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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...

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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...

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...

Light on drama, heavy on message. Californians are thrilled at the prospect of having their votes actually matter during the presidential primary season, especially when every delegate is critical. So many Republicans in the southern California area headed to various rallies yesterday to see aspirant Senator Ted Cruz. I joined two of our local Tea Party bloggers (W.C. Varones and Left Coast Rebel) and 2000 other interested voters at his San Diego event yesterday. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Both of my Tea Party compatriots are unhappy with the thought of Donald Trump’s nomination. However, they had reservations about the Cruz style of speaking,...

"We're winning because we're uniting the Republican Party," Ted Cruz said in his victory speech after Wisconsin. He reached out not just to his own party but beyond it, quoting John Kennedy on the lighting of candles, and welcoming old foes and RINOs of many years standing happily into the fold. Proudly, he spoke of leading a coalition of which Jeb Bush was a member, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, who at one point joked about having him murdered. But bygones were bygones and this was a moment about hope and unity: "We've got the full spectrum of the Republican...

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The chairman of the Colorado Republican Party has gotten such a violent reaction to the results of his state’s caucus last weekend that he says he is considering bringing a local sheriff as one of his guests to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer. “I’ve made the decision that I would not take my wife along. I am certainly at the very least going to use my personal guest pass to bring along a Republican sheriff," Steve House told POLITICO in an interview. “People might think that’s crazy, but not after what we’re growing through right now.” What...

Newt Gingrich has been a friend of Donald Trump’s for the past decade. He hasn’t endorsed Mr. Trump’s presidential bid, but they talk frequently. Mr. Trump is anti-left wing and anti-political correctness, Mr. Gingrich says, while acknowledging this: Mr. Trump is not a conservative....

JUDY WOODRUFF: And we begin with politics tonight. As we just heard, the race for the White House is partly a battle for delegates, and neither party has a candidate with enough delegates yet to clinch the nomination. Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are within a few hundred pledged delegates of one another. But add in superdelegates, and she has a commanding lead. For Republicans, Donald Trump leads the delegate count, with Ted Cruz a few hundred behind, and John Kasich well back. The GOP still has contests too come in 16 states, including New York, Pennsylvania, and California....

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan issued an emphatic statement Tuesday that he would not accept the Republican Party's presidential nomination this summer at the GOP convention in Cleveland, effectively broadening U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz's potential path to becoming the party's nominee. "Let me be clear: I do not want, nor will I accept the Republican nomination," the Wisconsin Republican told reporters at a news conference at Republican National Committee headquarters. "So let me speak directly to the delegates on this: If no candidate has a majority on the first ballot, I believe you should only choose a person who actually...

On the surface, things are looking pretty good for Donald Trump’s efforts to capture the Republican nomination. He’s received more votes, and has more pledged delegates, than any other candidate. After Missouri certified its race on Tuesday, Trump’s delegate lead was 755 to 545 over Sen. Ted Cruz, with 1,237 needed to win the nomination. Trump is about to overwhelmingly capture his home state of New York, and is poised to do nearly as well in Pennsylvania. And Trump has the full backing of some crucial parts of conservative media, notably The Drudge Report. And yet there’s an increasing desperation...

Already behind the curve in organizing for the Republican convention, Donald Trump has missed crucial deadlines in a number of states to lock up delegates who would stay loyal beyond the first ballot. Trump’s shortcomings in this behind-the-scenes campaign, which hasn’t played much of a role in selecting the GOP nominee in decades, could doom his presidential candidacy if he is unable to win the nomination in the initial voting at this summer’s national convention in Cleveland...