the Pope speaking out against him. Newt Gingrich recently said it’s because Trump isn’t part of the secret societies and hasn’t taken the initiation rites. Regardless, Trump has received a groundswell of support from the average conservative American, winning state primaries left and right. Ohio’s primary is coming up on March 15, and it’s a big one because it’s a “winner takes all” state. Well now it’s being alleged that Ohio’s GOP has intentionally set up a confusing...

Bloomberg’s Billy House writes that House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) 56% is “struggling to do the most basic duties of Congress” because the popularity of Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 97% has crippled his agenda. From Bloomberg Politics: It was never going to be easy for House Speaker Paul Ryan to cut through the noise of a presidential campaign and chart out a course of conservative policies for the Republican Party. But the bombast and divisiveness of the presidential campaign has left Ryan struggling to do the most basic duties of Congress. With the two Republican front-runners...

As Donald Trump is presenting himself as the presumptive nominee, he has described himself as “flexible” on immigration. This now has Ted Cruz  positioned as the Republican candidate with the most hardline position on immigration. NumbersUSA, a prominent immigration restriction group, keeps an ongoing scorecard on 2016 presidential candidates and since updated on March 4, Ted Cruz has an “A” and Trump a “B+”. Roy Beck, founder and executive director of NumbersUSA, spoke to The Daily Caller Tuesday about the differences between the two candidates and how he feels both will return America to policies that benefit the citizen...