Clinton, Trump sharpen focus on fall contest

Cruz taps Fiorina for ticket; Sanders evokes agenda role

Carly Fiorina joins Ted Cruz at a campaign rally Wednesday in Indianapolis.
Carly Fiorina joins Ted Cruz at a campaign rally Wednesday in Indianapolis.

WASHINGTON -- With the general election in their sights, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton headed to Indiana with newly padded delegate totals after emerging mostly victorious from this week's Northeastern primaries.

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Bernie Sanders campaigns Wednesday at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. While not conceding the race, Sanders vowed to use his delegates to help forge a strong “progressive agenda” for the general election.

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Graphs showing the current delegate tally.

In a surprise move for the campaign to stop Trump from securing the GOP nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas announced he already has tapped Carly Fiorina as his running mate.

Though Trump must keep winning primaries to clinch the nomination before this summer's national convention -- he needs 48 percent of the remaining delegates -- he has breathing room to start making overtures to general-election voters. With Tuesday's wins, he has 987 delegates.

Trump emerged with more than 50 percent of the Republican votes in Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Maryland, and scored over 60 percent in Delaware and Rhode Island. Similarly, Clinton won convincingly in four of the five contests, scoring 56 percent in Pennsylvania and 63 percent in Maryland -- the two biggest contests of the night. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont won the Rhode Island primary with 55 percent of the vote.

Mathematically unable to win the nomination on a first round vote, all Cruz and fellow candidate Gov. John Kasich of Ohio can do is throw obstacles in the businessman's path to force a contested convention if no candidate secures 1,237 delegates.

Cruz announced Fiorina as his vice presidential pick during a rally in Indiana, which votes Tuesday. He cast the unusual announcement as a way to give voters confidence in their choice if they vote for him.

"You deserve to know exactly where a candidate stands," he said.

Cruz praised Fiorina's path from secretary to chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard and her past willingness to challenge Trump.

"Carly isn't intimated by bullies," he said, adding, "Over and over again, Carly has shattered glass ceilings."

Fiorina immediately went after Trump and Clinton, embracing the aggressive role of a No. 2 on the White House ticket. She cast Trump and Clinton as a pair of liberals who would do little to shake up Washington.

"They're not going to challenge the system -- they are the system," Fiorina said.

"This is the fight of our time. And I believe Ted Cruz is the man to lead that fight," Fiorina added. "And I am prepared to stand by his side and give this everything I have, to restore the soul of our party, to defeat Donald Trump, to defeat Hillary Clinton, and to take our country back."

Cruz hoped that adding Fiorina to his potential ticket would be a draw for Republicans desperate to keep Clinton out of the White House. Fiorina was frequently praised for her tough criticism of Clinton during her own presidential campaign and irritated Trump with her sharp retorts during GOP debates.

Since dropping out, she has become Cruz's most active surrogate, making frequent campaign appearances alongside him and on her own.

Candidates typically wait until they've secured their party's nomination before picking a running mate, in part to avoid appearing to be getting ahead of the will of the voters.

But in Cruz's case, the announcement seemed aimed at keeping up the idea that he has a claim to the nomination and potentially attracting more voters in Indiana and other remaining states -- including Fiorina's home state of California.

Trump mocked Cruz at a rally in Indianapolis on Wednesday night, saying, "Cruz can't win -- what's he doing picking vice presidents?"

"He is the first presidential candidate in the history of this country who's mathematically eliminated from becoming president who chose a vice presidential candidate," Trump said.

Earlier in the day, Trump said on Fox & Friends that it "looks ridiculous; he's not going to get the nomination."

"Naming Carly's dumb because Carly didn't do well. She had one good debate -- not against me by the way, because I had an unblemished record of victories during debates -- but she had one victory on the smaller stage, and that was it," Trump said.

