The Associated Press reports Donald Trump has reached the magic 1,237 required to secure the Republican nomination ahead of the convention.
Unbound delegates pledging their support to Trump put him over the requisite threshold, according to the AP’s calculations.
From the AP:
Donald Trump reached the number of delegates needed to clinch the Republican nomination for president Thursday, completing an unlikely rise that has upended the political landscape and set the stage for a bitter fall campaign.Trump was put over the top in the Associated Press delegate count by a small number of the party’s unbound delegates who told the AP they would support him at the national convention in July. Among them is Oklahoma GOP chairwoman Pam Pollard.”I think he has touched a part of our electorate that doesn’t like where our country is,” Pollard said. “I have no problem supporting Mr. Trump.”It takes 1,237 delegates to win the Republican nomination. Trump has reached 1,238. With 303 delegates at stake in five state primaries on June 7, Trump will easily pad his total, avoiding a contested convention in Cleveland.
Trump envisions the new Republican Party as “the worker’s party“:
“Love the question,” Trump said in response to a question from Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green in a profile of Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus published Thursday. The article bears the headline, “How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built.”“Five, 10 years from now — different party. You’re going to have a worker’s party,” Trump said in the May 17 interview. “A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry.”Trump reiterated that cutting Social Security would be a “big mistake” for the GOP, remarking that “[c]utting it the wrong way is a big mistake, and even cutting it [at all].”The presumptive nominee’s views would not appear to have come about through intense retrospection. “My views are what everybody else’s views are. When I give speeches, sometimes I’ll sign autographs and I’ll get to talk to people and learn a lot about the party,” he said, admitting that he had not closely followed past Republican efforts to reform the immigration system.
The RNC has encouraged Republicans to unite around Trump prior to the general presidential election.
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