Trump sweeps GOP primaries on East Coast

Donald Trump swept to victory in five states Tuesday, winning primaries in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island.

The Manhattan business mogul always figured to have a good day when voters in the five Eastern states went to the polls. Just how good may determine whether he wraps up the GOP presidential nomination by summertime, or has to fight all the way to the Republican National Convention in July.

Starting the day, Trump had 845 delegates. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, with 559, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, with 148, forged a tenuous non-compete agreement this week to try to stop the front-runner and wrestle the nomination away at the Cleveland convention.

It takes 1,237 delegates to win the Republican nomination. With no chance of gaining enough delegates to win outright, the only hope for Cruz, Kasich and the forces aligned against Trump is to stall him short of clinching on the convention's first ballot and throw the floor open to alternatives in subsequent rounds of voting.

Their last best chance to thwart Trump's momentum may come next Tuesday, in Indiana, which offers 57 delegates and stands as arguably the most closely matched contest in the remaining six weeks of the GOP presidential race, which ends June 7.

California, which votes that day and offers 172 delegates-more than any state-will ultimately determine whether Trump clinches the nomination, or how close he comes.

The five states voting Tuesday-Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Rhode Island as well as Pennsylvania - offered a combined 172 delegates.

There was only one pure winner-take-all contest: Delaware, which awards all 16 delegates to the candidate who carries the state. The rest apportioned their delegates through a combination of statewide and congressional district-level results.

Pennsylvania was the day's biggest prize and also the most complicated.

Of the 71 delegates at stake, just 17 will be required to vote for the winner on the first ballot of the convention in Cleveland. The rest, elected by congressional district, can support whomever they choose, though many said ahead they would support the candidate who carried their district.

Trump continued Tuesday to decry the nominating system, which is based on the delegate count in Cleveland rather than the popular vote in contests across the country.

'The whole delegate system is a sham,” he said on Fox News.

For his part, Cruz always faced a difficult road Tuesday, given his cultural conservatism and religiosity in a region that tends toward neither. For the last several days he has focused on Indiana, where a sizable evangelical population and buttoned-down Midwestern sensibility offer a better political fit.

On Sunday night, his campaign announced an alliance with Kasich, in which the governor would essentially cede Indiana in return for Cruz standing down in primaries in Oregon, which votes May 17, and New Mexico on June 7.

But the accord was quickly mired in confusion, with Kasich refusing to explicitly steer his Indiana supporters to Cruz and a pro-Cruz political action committee continuing to air anti-Kasich TV ads in the state.