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The conventional wisdom is that though Ted Cruz can excite the conservative-activist base of the Republican party, he can’t beat Hillary Clinton in a general election. But the recent head-to-head polling tells a different story. Unless your name is George W. Bush, it’s tough to win 270 electoral votes without winning the popular vote. And Cruz is hanging in there against the Democratic front-runner. The RealClearPolitics average puts Clinton at 46.4 percent and Cruz at 43.9 percent; the most recent McClatchy-Marist survey has it a tie. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the current Republican front-runner, hasn’t led Clinton in any national poll...

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...

Donald Trump is waxing wroth these days about Ted Cruz's rounding up of Colorado delegates and has called the whole GOP delegate selection process "rigged and crooked." He says this to audiences who probably know less about the state-by-state rules than he does. It is the blind leading the blind, telling the assembled mob to grab their torches and pitchforks and storm the establishment castle.

I am a delegate to both the North Carolina State GOP convention to be held in May and my Congressional District Convention next week. My political insider connection is that I showed up at my precinct caucus/county convention last month, where I expressed the willingness to commit to the time and expense of attending these other conventions. I have made a similar commitment every few years for the past three decades. When I lived in Chicago I was also a delegate to several Illinois State GOP conventions for the same reasons: I voted in Republican primaries, attended my ward Republican...

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...

Ted Cruz rejected Donald Trump's claims that the GOP race is rigged, telling Glenn Beck on Tuesday that Trump will continue "to scream that they're stealing the election" as long as they continue to successfully wrangle delegates before a possible contested convention this summer. "Apparently, when anyone votes against him, it's an act of theft," Cruz said on Beck's online radio show. He also told Beck the Trump campaign's "inability to even show up and win elections" makes it appear the front runner "can't run a lemonade stand." "Donald, it ain't stealing when the voters vote against you -- it...

Call it a high-tech lynching. In the wake of Donald Trump’s being shut out in Colorado — final delegate count: Ted Cruz, 34; Trump, 0 — his fans have formed virtual mobs, and on Sunday a particularly passionate Twitter user tweeted out the home address and phone number of Steve House, chairman of the Colorado GOP. House’s personal information has been retweeted more than 1,100 times. He says he’s received some 3,000 phone calls, most of them uncomplimentary: Meanwhile, the same Trump partisan also tweeted information for the state’s national committeewoman, Lily Nuñez, and committeeman, George Leing. Of course, the...

As Donald Trump attempts to distract from his campaign's myriad failures in Colorado by cynically stirring the "rigged corrupt game" pot, one of the public faces of this phony outrage is a gentleman who earned himself prime Drudge real estate when he dramatically burned his voter registration card on camera -- claiming that he was wrongfully turned away from the state party convention because he's a Trump fan. It's a disenfranchisement conspiracy cooked up by the elites, he argued, torching his Republican documentation in protest.  The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway was skeptical of the man's version of events and dug into the back story....

So, here’s what’s going on: Trump wants delegates from the state of Washington, so the campaign sent out an email soliciting possible delegates on Friday, April 8 to let everyone know that the deadline to submit their Declaration of Candidacy for Delegate form was Wednesday, April 6. Oh, no. It gets worse, though. There is no deadline anyway. Well, there sort of is, but it isn’t April 6 across the board; Washington has a number of conventions that all take place on different days and have different deadlines.. The gaffe would have reflected poorly on the campaign if they’d send...

If the Republican primary process were designed to produce an exactly proportional result based on voters' choice rather than a winner, the party would have been doomed to a contested convention almost from the start. Donald Trump, who has failed more than any other GOP presidential front-runner in recent history to unite the party behind him, would have no chance of securing the nomination, for he has won only 37 percent of primary votes so far. Keep this in mind as Trump gripes about how his opponent Ted Cruz secured all 37 delegates at the Colorado convention last weekend. The...

In “Through the Looking Glass,” the Queen tells Alice: “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” She might have choked on her grits, however, at the thought of Ted Cruz becoming the Republican nominee. Until a few weeks ago he was low in the polls and loathed by the GOP establishment. Sen. Lindsey Graham joked about murdering him. But now, the impossible has happened: Cruz’s unlikely emergence as the favorite to beat Donald Trump. His transformative win in Wisconsin. And even his unthinkable endorsement by Graham. Can Ted believe this is happening? And does he —...

