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“This event this morning is a celebration of strong women.” On Tuesday morning, Ted Cruz kicked off a Women for Cruz coalition in the liberal stronghold of Madison, Wisconsin. The senator was joined by his wife Heidi, mother Eleanor, and former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina for a conversation on issues considered important to women. In a change of pace from prior events, Cruz gave a shortened stump speech and focused on the meaning of the term “women’s issue,” itself: “This event this morning is a celebration of strong women. One of the most frustrating things about the Democrats is the...

This map will track the electoral vote count for a prospective Hillary Clinton vs. Ted Cruz 2016 match-up, based on polling. States not polled are shown in gray. States where the average difference between Clinton and Cruz is 5 points or less are shown as toss up. An interactive map, based on this polling plus 2012 results for unpolled states, is also available. Last Update: March 28, 2016

There is no evidence that Ted Cruz attacked Donald Trump's wife. In a normal election year, this statement would be relatively uncontroversial. After all, it's true. Yes, there was an ad that ran in Utah, suggesting that because she had posed for provocative modeling photos, she was somehow unfit to be first lady. But, no, that ad was not from the Cruz campaign. It was from the Make America Awesome super PAC, a group that raises and spends money without input from any candidate, including Cruz. How do I know that? Well, I know that if such a political action...

The Ted Cruz sex scandal may be nothing of the sort, some journalists are beginning to say after the seemingly bombshell story hit the news this week. On Friday, the National Enquirer reported that Cruz had been something of a ladies man in Washington, with five different mistresses. It appeared to be a major story, especially given Cruz's strong Christian faith and his seemingly strong morals. But there very quickly appeared to be cracks in the story, and now many journalists are going on record to raise doubts that any of it might be true. The most immediate denials came...

The greatest political sleight of hand in the 2016 campaign has been Sen. Ted Cruz's remaking himself into the reasonable, establishment candidate in the GOP race. The strategy seems to be working. Now that Marco Rubio is out of the race and John Kasich struggles to win any state other than Ohio, where he is the governor, a number of prominent officials are turning to the Texas senator. Former Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who has decried what Donald Trump would do to the legacy of his party, campaigned for Cruz in Utah and said that he will vote for him....

A pair of new polls are showing good news for presidential hopeful Ted Cruz. In a new Fox News poll of 388 likely GOP primary voters, frontrunner Donald Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz are now in a statistical dead heat nationally. The poll shows Trump and Cruz polling at 41%-38% respectively, a slight edge for the real estate mogul, but within the poll's +/- 5 point margin of error. Governor John Kasich is running in third place with 17%. A second poll, this one from Emerson College, is spelling good news for Ted Cruz in the April 5th, winner-take-all...

Why Donald Trump Is Poised To Win The Nomination And Lose The General Election, In One Poll By Philip Bump March 23 Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but a new poll from Quinnipiac University suggests that the most likely outcome of this presidential race is the following: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face off in the general election, and Hillary Clinton wins. Standard polling caveats apply, not the least of which is that the campaign hasn't started and that polls taken well in advance of an actual election are often not predictive. But reading this poll on...

EMERSON POLL: WISCONSIN PRIMARY IN PLAY FOR BOTH PARTIES; CRUZ LEADS TRUMP BY A POINT; CLINTON UP 6 OVER SANDERS; CRUZ FARES BETTER THAN TRUMP IN GENERAL AGAINST CLINTON.

Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States, and he will have the Democratic National Committee to thank for it. Much has been made of the “math” of the Democratic nomination, and how it favors Hillary Clinton—in large part due to her huge lead in unpledged “superdelegates.” Trump is likely to decisively beat Clinton in virtually all of the states that she has performed strongly in so far, and seems poised to win many of the states she lost as well. This leaves her relying heavily on the solidly blue states, which overwhelmingly voted against...

With so many wins, it appears Donald Trump is on his way to the Republican Convention in July with the hopes of walking away with the party's nomination. The primary results on March 15 seem to only further cemented that reality. But not so fast. KIRO Radio's Dave Ross with Seattle's Morning News and conservative voice Michael Medved joined the Jason Rantz Show after March 15 results were announced. According to the two men on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, the Republican Convention will likely be a contested one, with no clear candidate. Trump could still have an...

SALT LAKE CITY — If Donald Trump becomes the Republican Party's nominee, Utahns would vote for a Democrat for president in November for the first time in more than 50 years, according to a new Deseret News/KSL poll. "I believe Donald Trump could lose Utah. If you lose Utah as a Republican, there is no hope," said former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, a top campaign adviser to the GOP's 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney. he poll found that may well be true. Utah voters said they would reject Trump, the GOP frontrunner, whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Vermont...

