Republican takes another big step toward party’s nomination as he sees victories in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware

Donald Trump has taken another giant stride towards the Republican nomination with a clean sweep of victories in the five states up for grabs in Tuesday’s primary elections.

The billionaire businessman appeared to have fully regained the momentum against rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich as he claimed all of the north-eastern states of the “Acela primary”, named after the rail line which links them.

The Associated Press called the first three races – Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut – for Trump moments after polls closed at 8pm.

Trump had a 36-point lead over Cruz in Pennsylvania with one-third of votes counted, with a 33-point margin in Connecticut and a 31-point lead in Maryland.

By 8.34pm, Rhode Island and Delaware had been added to the wins column for the property magnate, with winning margins in excess of 40 points.

Trump hailed what he said was his biggest night of the race and although he is still quite likely to fall short of the finish line, he said: “I consider myself the presumptive nominee ... as far as I am concerned, it’s over.”

Speaking at Trump Tower in New York City, he predicted big nights ahead in the key states of Indiana and California and also began looking forward to the general election in November, claiming: “We will beat Hillary so easily.”

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But despite notching up more delegates and dominating the media agenda, Trump’s ultimate claim on the nomination remains far from certain and leaves little room for error. The final winning margins will be crucial in deciding whether he can reach the 1,237 delegates needed before the Republican convention in July.

Trump has already criticised the system in Pennsylvania, where the Republican winner is awarded 17 delegates, but 54 other delegates will be unbound and free to vote for any candidate at the convention. “It’s crazy,” he said of the voting rules. “The system is so complicated.”

Opinion polls had shown Trump leading in all five states – and his last remaining rivals had already moved on to later states where they desperately hoped to halt his advance. Laura Seyler, a Republican in Pennsylvania, cast her vote for him, saying she believed he would “take the bat and straighten things out”. She told the AP: “I don’t think he’s afraid, he doesn’t owe anybody anything, and I think he’s very much an American that loves his country, and he sees Americans suffering.”

Exit polls showed Trump dominating among almost every demographic in the north-east and continuing his trend of overwhelming leads among poorer and older voters in the Republican primary. Kasich, though, essentially tied with Trump in Maryland among voters with graduate degrees.

But as the endgame draws near, attention is already turning to Indiana’s primary next week. The Hoosier State has long been considered one of the key battlegrounds for anti-Trump forces, as the statewide winner receives 30 delegates, the biggest single pot of delegates before June.



In attempt to stop Trump, Texas senator Cruz formed a pact with Kasich, according to which the Ohio governor, who is currently polling in third place in Indiana, will devote no further resources to the state.

The goal of their pact is to stop Trump from winning a majority of delegates, with the ambition of forcing a second ballot at the July convention in Cleveland, Ohio. At that point, delegates would be free to vote for other candidates and the Kasich campaign calculates that it would pick up the support of a number of Indiana delegates once they are no longer obligated by next week’s primary result.

Cruz was quick to pull out of campaigning in Tuesday’s primaries and focus all his energy on Indiana. In contrast, Kasich spent time hoping to pick up delegates in states such as Rhode Island, and in several congressional districts in Maryland that border Washington DC.

Trump has dismissed his rivals’ strategy as “pathetic” and the latest example of what he describes as a rigged political system. The former candidate Ben Carson, now a Trump supporter, added on Fox News: “The people have sort of risen up and they’ve said we don’t want all this stuff that is going on, all this intricate, backroom stuff.”

Speaking before polls closed in the five states voting on Tuesday, Cruz took the stage in the gym where the underdog sports movie Hoosiers was filmed to criticise both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as peas in the establishment pod.

The Texas senator pre-emptively conceded, saying “tonight Donald Trump is expected to have a good night”, but expressed his hope that the race was moving on to “more favorable terrain” with the Hoosier State’s primary next week.



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Cruz went on to try to tie his top Republican rival to the likely Democratic nominee. He jibed that Clinton might pick Trump as a running mate because they were both New York liberals who agreed on 13 listed policy issues, including that “grown men should use the little girls’ restroom”, a reference to the controversial HB2 measure recently passed in North Carolina, which overturns local laws banning discrimination against transgender individuals.



Cruz, though, embraced what he saw as his current role as the underdog in the race, even having his bodyman re-enact a scene from Hoosiers to demonstrate the basket was the same height in Indiana as it was in New York City. This was a reference to a scene in which the underdog high school coach, played by Gene Hackman, inspires his team to victory on the eve of a game against a heavily favored opponent.



The wider Republican intrigue, as Cruz and Kasich plot to foil Trump, is matched by drama within the Trump campaign. As the frontrunner has edged closer to the nomination, the introduction of veteran Washington operative Paul Manafort to his inner circle has triggered a civil war within his camp.



Manafort, who has brought in a number of other seasoned Washington operatives, has pushed Trump to be a more traditional candidate who makes fewer controversial remarks and runs a campaign that features extensive television advertising and polling.

In contrast, longtime campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has pushed to “let Trump be Trump.” The resulting conflict between the two for the Republican frontrunner’s ear has seen Trump schedule a foreign policy speech one day and make fun of how Kasich eats the next.

Trump was due to make that speech in Washington on Wednesday as he tries to show the wider world that he can discuss foreign policy in fully formed paragraphs.