Listen
Ted Cruz kept his hopes for the GOP nomination alive on Super Tuesday. The Texas senator notched up wins both in the Lone Star State, in neighboring Oklahoma and far-flung Alaska. But he remains a distant second to Donald Trump, who ran away with all but one other March 1 contest.
The Associated Press reports that Trump has 285 delegates, while Cruz has 161. The first to get to 1,237 delegates wins the GOP presidential nomination
Cruz took the stage at the Redneck Country Club in Stafford around 9:15 p.m. Tuesday night. Citing his latest two victories, he cast himself as the only Republican candidate capable of keeping Trump from winning the party's nomination for president.
"For the candidates who have not yet won a state, who have not racked up significant delegates, I ask you to prayerfully consider our coming together, uniting," Cruz said.
The Texas senator delivered his pitch before word came through that Florida Senator Marco Rubio had won Minnesota's Republican primary. That's likely to keep Rubio in the race, at least until Florida's delegate rich primary on March 15.
David Vaughn is a chemical engineer and a Cruz supporter who likes his candidates chances moving forward.
"Well, he did extremely well in Texas, like we expected, and Oklahoma," Vaughn said. “He's going to pick up a lot of delegates in a lot of the proportional states. So he did about as well as we could expect with a divided field on the non-Trump vote."
Texas is one of those states that awards delegates on a proportional basis. Trump picked up the second-largest number of delegates in the Lone Star State, after Cruz. The billionaire also notched wins in five Southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia – as well as Massachusetts and Vermont in New England.
