Indiana primary live: do-or-die for Cruz as Trump seeks Republican coronation

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Indiana primary live: do-or-die for Cruz as Trump seeks Republican coronation” was written by Tom McCarthy in New York, for theguardian.com on Tuesday 3rd May 2016 22.46 UTC





Don’t make the mistake of neglecting our results page – we’re at 2.5% reporting now on both sides, from mostly rural precincts, and Clinton and Trump appear to be performing well:







What will we learn when the last of the Indiana polls close in just 20 minutes?



We haven’t even had time to order pizza yet!







Roger Stone, the former Donald Trump adviser, current Trump ally and longtime Republican bruiser, tweets that CNN’s Jake Tapper, in the spot we linked to earlier, is wrong about Ted Cruz’s father and, by the way, Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill Kennedy:









Ted Cruz for president, down to 2% in betting pools.


Not down by 2%. Down to 2%.








Here are a few good #ffs for snap results analysis:











Forty precincts have now reported on each side – that’s less than 1% reporting. Needless to say that’s not a large enough proportion to base a projection on. But not bad for Trump, it appears:



Visit our comprehensive mapped results page here:







Why would the Associated Press be circulating a video explaining how they might call a race in Indiana immediately as polls close? Hmmm …




Updated






One precinct has let fly its results early. And Clinton holds a 228-vote lead in Indiana. Count it.



Here’s Nate Cohn with a good reminder of why exit polls can be misleading: they don’t encompass early votes – hundreds of thousands of them, in Indiana’s case tonight:




Updated







Donald Trump is a friend of mine.


– Senator Ted Cruz, 7/18/15









Jim Facklam votes at the Whiting Fire Department in Whiting, Indiana.
Jim Facklam votes at the Whiting Fire Department in Whiting, Indiana. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Voters at the Hamilton Co. Auto Auction in Noblesville, Indiana.
Voters at the Hamilton Co. Auto Auction in Noblesville, Indiana. Photograph: Darron Cummings/AP
A station in Indianapolis, Indiana.
A station in Indianapolis, Indiana. Photograph: Steve C. Mitchell/EPA




Majority of Indiana polls to close



Polling stations in 80 of 92 counties in Indiana are about to close. What’s done is (almost) done.



Update: to be clear: It appears there is no way that Ted Cruz might leave the race tonight or any night soon:



Correction: this post has been updated to reflect that some results will land before 7pm ET.



Updated






Here is the kind of exit poll tidbit that an eyebrow might be raised at but which on the other hand might mean diddly depending on the reliability of the data which might be nil:









“Many supporters of each candidate wouldn’t consider ultimately voting for the other,” writes Guardian politics reporter Ben Jacobs:


Michael Strawn, a 52-year-old mortgage banker from Carmel, Indiana, who supports Cruz, told the Guardian: “Donald Trump scares me. He is unpredictable and self-centered.” A lifelong Republican, Strawn said he would have a hard time voting for Trump if he was the nominee. “I know what the worst case is with Hillary. I don’t like it but I can manage. With Trump I just don’t know.”


In contrast, Danny Buechler of Greenfield not only couldn’t imagine voting for Cruz, but he couldn’t imagine voting for anyone besides Trump. The long-bearded biker, who wore a black cowboy hat with “Trump” written in silver, said he had last voted for Richard Nixon in 1968. To him, the Republican frontrunner represented “truth and change”, and Buechler took reassurance in the fact that the mogul “ain’t a politician yet”.



Read the full piece here:






The exit poll temptation



If you like results but don’t like waiting, you’re in luck, because exit poll data is now trickling out. The data have been collected by interviewers outside polling stations across Indiana on behalf of a consortium of media outlets, and the data might shed light on the demographic and ideological breakdowns of today’s electorate, which information then might be extrapolated to judge the candidates’ potential performances, is how it works.


You can root through the data for kernels of potential insight here, but be warned – those kernels might in fact be misleading nonsense, the result of bad voter sampling or inaccurate self-reporting by voters.


