Ohio Gov. John Kasich has won the GOP presidential primary in his home state, according to a CNN projection, his first victory of the campaign.
The win represents a speed bump for Republican front-runner Donald Trump by depriving the billionaire of 66 crucial delegates that would have made it easier to reach the magic number of 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination. It may also give the Republican establishment a final chance of uniting behind a candidate who could challenge Trump in the event of a contested convention.
“We are all very, very happy,” Kasich told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in a telephone interview.
Trump won the other big prize of the night: the Florida primary. That resounding win helped force Marco Rubio out of the race after failing to unite the Republican establishment against Trump.
“America is in the middle of a real political storm, a real tsunami, and we should have seen this coming,” Rubio said in Miami on Tuesday night in a speech that served as a thinly-veiled rebuke of Trump’s campaign tactics. “While we are on the right side,” he said, “this year, we will not be on the winning side.”
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has both the Florida and Ohio primaries — crucial victories that bolster her claim that she is her party’s only candidate who can win diverse states that will be pivotal in the November general election.
She is also projected to win the North Carolina primary, completing her sweep of Southern states where she has enjoyed strong support from African-American voters.
“We are moving closer to securing the Democratic Party nomination and winning this election in November,” Clinton said in a victory speech in West Palm Beach, Florida.
She added that by the end of the night she would have more two million more votes than rival Bernie Sanders and hold a lead of more than 300 in the delegate count.
Potent threat
Sanders remains a much more potent threat to Clinton than seemed likely when he launched his campaign last year. Many pundits expected the former first lady to have the nomination in her grasp by now.
“When people come out to vote in large numbers to reclaim their democracy, we win. When voter turnout is low, we lose. Let’s make sure that tomorrow we have a huge voter turnout,” Sanders told supporters in Akron, Ohio, on Monday night.
Sanders tried to see whether his assaults on free-trade deals, which he blames for economic blight in the industrial Midwest, could resonate in Ohio and Illinois as they did in Michigan. But Ohio went to Clinton.
Clinton is trying to counter Sanders’ push on trade as she seeks a way to rationalize her initial support for the huge Trans-Pacific trade deal. She backed the agreement as secretary of state only to oppose it when it was finalized while she was a candidate.
“His position is so ‘anti.’ He is against things before they are even finished, before they are read,” Clinton said at an MSNBC town hall meeting on Monday.
Clinton noted how Sanders was against the 12 -nation trade deal even before it was completed last year.
“He is just reflexively against anything that has any international implication,” Clinton said.