WASHINGTON, March 15 (UPI) — Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has won Tuesday’s winner-take-all primary in Florida — apparently dealing a knockout blow to Sen. Marco Rubio, who has suspended his campaign.
But Trump, who is also projected to win in Illinois and North Carolina, failed to capture the other major prize of the night in Ohio where that state’s two-term governor, John Kasich, has scored his first win of the race.
While Kasich was able to defend his home turf, Rubio could not and it forced him out of the race while giving Trump a major boost. Trump’s Florida victory comes in one of two winner-take-all delegate states for the Republicans. He earns all of Florida’s 99 delegates to the GOP convention in Cleveland, and all but ensures he will finish the night the delegate winner in five states holding primaries Tuesday.
Rubio, who suffered an embarrassing defeat on his political home turf, spoke to supporters at his headquarters in Miami Tuesday night, saying it was not “God’s will” he should become president.
His speech also called out the Trump campaign in a veiled shot at his rival, who the Florida senator said is leading a “political tsunami … we should have seen coming.”
Rubio, who at times went insult-for-insult with Trump, said that he tried to run a campaign that was “optimistic” about the country.
“From a political standpoint, the easiest thing to have done on this campaign is jump on all those anxieties, make people angrier, more frustrated,” he said. “But I chose a different route and I’m proud of that. In a year like this, that would have been the easiest way to win.”
In Florida, Trump secured about 45 percent of the vote while Rubio took less than 30 percent.
Kasich spoke on CNN prior to giving a victory speech at a college campus in Ohio. He pledged to fight on in the campaign, despite the fact he faces long odds in beating Trump in the delegate race given his poor showings in early-voting states.
“We’ve only been paid attention to for the last two or three weeks. … People are only starting to hear the message,” Kasich said.
The victory in his home state, which he has served in Congress and as governor for 18 years, is a powerful moment, and it more importantly for the stop-Trump movement, denies him all 66 delegates that were at stake in the winner-take-all contest.
“What it does is you said, you want to divide [voters], you came to Ohio and threw everything you had at me and it didn’t work,” Kasich said in the CNN interview.
In Illinois, a state where Sen. Ted Cruz had campaigned hard, Trump walked away with another plurality win. He was projected to take about 40 percent of the vote to 26 percent for Cruz and 21 percent for Kasich.
Republicans also vote in Missouri on Tuesday.
Trump is scheduled to address supporters and take questions from reporters at a rally at the Mar-a-Lago club he owns in Palm Beach, Fla.