On Friday, Donald Trump questioned whether Mitt Romney is actually Mormon. “I have many friends that live in Salt Lake City — and by the way, Mitt Romney is not one of them,” Trump said during a Salt Lake City speech. ”Are you sure he’s a Mormon? Are we sure?” This is the third time Trump has questioned the faith of one of his opponents, despite having criticized the practice of questioning other people’s faith, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pointed out this morning during an interview with Trump. “Why do you keep doing it?” he asked. Here’s Trump’s reply: With Mitt...

[SNIP]The argument against Cruz is that he’s obnoxious.His colleagues don’t like him,and exit polls show he doesn’t do nearly as well among moderate and somewhat conservative voters as he does among hardcore conservatives....That’s why,when my colleague Jamelle Bouie was betting on Cruz,I put my money on Rubio...I stand refuted.Cruz hasn’t overcome the Trump wave,but he has proved that in an angry party,his organization,discipline,and message can beat a broadly appealing rival.Republicans who vote for Trump in 2016,only to see him abandoned by elements of their party and defeated in the general election,would be at least as angry in 2020.The notion that...

In a sign of just how much the Republican presidential primary has turned the party on its head, Sen. Lindsey Graham will host a fundraiser on Monday in support of Sen. Ted Cruz. A draft of the invitation, obtained first by CNN, invites guests to "honor and support a great friend of Israel and the Jewish people," at a meet-and-greet event that will take place during the AIPAC policy conference in Washington next week.

"Try not to hurt 'em. If you do, I'll defend you in court. Don't worry about it." [Cheers]. This past Sunday when Trump was confronted with similar questions on Meet the Press, he suggested he was seriously considering covering the legal bills for a man who punched an African-American protester in the face at a rally over the weekend.  The assailant later said that perhaps next time, he'd kill the protester.  “I'm going to take a look at it,” Trump told host Chuck Todd.  “I've actually instructed my people to look into it, yes.”  Forty-eight hours later with Stephanopoulos, Trump made the following two...

The notion that Donald Trump is some new phenomenon on the political scene is sadly mistaken. Would that he were. His type has been seen before -- all over Latin America, which may explain why the United States has prospered, and even remained a republic, while much of the rest of the continent has seen dictatorships come and go. Just abandon the foundations of republican government -- like the rule of law under an independent judiciary -- and there's little to prevent our becoming a banana republic too. Our current president toys with ruling by executive decree every time Congress...

In actual elections, Ted Cruz has outperformed polls by an average of at least 12 points. While national polls had put him down to Trump by ten to 33 points, he's only behind 6 points in the popular vote. That's despite the not-Trump vote being split 3 to 4 ways and the caucuses being under-represented by popular vote tallies. Most of Trump's victories have been in the Southeast, and that region will be entirely finished voting after Tuesday. Here's some good news: ABC poll says that Cruz has cut Trump's lead from 16 to 9 points, but even better Cruz...

If we’re ultra-conservative w/ proportional contests, and assume Trump loses a number of states that he currently leads, he still gets ~1,300… Delegates Guesstimate March 12 Wyoming (UNBOUND) 29 / 0 March 15 Florida (WTA) 99 /99 Illinois (WTM) 66 /40 Missouri 52 /15 North Carolina 72 /40 Ohio (WTA) 66 /0 March 22 Arizona (WTA) 58 /58 Utah 40 /0

Hollywood is going to vote for Donald Trump, said Donald Trump this morning at a news conference. Networks Feast On Ratings After Favoring Donald Trump's Steaks Over Hillary Clinton Trump says his Hollywood pals have told him, “Everyone out there is voting for you, but they’re not going to admit it.” “I say, ‘Why? Aren’t you proud? I have a tough stance on crime. I have a tough stance on borders.’ They all know I’m right. But they’re liberal people, and they don’t want to admit it.”“But, you know what? They’re going to vote for Trump,” the GOP frontrunner boasted.

Attacks On Trump Didn't Slow Him Down In The Primaries. America's Another Story By David Lauter Last night, after his triumphs in more GOP primaries, Donald Trump reveled in the ineffectiveness of the attacks against him. “I don’t think I’ve ever had so many horrible, horrible things said about me in one week … but that’s OK,” Trump said in his news conference from his Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Fla. “I want to thank the special interests and the lobbyists, because they obviously did something to drive these numbers.” There's no question that he's right about the primaries...