Big Election Contests in Utah, Arizona Highlight Delegate Fight
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Republican and Democratic voters in Arizona and Utah head to the polls for presidential primaries Tuesay, while Idaho Democrats are also holding presidential caucuses.
Frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are looking to strengthen their leads in the delegate count.
Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republicans Ted Cruz and John Kasich are fighting to reverse the growing sense of inevitability about both party frontrunners.
They are also working to keep Trump and Clinton from gaining enough delegates to officially win their parties' nominations.
Recent polls have shown Trump with a decent lead in Arizona.
But his brash tone has turned off some Republican voters in Utah, where preference polls suggest Cruz has a chance to claim more than 50 percent of the caucus vote - and with it, all of Utah's 40 delegates.
Trump could earn some delegates should Cruz fail to exceed 50 percent, in which case the delegates would be awarded proportionally based on each candidate's vote total.
Meanwhile, Kasich could end up playing the spoiler in Utah. He has invested heavily there in recent days, airing $215,000 in ads, including an online-only ad that falsely implies Mitt Romney backed him, rather than Cruz, in Utah.
Romney, the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee, has actually told his fellow Utah voters in a recorded phone message that Cruz "is the only Republican candidate who can defeat Donald Trump."
To win the Republican nomination, candidates need to secure 1,237 delegates. So far, Trump is leading with 680 delegates, Cruz is second with 424, and Kasich in a distant last place with 143.
Trump's challengers' best - and perhaps only - hope lies with denying the frontrunner a delegate majority and forcing a contested national convention in July.
"This is going to the convention," Kasich said Tuesday night on CNN.
On the Democrat side, the latest count by RealClearPolitics shows Clinton has won 1,119 delegates, while Sanders has earned 813. But the Democratic Party's process also includes so-called "Superdelegates" who have overwhelmingly sided with Clinton.
That means Clinton has a total of 1,630 delegates, and Sanders only has 870 delegates out of the 2,382 required to secure the Democratic nomination.
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