Cruz, Kasich agree on stop-Trump plan

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz speaks at Woodrow Wilson Middle School on Sunday in Terre Haute, Ind. The campaigns of Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Sunday night that they are working together to keep Republican front-runner Donald Trump from winning the party’s nomination.
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz speaks at Woodrow Wilson Middle School on Sunday in Terre Haute, Ind. The campaigns of Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Sunday night that they are working together to keep Republican front-runner Donald Trump from winning the party’s nomination.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- The presidential campaigns of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Sunday that they are collaborating to deprive front-runner Donald Trump of the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination.

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Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally Sunday at Roger Williams Park in Providence, R.I.

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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign stop at the University of Bridgeport in Bridgeport, Conn., on Sunday.

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses a campaign rally Sunday in Hagerstown, Md.

"Having Donald Trump at the top of the ticket in November would be a sure disaster for Republicans," Cruz's campaign manager, Jeff Roe, said in a statement. "To ensure that we nominate a Republican who can unify the Republican Party and win in November, our campaign will focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Gov. Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico, and we would hope that allies of both campaigns would follow our lead."

Trump responded to the news on Twitter shortly before midnight: "Wow, just announced that Lyin' Ted and Kasich are going to collude in order to keep me from getting the Republican nomination. DESPERATION!"

Trump needs 1,237 delegates to win the Republican nomination. If he falls short, the national Republican gathering in July will evolve into a rare contested convention.

Trump has repeatedly denounced the system, saying he should win the nomination even if he falls slightly short of the majority -- something officials with the Republican National Committee have ruled out.

While Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland and Delaware go to the polls Tuesday with about 172 Republican delegates at stake, both Cruz's and Kasich's campaigns view Indiana's winner-take-all contest on May 3 as the critical turning point for thwarting Trump's rise to the nomination.

"Keeping Trump from winning a plurality in Indiana is critical to keeping him under 1,237 bound delegates before Cleveland," Kasich's campaign said Sunday. "We are very comfortable with our delegate position in Indiana already, and given the current dynamics of the primary there, we will shift our campaign's resources west and give the Cruz campaign a clear path in Indiana."

Cruz, who ignored the Tuesday contests and instead campaigned in Indiana on Sunday, wrapped up a weekend of largely successful delegate collecting as several states held party conventions.

Trump, meanwhile, looked to Tuesday's contests, where he's poised to do well, and to a foreign policy speech later in the week. Kasich did not make any campaign stops Sunday but will hold town-hall events today in Rockville, Md., and McKees Rocks, Pa., according to his campaign website.

Trump campaigned in Maryland on Sunday as a senior adviser predicted that Cruz is "going to lose all five states and probably finish third in most of them" on Tuesday.

The adviser, Paul Manafort, said the businessman's campaign, not the candidate, was evolving as the general election neared, an attempt to clarify his recent comments to the Republican National Committee that Trump has been "playing a part" onstage. That includes working with such Washington stalwarts as the Senate majority leader -- even as Trump casts himself as the ultimate outsider.

"What we're trying to do right now is work with the Mitch McConnells" on party business, Manafort said on Fox News Sunday.

On the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont rallied thousands of voters in two New England states, seeking momentum even as he offered mixed signals on how hard he would push his differences with front-runner Hillary Clinton.

At a Providence, R.I., park, Sanders largely steered clear of Clinton, but hours later ramped up his critique before more than 14,000 supporters in New Haven, Conn. Near Yale University, Sanders reiterated his call for Clinton to release transcripts of lucrative Wall Street speeches she delivered after leaving the State Department in early 2013.

Clinton, a former secretary of state, went to two Philadelphia church services attended largely by blacks ahead of the primary in Pennsylvania, Tuesday's top delegate prize. She declined to attack her Democratic rival by name in the morning appearance and a subsequent stop in Bridgeport, Conn., focusing on the GOP candidates.

Clinton said the rhetoric from Trump and Cruz is "not only offensive, it's dangerous."

"The people who run for office on the tea party or whatever else and say they will never compromise, they are basically denying the fundamental tenets of democracy," Clinton said.

Clinton stood to effectively lock up the nomination on Tuesday. The five states together offer 384 delegates for Democrats, a trove that would put Clinton only about 200 delegates short of the majority needed to clinch the nomination.

Cruz wins delegate seats

Over the weekend, Cruz dominated the race for delegate seats at weekend Republican meetings nationwide, further positioning him to overtake Trump in the race for the nomination if the contest is decided on later ballots at the Republican National Convention.