Sanders' rationale

Like Trump, Clinton emerged from this week's Northeastern primaries with a stronger claim on her party's nomination. With four victories Tuesday, she now has 1,644 delegates. Counting superdelegates -- party members who may back the candidate of their choice -- the former secretary of state has 2,151, more than 90 percent of the 2,383 needed to clinch the nomination.

Sanders, campaigning in Indiana as well Wednesday, conceded that the delegate math was not in his favor. With 1,316 delegates -- 1,355 with superdelegates -- he said his campaign still aims to win the nomination but also will seek to assemble as many delegates as possible to influence the party's platform and message.

Seeming to acknowledge his dwindling fortunes early in his remarks, Sanders suggested another rationale for staying in the race after losing four of five Eastern primary states on Tuesday: shaping the Democratic party platform.

"We are in this campaign to win, but if we do not win, we intend to win every delegate we can so that when we go to Philadelphia in July, we are going to have the votes to put together the strongest progressive agenda that any political party has ever seen," Sanders said to boisterous applause during a rally at Purdue University.

Sanders emphasized that many state and national polls have shown him beating Trump in a general election by a greater margin than Clinton.

"If we want a candidate who will be the strongest Democratic candidate to defeat Trump or any other Republican nominee, you're looking at that candidate," he said.

Clinton, too, is focusing on the bigger election picture, appealing to Sanders' supporters to unite with her own supporters as Democrats to defeat the Republican nominee in November.

"I applaud Sen. Sanders and his millions of supporters for challenging us to get unaccountable money out of our politics and giving greater emphasis to closing the gap of inequality," Clinton told a crowd in Philadelphia. "And I know together we will get that done. Whether you support Sen. Sanders or you support me, there's much more that unites us than divides us."

In an interview, Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign manager, said he still sees a "mathematical possibility" of catching Clinton, saying Sanders is poised to go on a winning streak and will continue to try to convince the party's superdelegates that he would be the stronger Democratic candidate against Republican front-runner Donald Trump in the fall.

"There will be a lot of obituary writers out there, but we're going to enter a number of states where he can make a run," Weaver said. "He's going to win the vast majority of contests in May and into June, and he's going to enter the convention with a tremendous amount of momentum."

With just more than a dozen states and territories left to vote, Sanders' campaign said it was laying off "hundreds" of field staff members and other aides to focus on winning the remaining primaries -- particularly California's on June 7.

The campaign will have gone from a staff of more than 1,000 in January to about 325 to 350, Briggs said.

"We will continue to have a strong and dedicated staff of more than 300 workers who are going to help us win in California and other contests still to come," said spokesman Michael Briggs.

Sanders hopes to score a victory in next week's Indiana primary and is looking ahead to contests in Oregon and California. He has vowed to compete until the final District of Columbia primary in June.

One of the biggest questions looming now is whether Sanders will alter his tone on the trail. At an election-night rally in West Virginia on Tuesday and again in Indiana on Wednesday, Sanders dialed back some of his criticism of Clinton, perhaps offering a preview of what he has said will be an "issue-oriented" campaign in the remaining 14 contests.

Weaver said there are no plans for Sanders to alter his message on the trail.

But Clinton's campaign and Democratic leaders still will watch closely to see whether Sanders will continue to raise issues that could damage Clinton's chances in November or whether he will encourage his youthful following to support Clinton.

"I would hope that there is a beginning of a pivot for him to make it really clear to his supporters what's at stake against the Republicans," said former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who supports Clinton.

Clinton's allies note that Trump has been co-opting Sanders' pitch against Clinton, which the businessman acknowledged Wednesday.

"Bernie Sanders has a message that's interesting. I'm going to be taking a lot of things Bernie said," Trump said Wednesday on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "When he said, 'Bad judgment,' I said, 'Sound bite!'"

Information for this article was contributed by Julie Pace, Ken Thomas, Lisa Lerer, Stephen Ohlemacher and Hope Yen, Scott Bauer, Steve Peoples and Erica Werner of The Associated Press; by John Wagner of The Washington Post; and by Margaret Talev, Jennifer Epstein and staff members of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 04/28/2016

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