After primary victories in Wisconsin, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders target their parties’ frontrunners in New York – which finds itself a surprise battleground

The race for the White House looked set to enter a tumultuous phase on Wednesday as overnight stumbles by both the Republican and Democratic frontrunners in Wisconsin opened up historic opportunities to block Donald Trump during the Republican convention in July and challenge Hillary Clinton on home turf in the next stretch.

At a stage in the US presidential cycle when the primary season is typically drawing to a close, the victories in the midwest for Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders proved to be by far larger margins than expected and raised painful questions for their Republican and Democratic opponents, even if neither Trump nor Clinton is likely to be overtaken before the conventions.

Cruz eventually seized 36 of the 42 delegates on offer in Wisconsin after trouncing Trump by a 13.1percentage point margin across a Republican state primary where the winner takes most of the prize.

Sanders, meanwhile, sealed his sixth victory in a row with an even bigger 13.5-point win over Clinton – who lost every county except Milwaukee – though he ended Tuesday night with a slimmer delegate lead of 47 to 36 due to Democratic proportionality rules.

Both challengers remain substantially behind on national delegates after the primary votes so far, with Cruz trailing Trump by 517 to 743, and Sanders with 1,027 pledged Democratic delegates compared with 1,279 for Clinton.



But signs of flagging support for Trump make it increasingly hard for him to reach the 1,237 Republican delegate milestone needed to avoid further rounds of voting at the party’s Cleveland convention. It raises the prospect of the first convention defeat for a leading candidate since the second world war.

Pressure is also now mounting on Clinton to secure the further 1,104 pledged delegates she needs from the second half of the Democratic race to avoid relying on controversial “superdelegates” to get her over the line at the party’s Philadelphia convention.

Clinton has a commanding 469-31 lead over Sanders among these superdelegates, mostly local party leaders who are not constrained by primary results and could theoretically change their early endorsement of her, but are more likely to remain loyal.

Yet the former secretary of state will be anxious to avoid relying on party insiders for victory – many Sanders supporters view them as damning proof of the party’s unwillingness to listen ordinary voters – and she remains hopeful of winning enough pledged delegates before the convention.

Attention therefore swiftly turned on Wednesday to New York, which finds itself in the unusual position of being a crucial battleground in not just one but two party races which are normally over long before the calendar reaches this point.

Cruz and Trump quickly descended on Wednesday for a series of rallies in the Empire State, which threatens to reverse recent momentum by awarding the bulk of its 95 Republican delegates to the billionaire celebrity from Manhattan rather than the socially conservative Texan.

But the ‘never Trump’ coalition is likely to pour millions of dollars into the expensive New York media market to blunt this natural advantage and keep open the increasing likelihood of a contested convention.

In the Democratic race, there were also growing signs on Wednesday of the gloves coming off in New York, as Clinton and her allies launched a series of stinging attacks on the democratic socialist from Vermont.

Top of the new strategy appeared to be an effort to paint Sanders supporters as naive, a departure from recent efforts to woo them as a part of a future coalition to defeat Trump.

“Look, I think it’s exciting to be in effect protesting,” Clinton told interviewers on MSNBC on Wednesday morning. “I remember I did that a long time ago when I was in my 20s, and I totally get the attraction of this.”

The former secretary of state has appeared impatient in recent days at the continued challenge from the left, and has made clear she wants to nip Sanders’ momentum in the bud in a state where she was senator and maintains a family home.

“There is a persistent, organised effort to misrepresent my record, and I don’t appreciate that, and I feel sorry for a lot of the young people who are fed this list of misrepresentations,” she added in an interview with Politico.

But the tactic brought a rebuke from otherwise supportive veterans of the successful Barack Obama insurgency against her 2008. “It’s patronizing,” warned the president’s former adviser David Axelrod.

Sanders faced more substantial questions over his plan to break up big Wall Street banks and reluctance to go beyond Obama on gun control – measures which provoked a fierce front page response to the Brooklyn-born senator in the New York Daily News on Wednesday.



“I think he hadn’t done his homework and he’d been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions,” said Clinton, who pasted the interview in full in an email to supporters.

The Sanders campaign defended his undoubtedly awkward encounter with the New York media by pointing to clearer explanations of his position on the banks in other recent speeches. It argues that letting shooting victims sue gunmakers would be a more disruptive alternative to more direct gun control measures, which he favours.



The Sanders campaign instead hopes the momentum and new attacks will help it continue to outraise Clinton among small donors and close the continued polling gap between them in New York.

“We very much expect an unbelievable amount of attacks and negativity over the next two weeks,” the campaign wrote to supporters on Wednesday. “We are on the path to the Democratic nomination for president. But I want to be clear: Super Pacs and the billionaire class want to block that path in the New York primary.”

If Sanders can stop Clinton from winning a majority of the 291 delegates on offer, he would still be a long way from closing the national gap – but it would raise the prospect of turning the Philadelphia convention into a battle for the soul of the party.

“We are going to an open convention,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver insisted on CNN after the Wisconsin result. “Everyone is talking about the Republicans having an open convention, but the Democrats are going to an open convention too.”

What is a contested convention?

How a contested convention could allow Republicans to snatch Trump's crown Read more

American political conventions have become stagey, if sterile, affairs in recent decades. Delegates and journalists typically arrive with little doubt over who will be picked as the presidential nominee and view them as pep rallies for the November general election.

This year, the Republican convention in Cleveland in July is increasingly likely to be the opposite: a wild and chaotic race to secure delegates after Donald Trump arrives short of the necessary 1,237 to secure outright victory in first round of voting.

There could even be drama among Democrats in Philadelphia, where Bernie Sanders will be seeking to argue that Hillary Clinton’s possible reliance on party insiders to put her over the line should raise the prospect of a contested convention.