Sen. Ted Cruz scored decisive wins in the Kansas and Maine caucuses Saturday, demonstrating his enduring appeal among conservatives as he tried to reel in Donald J. Trump's significant lead in the Republican presidential race.
Trump contained Cruz's advances by winning the Louisiana and Kentucky primaries. But the Texas senator's wins were sure to energize the anti-Trump forces who are desperately trying to stop Trump's march to the nomination, and they left little doubt that Cruz, who has now captured six states, is their best hope.
In Democratic contests, Hillary Clinton scored a commanding victory in Louisiana, the state with the most delegates in play Saturday, while Sen. Bernie Sanders won the Nebraska and Kansas caucuses, according to The Associated Press. The results were not likely to alter the broader contours of a race in which Clinton maintained a significant delegate lead.
The biggest stakes were on the Republican side, and the voters sensed it; turnout in Kansas, for example, was more than double that in 2012. Cruz won 48 percent of the vote there, while Trump received 23 percent, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida won 17 percent, and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio won 11 percent. The results were tighter in Maine, but Cruz still easily defeated Trump there by 13 percentage points.
"I think what it represents is Republicans coalescing, saying it would be a disaster for Donald Trump to be our nominee and we're going to stand behind the strongest conservative in the race," Cruz told reporters in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which votes Tuesday.
Boasting of his "breadth of support," Cruz suggested it was time for Rubio and Kasich to consider dropping out of the race.
"We'll continue to amass delegates, but what needs to happen is the field needs to continue to narrow," he said. "As long as the field remains divided it gives Donald an advantage."
The results Saturday marked another stinging setback for Rubio. He finished a distant third in Kansas and Louisiana and fourth in Maine.
Rubio, who backed out of trips to Kentucky and Louisiana on Friday to make three stops across Kansas, has an increasingly narrow path and is confronting the prospect of a humiliating loss in his own state next week. He has won just a single state, Minnesota, and lags well behind Trump and Cruz in delegates.
"The states that voted tonight are states that quite frankly some of my opponents just do better in. We recognized that going in," Rubio told reporters in Puerto Rico, where he is hoping to find a win Sunday.
Trump's losses underlined his continued vulnerability in states that hold time-intensive caucuses: He has now lost five of six such contests. He has performed far better in states holding primaries, which require less organization, and some of which also allow Democrats and independents to vote in Republican races.
Such voters, who can be receptive to Trump's anti-establishment message, have augmented Trump's support. But if Trump is not able to bolster his organization and start performing better in caucuses and states that allow only Republicans to vote, Cruz may be able to deny him the 1,237 delegates needed to capture the nomination before the convention.
Saturday's contests could offer clues about whether the growing effort to deny Trump the nomination has any resonance. The Stop Trump campaign was joined last week by Mitt Romney, who delivered a blistering attack on the Republican front-runner, portraying him as a threat to the party and the nation. But Romney was seemingly undercut the same day at a debate where all three of Trump's rivals indicated they would support his candidacy if he won the nomination.
Kansas was seen as the contest in which Cruz had the best chance for victory. Its Republicans in recent years have turned sharply away from the moderation exemplified by former Senate Republican Leader Robert J. Dole, electing a series of hard-line conservatives. Rick Santorum won the caucuses there in a landslide four years ago, appealing to the same heavily religious voters who backed Cruz.
Cruz campaigned aggressively in the state, which has a robust Christian conservative wing, but both Trump and Rubio tore up their schedules to make a late play there.
Trump was scheduled to appear at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, but canceled so he could attend a rally in Wichita, Kansas' largest city, just before the caucuses began Saturday morning.
There he continued to mock Romney as a "stiff" and a "loser," saying he should have "devoted the same energy" to running for president four years ago as he is now. He also knocked Romney for "looking for a zone change to get a nine-car garage built." It was a favorite Democratic talking point about Romney, a wealthy businessman, who built a large garage with an elevator at his home in California during the 2012 campaign.
And it was red meat for Trump's fans. One of them, Mark Pendergrass, 66, a Wichita artist, said that if Romney's message "had been half as powerful four years ago, he might have won the presidency."
At the rally, Trump was still defensive about Rubio's criticism of the size of his hands. "These hands hit a golf ball 285 yards!" Trump told the crowd, repeatedly holding them up and splaying his fingers.
Trump also mocked Cruz, calling him "Lyin' Ted." He then went on to explain how that would be spelled: "L-Y-E-N. Lyin'. With a big apostrophe."
Urging his fans to go to the caucuses, he said, half-jokingly, "If I lose, I'm gonna be so angry at you."
Charles Ebright, 48, a teacher and a baseball coach at a Roman Catholic high school in Wichita, was among the many caucusgoers who backed Cruz, who had also addressed the gathering before voting began. "I've studied the formation of the Constitution, and I teach that," Ebright said. "I think Ted Cruz stands up for the Constitution."
Long lines outside the caucus led party officials to extend it past the scheduled 2 p.m. closing time. Steve Brunk, a former Republican state representative from Wichita who is now a lobbyist for the Family Policy Alliance of Kansas, said 40 computers had been set up to check caucusgoers' information as quickly as possible. "I don't think I've seen a turnout like this for anything," Brunk said.
Trump's comments about building a wall along the border with Mexico and about illegal immigrants causing crime have drawn demonstrations almost everywhere he goes. In Wichita, Trump supporters in line engaged in shouting with several dozen protesters, many of them Hispanics, who make up 20 percent of the city's population. Trucks with Mexican flags hanging out the windows and Latin music blaring from the speakers cruised slowly past the line.
Both Rubio and Kasich have said that they need to win their home states, which both hold winner-take-all primaries March 15.
But Cruz is making that more difficult by not ceding either state, a move that could ensure he finally gets a one-on-one race with Trump.
"If Trump wins those states, he still won't have enough delegates to win the nomination, and it becomes a binary decision after that," said Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, one of Cruz's leading supporters.
But the geography of the race will become less friendly to Cruz as it moves past the Bible Belt. And by splintering the vote in Ohio and Florida, Cruz also risks handing Trump advantages in momentum and delegates that could be unstoppable, no matter how much the field winnows.
There has been considerably less drama in the Democratic race since Clinton bounced back from her landslide loss in New Hampshire with victories in Nevada, South Carolina and across the South on Super Tuesday that underscored Sanders' weakness with nonwhite voters.
But while Clinton is now heavily favored to be the Democratic nominee, the party's primary calendar still features a series of contests that seem ripe for Sanders, as Kansas and Nebraska were.
Both of those states tend to attract liberal voters who prefer Sanders, and both are heavily white. And as moderates in each state have migrated to the Republican Party in recent years, what remains of the Democratic Party has moved left.
Clinton, though, continued to demonstrate her strength in the South, easily capturing Louisiana, where the primary electorate was expected to be heavily black. Sanders expended little effort there.
There were 126 delegates up for grabs in the Democratic race on Saturday, allocated on a proportional basis. That means that Clinton's single victory, in the most delegate-rich Democratic state voting Saturday, was likely to diminish the gains from Sanders's two wins.