Ted Cruz scored a decisive victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday, defeating Donald Trump and seizing most of the state’s 42 delegates in a win that boosted the odds of a historic contested convention this summer.

Cruz’s margin of victory was large enough that three television networks called the contest soon after the polls closed. With 70 percent of precincts reporting, The Associated Press showed Cruz with roughly 50 percent of the vote, compared to just over 32 percent for Trump. John Kasich lagged far behind with about 14 percent. Cruz crushed Trump in the heavily GOP Milwaukee suburbs, leading Waukesha County by nearly 40 percentage points, with nearly 90 percent of the vote counted there.


The loss for Trump marked only the second time in the nominating contest — and the first since Iowa — that the Manhattan businessman suffered an election day without winning a state.

In an upbeat victory speech in Milwaukee, Cruz hailed the result as “a turning point” in the 2016 campaign that would cascade across the remaining states.

Cruz's Wisconsin win was thorough. Exit polls showed him winning Republicans of every age, every level of education, and every level of income. His strongest base was "very conservative" voters, which Cruz carried with nearly two-thirds of the vote.

As significantly for the states to follow, Cruz turned in his strongest performance to date among non-evangelicals, at least among states that had exit polls, beating Trump in that group 43 percent to 35 percent.

“Wisconsin,” Cruz said, “has lit a candle guiding the way forward.”

Whether that’s true won’t be clear until the coming weeks, but what was clear Tuesday is that Cruz had handed Trump his most consequential defeat since the Iowa caucuses and made the frontrunner’s path to the 1,237 delegates he needs even steeper. Trump now must win nearly 70 percent of the remaining delegates to avert a convention floor fight that he has already said could cause “riots.”

Interestingly, Cruz, who only days ago insisted he was still trying to win the nomination outright despite that being a mathematical near-impossibility, embraced the concept of a floor fight this summer in his most overt way yet.

"Either before Cleveland, or at the convention in Cleveland,” Cruz said, “Together we will win a majority of the delegates and together we will beat Hillary Clinton in November."

Trump chose not to deliver remarks after his bruising loss, but his campaign issued a fiery statement slamming Cruz and his allies. “Lyin’ Ted Cruz had the Governor of Wisconsin, many conservative talk radio show hosts, and the entire party apparatus behind him,” the statement read. “Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet--- he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump.”

Trump’s loss was also a major victory for the Stop Trump constellation of super PACs that had invested millions in the state on television ads, and must still prove to deep-pocketed donors that their movement is not a lost cause.

Club for Growth Action President David McIntosh, whose group paid for $1 million in Wisconsin ads, issued a statement immediately after Cruz won, calling Wisconsin "a major pivot in the GOP race away from Donald Trump and toward Ted Cruz.”

As the race has consolidated, Cruz has showed increasing strength. He was on pace to score 50 percent of the vote in Wisconsin, and boasted on stage of raising $2 million on Tuesday, refueling a warchest likely to be drained by New York’s pricey media market in two weeks.

Heading into Tuesday’s vote, Trump had secured 737 of the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the GOP nomination outright, while Cruz trailed badly with 475 delegates and Kasich had already been mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination outright, with only 143 delegates.

With more than 90 percent reporting, it appeared Cruz was on pace to win 36 of Wisconsin’s 42 delegates, carrying six of the state's eight congressional districts.





Ted Cruz's victory speech in Milwaukee, WI Ted Cruz's victory speech in Milwaukee, WI

Trump’s strength in some of Wisconsin’s more rural reaches had him competing to score as many as a half-dozen delegates or more. But in the face of impending defeat, Trump’s team had tried to downplay expectations in the state, with Trump adviser Stephen Miller saying on MSNBC hours before the polls closed that winning a single congressional district, and thus only three of Wisconsin’s 42 delegates, “would be considered a boost of momentum.”

In a sign of Cruz’s confidence, he was in Wisconsin for a victory party on Tuesday, while Trump was off the campaign trail, with no public events scheduled. On election nights past, Trump has dominated cable news with long speeches and press conferences often carried live in their entirety.

The Cruz victory ratchets up the pressure on Trump in his home state of New York in two weeks. Now Trump doesn’t just have to win there; he has to win big for his delegate math to add up to 1,237.

Still, Trump has a chance to regain his political footing with the slate of northeastern and more secular states coming up next that could pose a demographic challenge for Cruz. Recent polls have shown Trump topping 50 percent and trouncing both Cruz and Kasich in New York, which votes next on April 19.

In his victory speech, Cruz made an explicit appeal to cut into base of blue-collar voters who have so far propelled Trump’s rise, talking about "truck drivers," "working moms," "plumbers" and "steel-workers." (Pennsylvania, the historic home of the steel industry, notably votes on April 26.)

In Wisconsin, Cruz took advantage of the lull in the calendar to campaign aggressively across the whole state, much as he did in Iowa, from a “cheese castle” in Kenosha to a Christian film screening near Green Bay, to the voter-rich suburbs of Milwaukee, the so-called “WOW” counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington. He especially sought to appeal to women voters, fanning out female surrogates including his wife, Walker’s wife and Carly Fiorina to try to take advantage of controversial Trump remarks about Cruz’s wife, about abortion and about women more broadly in recent days.

Trump, too, campaigned aggressively in the closing days, holding five rallies since Saturday, including in La Crosse, Superior and Milwaukee on Monday alone. But speaking to a half-filled auditorium at his final event, Trump acknowledged his poor chances. “I’m not seeing polls that are great, I’m a little bit down, I’m down in some, I’m a little bit down,” he said.

Whatever the exact delegate count, the Wisconsin win capped one of Cruz’s strongest stretches of 2016, as his grassroots organization repeatedly has outmaneuvered Trump in the shadow campaign to win the loyalties of the individual delegates headed to Cleveland, both those bound on the first ballot, who could prove decisive in a contested convention, and the even more crucial dozens that will arrive as free agents from the start.

Over the weekend, Cruz scored all six unbound delegates available at local party meetings in Colorado and muscled through a slate of 18 of the 25 unbound delegates at stake in North Dakota. Trump won only a single self-identified possible delegate in the state.

While Trump has talked obsessively for months about his poll numbers, Cruz has begun to incorporate these delegate and statewide victories into own speeches, as he did Tuesday night in Milwaukee.

“Four very different states — Utah, Colorado, North Dakota, Wisconsin — four victories,” he said of the most recent states to vote or select delegates to the convention.