Still, it is interesting to contemplate that the proportion of #NeverTrump voters in the Republican race may have been smaller, actually, than the proportion of voters who said they were #NeverCruz:



Read @SteveKornacki for more.



Updated





The campaign’s strangest day?



3 May 2016 witnessed some of the most outlandish lines ever to surface in the national political discourse, which is saying something.


Donald Trump started things off by calling into Fox News and giving credence to a months-old story in the National Enquirer – think celebrity alien baby births and John Edwards’ affair – that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz Sr., had been captured on camera with Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated president John F Kennedy.


“What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death, I mean before the shooting?” Trump said. (There’s no reason apart from the sterling journalistic reputation of the Enquirer, which has endorsed Trump and is published by a friend of Trump’s, to believe the man in the picture in question is indeed Cruz’s father.)


Cruz replied in a midday news conference that snowballed into a full-throated condemnation of Trump, whom Cruz called a “pathological liar” and a “serial philanderer” whose “battles with venereal disease” were not the kind of thing Americans would like their teenagers to contemplate.


Here’s Cruz’s sizzler:



Cruz attacks Trump for linking his father to JFK assassination – video

Trump hit back, saying Cruz was in the last throes of a “desperate” attempt to save his “failing campaign,” accusing him of a “ridiculous outburst” and saying he did not “have the temperament to be president.”


The end. Take it away CNN’s Jake Tapper:




Updated





Visit our Indiana results map



Our comprehensive interactive map-glamorous results page is now live here.


Veterans of this process know that the interactive is a great place to go if you want to compare Trump’s performance in the Indianapolis metropolitan area, say, with his results in the more rural southern part of the state or the industrial strip along the I-80 corridor up north.


Also, there are animated candidates riding scissors lifts and wielding paintbrushes to tag territory where they’re ahead. Check it out:







Guardian politics reporter Ben Jacobs is in Indianapolis tonight, where he will watch Ted Cruz deliver a speech after the results are in.



From there, Cruz heads west:








Hello and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the Indiana primaries, where Donald Trump is hoping to kick his ankles free of Ted Cruz’s teeth, and Hillary Clinton is hoping to avoid another unseemly Bernie Sanders win.


The stakes on the Republican side tonight cannot be overstated. If Trump wins the 30 delegates that Indiana awards the victor in the state’s popular vote (the winners in each of the state’s nine congressional districts receive three delegates apiece), only a huge upset by Cruz in California next month could stop Trump from obtaining the 1,237 pledged delegates needed to clinch the nomination.


Tonight’s the night that Donald Trump could become the likely 2016 Republican presidential nominee.


It’s raining wins, hallelujah.
It’s raining wins, hallelujah. Photograph: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

Polling averages have Trump up by double digits in the Hoosier state, while Clinton holds a smaller and less extensively surveyed lead over Sanders (with 83 pledged delegates to be awarded on the Democratic side). But Clinton, who holds a prohibitive lead in the delegate race, is already leaving the primary season behind and training her fire on Trump:



Most polling stations in Indiana, which straddles two time zones, close at 6pm ET, with the remainder closing at 7pm ET. In 2012, half the Indiana vote had been reported by 8pm ET, and 95% by 10pm ET, according to the Associated Press.


A very high rate of absentee ballots, which were requested in unusual volume, have been returned in Indiana, NBC News reported.



It was a strange day on the campaign trail, even for the 2016 cycle, with Trump starting off by linking Cruz’s father to the JFK assassination and Cruz trotting out an old Trump quote about venereal disease. We’ll bring you a recap of that action shortly – or you can scroll through today’s Campaign Minute or enjoy Scott Bixby’s daytime live blog.


As usual, we’ll be tracking the results on our interactive maps tool and bringing you the headline returns here as soon as they come in. Do you think Sanders will pull off an upset? Is there any chance of Cruz doing the same? Wherefore John Kasich?


Here’s how the delegate races currently stack up:


Republicans
Democrats

Thank you as always for reading – and don’t forget to join us in the comments!




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Indiana primary live: do-or-die for Cruz as Trump seeks Republican coronation


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