The 2016 Blast The latest POLITICO scoops and coverage of the 2016 elections. Email Sign Up

Tweets from https://twitter.com/politico/lists/team-politico



Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Eugene, Ore. on May 6. | AP Photo Trump wins Washington State

Donald Trump marched closer to the Republican nomination on Tuesday, winning Washington State’s primary unopposed.

With the win, the mogul closed in on earning the 1,237 pledged delegates he needs to claim the nomination, a threshold he’s certain to cross on June 7, when Republicans in the final five primary states cast ballots. That election will kick off a six-week lull before Republicans convene in Cleveland to formally bestow the party’s nomination.

Washington’s GOP has a conservative streak that Trump’s former rival Ted Cruz once hoped to capitalize on as he worked to block Trump from claiming the nomination. But without Cruz in the race, Trump has begun consolidating support among primary voters — and the results showed on Tuesday, when the Associated Press called the race for Trump.

However, the New Yorker’s win followed another sign of lingering division within the Republican Party after a bitter primary season; At a state GOP convention over the weekend, Cruz’s allies overwhelmed the event and elected 40 Cruz supporters (of 41 slots available) as delegates to the national convention. Party leaders, sensing the concerns that have accompanied similar delegate takeovers in the past, issued a statement Monday urging primary voters to turn out.

“While the delegates were elected this weekend at the state convention, their personal preferences will not be considered. Instead, YOU the Primary voters will decide,” the party said in a statement.

Though those delegates’ preferences would have been pivotal if the convention became a contested affair, they could still be influential in shaping the party’s platform and rules that will govern the GOP nominating contest in 2020.

Trump has largely turned away from the primaries and begun sharpening attacks on Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee. But state GOP leaders have used the remaining primaries and statewide conventions as platforms to plead for party unity against Clinton, worried that a divided Republican Party would hand the White House to Democrats in November.