Republican Sen. Cory Gardner says Donald Trump has a “diminishing future” after his loss to Ted Cruz in Wisconsin’s primary last week. The Colorado senator was asked on the Kelley and Kafer show Friday about Trump’s former adviser, Roger Stone, threatening to publicize the hotel rooms of Republican convention delegates who don’t support Trump. “It sounds like to me like a consultant, a political consultant who has a candidate that is kind of wits end because they see a diminishing future, and I think you can see that turning point in Wisconsin as somebody else has caught momentum,” Gardner said....

The state will host what’s likely to be the contest's decisive primary in June, but the campaigns are already marshaling their forces. Ted Cruz lands in California on Monday for two rallies in a state where voters won’t head to the polls for nearly 60 days, but the West Coast swing is anything but a diversion. It’s preparation for the campaign’s endgame. If Cruz is to stop Donald Trump short of 1,237 delegates, the final, decisive stand will almost certainly come in California. And that realization has spurred a behind-the-scenes arms race, with Cruz, Trump, John Kasich and their allies...

On March 1, the Colorado Republican party prepared for 60,000 voters to arrive at nearly 3,000 precinct-caucus sites across the state. Those voters would select men and women to attend the party’s county assemblies and congressional district conventions, in the first step of a multi-part process that determined 34 of Colorado’s 37 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. To hear Donald Trump and his fans tell it, those tens of thousands of Republicans never arrived, never made their choices, and never had the chance to play a role in selecting the party’s delegates. Matt Drudge, the populist Right’s...

Donald Trump is right: The system is rigged. It’s rigged in favor of front-runners. That’s why Trump, who is leading the Republican nominating contest, has a larger percentage of delegates (46 percent) than of votes (37 percent). Unsurprisingly, Trump never mentions when the rules have helped him. He much prefers to whine and peddle conspiracy theories when they don’t. Trump’s latest tantrum is over Colorado, where Ted Cruz just swept all 34 of the state’s available delegates. Trump is calling the results “totally unfair” and on Twitter he asked: “How is it possible that the people of the great State...

Donald Trump played up his plans to tax companies that move jobs out of the United States as he tried to appeal to blue collar workers in a New York rally Sunday. Speaking for about an hour Sunday in Rochester, N.Y., Trump recited statistics about the area's loss of manufacturing jobs and economic hardship in recent years. He reiterated his desire to tax goods sold by companies once based in the United States that moved away to find cheaper labor. The plan has been widely panned by economic experts. But the Rochester crowd ate it up. "I'm the only one...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, there's something else about these delegate fights that have taken place over the weekend where Cruz has just skunked Trump. It isn't even a contest. It is fascinating to watch. And, of course, the Trump people think that games are being played and that tricks are being pulled. But that's not happening. This is just somebody who understands the system using it. You know, we could go into a little discussion if you want about insider versus outsider, and I've tried to tell people: "These insiders are not just gonna let this stuff go, folks. They're...

Despite what you may have heard or read, Donald Trump has never filed for bankruptcy. His companies have, four times, but Donald Trump never has.  The purpose of corporations is for investors to put a limited amount of capital at risk in exchange for the opportunity to earn money in any one of a myriad of legal ways. Investor use the corporate structure to ensure that if their bets go south, the most they can lose is the capital they invested in the first place. Corporate bankruptcy laws can give a company an opportunity to restructure its business in a...

If you’ve spent any time on social media, particularly in the politicalsphere, chances are you’ve encountered an internet troll or two. This election cycle has been er, um… interesting. I never thought I’d long for the days the so-called Paulbots would troll my feeds lecturing me about liberty and the Constitution and Dr. Paul. At least most of those accounts were real. Alas… Not so in 2016. The Trumpbots, or accounts that seem to exist solely to attack those with unfavorable views of The Donald, are a special breed of vicious. I’ve learned it’s best to ignore, block, and move...

JACQUELINE ALEMANY CBS NEWS April 8, 2016 "Kosher" Trump Vodka Lands In Hot Water Well, apparently neither does the kosher liquor company that Donald Trump rented his name to. Trump Vodka, the product of yet another licensing deal under Trump's name, was founded in 2006 and distributed by a company called Drinks Americas, the Jerusalem Post reports. Despite the Trumpian catchphrase "Success Distilled," distribution of the drink came to an end in 2011. But when an independent importer saw an opportunity for the drink to enjoy a fruitful afterlife in Israel, Trump agreed to a new deal allowing H. Pixel...