Trump needs 77 delegates to officially clinch nomination
Donald Trump is just 77 delegates away from clinching the Republican presidential nomination after his victory in Tuesday night’s Oregon primary.
{mosads}The real estate mogul is the only candidate left in the race, so each contest brings him closer to officially securing the party’s nomination.
His victory in Oregon will give him another 17 delegates to add to his coffers, which brings him to 1,160, according to Associated Press estimates. That’s just 77 delegates shy of the 1,237 threshold, which he will almost assuredly eclipse during the final round of primaries on June 7.
As the only active candidate in the GOP, Trump is all but a lock to win the 347 delegates yet to be awarded, meaning he’ll end the race with more than 1,400 delegates.
However, many of those delegates may not be Trump loyalists. Party rules only bind them to the candidate, and they do not necessarily have to be ardent supporters themselves.
That won’t hurt his prospects for the nomination, thanks to the requirement that the delegates vote the way that they are bound for at least the first ballot. But it could lead to contentious debates at other points during the convention on issues like the platform and the party’s rules.
Oregon had previously been seen as a potential battleground in the GOP effort to keep Trump away from that threshold and force a contested convention. Ted Cruz and John Kasich had agreed to clear a path for Kasich in the state, in exchange for Kasich standing down in Indiana. But the pair both dropped out long before they could fully execute that plan.
Cruz and Kasich both won 3 delegates in Oregon’s primary on Tuesday.
–Mark Hensch contributed to this report, which was updated on May 18 at 8:06 a.m.
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