In some instances, Cruz supporters won delegate seats in states that Trump won, meaning that in most cases they will be required to vote for Trump on a first ballot. But if Trump fails to win the nomination in the first round, those Cruz supporters could switch to the senator on subsequent ballots.

In Maine, Cruz supporters won 19 of the 20 delegate seats up for grabs.

Republicans also met Saturday at state conventions in Utah and Kentucky while party members met in congressional districts in Minnesota and South Carolina to pick their delegates.

In Utah, another state Cruz won overwhelmingly, 36 of the 37 available delegate seats were won by his supporters. His slate includes Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Mia Love. Three more seats will be awarded to state party leaders. Cruz gets all 40 votes on the first ballot.

Kentucky's GOP also formally selected 25 delegates, including Gov. Matt Bevin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul. There was less controversy at the convention in Lexington on Saturday, given that the state party controls the selection process. On the first ballot, the commonwealth's 46 delegates will go this way: Trump gets 17, Cruz gets 15, Kasich gets seven and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who has dropped out of the race, gets seven delegates. Delegates are free to vote as they choose on subsequent ballots.

In Minnesota, Republicans in three congressional districts elected Cruz supporters for each of the nine seats up for grabs. The state concludes its selection process next month. Rubio won the state, meaning that he will get 17 of Minnesota's votes on the first ballot, while Cruz will get 13 and Trump eight.

And Trump again failed to have his supporters win seats in South Carolina, a state he won overwhelmingly. Cruz grabbed a delegate in the 6th Congressional District, a mostly Democratic area. So did Kasich. The third position went to a publicly uncommitted delegate who privately supports Trump, according to Republicans familiar with the contest. Trump gets all 50 votes on the first ballot.

The arcane process of picking Republican delegates continues next weekend in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Missouri and Virginia.

Clinton-Sanders rivalry

Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz downplayed tensions between Sanders and Clinton, whose rivalry has become increasingly nasty in recent weeks.

"Regardless of the intensity of what's played out here ... we are going to be unified," she declared.

Clinton's team accused her Democratic presidential rival of condoning "vitriol" after a brief mention of Monica Lewinsky by a prominent Sanders supporter.

Actress Rosario Dawson, who has campaigned with Sanders on several occasions, brought up the former White House intern on Saturday during a Sanders rally in Wilmington, Del., referring to the work that Lewinsky now does to combat cyberbullying. Dawson said she and other Sanders supporters were being bullied by Clinton's allies.

"We are literally under attack for not just supporting the other candidate," Dawson said in remarks introducing Sanders to the crowd. "Now, I'm with Monica Lewinsky with this. Bullying is bad. She has actually dedicated her life now to talking about that. And now as a campaign strategy, we are being bullied, and, somehow, that is OK and not being talked about with the richness that it needs."

During an appearance Sunday on CNN's State of the Union, host Jake Tapper pressed Sanders about whether his surrogates "should be talking about Monica Lewinsky."

Sanders replied, "I have no idea in what context Rosario was talking about her, but I would hope that all of our people focus on the real issues facing working people and the massive level of income and wealth inequality that we have."

Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill later said on CNN that his campaign will "absolutely not" address Dawson's comments on Lewinsky, whose affair with former President Bill Clinton led to calls for his impeachment.

Merrill added, "You could ask the Sanders campaign why they encourage this vitriol in the vicinity of their candidate by staying silent."

Elsewhere, Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist, suggested in an interview Sunday that he was open to supporting Clinton for president and said it was possible she would make a better president than her Republican rivals.

It was an unexpected sentiment from Koch, who has for years deployed his vast wealth to champion conservative causes and Republican candidacies.

In an interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC, which aired on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Koch called a plan by Trump to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country "monstrous" and dismissed Cruz's proposal to carpet-bomb territory held by the Islamic State as "frightening" hyperbole.

Of Clinton, Koch said, "We would have to believe her actions would be quite different than her rhetoric. Let me put it that way. But on some of the Republican candidates we would -- before we could support them, we'd have to believe their actions will be quite different than the rhetoric we've heard so far."

In a message Sunday afternoon on Twitter, Clinton said she was "not interested in endorsements from people who deny climate science and try to make it harder for people to vote."

Although she did not mention Koch by name, she linked to a message about his ABC interview.

Information for this article was contributed by Steve Peoples, Ken Thomas, Catherine Lucey, Laurie Kellman and Brian Slodysko of The Associated Press; by John Wagner, Anne Gearan and Ed O'Keefe of The Washington Post; and by Michael Barbaro of The New York Times.

A Section on 04/25/2016

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