KOs Rubio

Trump KOs Rubio but falls to Kasich in Ohio

The results dramatically increase the chances of a contested convention, despite Trump's strong night.

By Shane Goldmacher

Donald Trump knocked Marco Rubio out of the presidential race with a win in Florida but fell to John Kasich in Ohio, a split decision in the evening’s biggest delegate prizes that will drag out the Republican nominating fight — possibly all the way to a contested convention.

The Ohio loss denied the business mogul the sweep he had hoped would make him the presumptive nominee. And it gave renewed hope to Republicans bent on blocking him from winning the nomination outright.

But Trump again was the big winner on Tuesday: He prevailed in North Carolina and Illinois, though neither state awards delegates on a winner-take-all basis. In Missouri, the election was too close to declare a winner: With nearly all precincts reporting, Trump was leading by two-tenths of a percentage point, or less than 2,000 votes out of roughly 935,000 cast.

Even before the Missouri result was final and the full breakdown of delegates was clear in Illinois, Trump was on pace to expand his delegate lead to roughly 220, doubling his margin over Cruz and hitting the halfway point to clinching the nomination.

The victory for Kasich was his first. "This is the little engine that can," Kasich said on CNN, after winning his home state halfway through the nominating contest.

The loss for Rubio was his last. “After tonight it is clear that while we are on the right side, this year we will not be on the winning side," he said in a speech ending his campaign.

Trump delivered his victory speech from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, calling for the GOP to unite behind him. “We have to bring our party together,” he declared at the event, which POLITICO was barred from attending without explanation.

Trump dismissed his critics and those who still question his dominant position in the contest.
“Some day, when we take it all, they'll understand,” Trump predicted.

Heading into Tuesday, Trump had 460 of the 1,237 delegates he needed to secure the nomination without a contested convention, followed by Cruz with 370, Rubio with 163 and Kasich with 63.

Trump jumped ahead 99 delegates with his Florida win and Kasich more than doubled his total with Ohio’s 66 delegates.

Even before the sun had risen Tuesday on the full continental United States, Trump continued his winning ways, carrying the remote Northern Mariana Islands and their 9 winner-take-all delegates. Trump took nearly three-quarters of the vote, according to a local Republican Party official.

"I want to thank our friends, Northern Marianas Islands have been so incredible," Trump said in Palm Beach.

Kasich seemed to savor his first victory, even if it came in his home state and he was held below 50 percent.

"There's three of us left,” he said minutes after Rubio had dropped out. “That's pretty cool."

The political calculations going forward for Cruz and Kasich are complex. Kasich has embraced the fact that he has no chance to win outright, and instead signaled in the CNN interview plans to cherry-pick more moderate states like California, Connecticut and Delaware.

Cruz, meanwhile, argued again that he's the GOP's only chance to stop Trump.

“Starting tomorrow morning, every Republican has a clear choice," Cruz told supporters in Houston. "Only two campaigns have a plausible path to the nomination: ours and Donald Trump’s. Nobody else has any mathematical possibility whatsoever.”

Trump brushed aside the notion that a narrowed field would somehow hurt him. “They don’t understand basic physics, basic mathematics,” he said.

The results Tuesday are likely to cause the anti-Trump forces within the GOP to reassess their position. Trump won handily in Florida despite a two-week period when Trump was subjected to more than $10 million in negative advertising.

Backers of Rubio and opponents of Trump in Florida had blanketed the airwaves with a range of anti-Trump messaging. Ads hit him over his treatment of women, for allegedly scamming students of Trump University, for his alleged ties to shady business figures, for outsourcing American jobs and more.

None of it worked.

“Mostly false, vicious, horrible,” Trump said of the ads as he exaggerated how much was spent against him.

In the end, Trump walloped Rubio.