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Cruz team attacks Trump for touting Tyson endorsement, while in Indiana

Fox News

The campaign for Sen. Ted Cruz and one of its PACs are attacking rival Donald Trump for his allegiance to former pro boxing champion Mike Tyson, who was convicted of rape in Indiana, which holds a primary Tuesday.

The Trusted Leadership PAC has released an online video pointing out that Trump said Tyson, a Trump supporter, was “railroaded” in the 1991 conviction.

“One of the leaders in the effort to keep Tyson out of prison is Donald Trump,” a TV news-reader is heard saying in the 30-second video, over archived moving and still pictures of Trump, including one of him beside Tyson.

Trump argued at the time, and replayed in the PAC ad, that the female victim, a teen beauty pageant contestant, was seen dancing with Tyson and willingly went to his Indianapolis hotel room.

The front-running Trump seemed to spark the pro-Cruz attacks by unexpectedly saying this week that “Iron Mike” had tweeted an endorsement and “All of the tough guys endorse me.”

On Friday, Cruz told reporters in Indiana: “I’ve got news for Donald Trump: Rapists are not tough guys.”

That same day, Carly Fiorina, Cruz’s newly announced running mate and a former 2016 GOP presidential candidate, also blasted Trump.

"Sorry, I don't consider a convicted rapist a tough guy,” she said, according to Politico.

Trump leads Cruz in the delegate count 996-to-565, on the way toward getting 1,237 to secure the nomination before the GOP’s nominating convention in July. Trump convincingly won New York earlier this month, then on Tuesday won big in all five Northeast states holding primaries.

Indiana is being considered by many, including Cruz, as the Texas senator's last chance to stop Trump’s run to the nomination. Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich trails Trump and Cruz, with 153 delegates.

On Thursday, Greg Garrison who prosecuted Tyson, questioned on his conservative talk radio show, why Trump’s handlers would allow him to make such a comment.

“Tough is one thing, a serial rapist is quite something else,” Garrison also said.

The PAC reportedly spent $375,000 for the online ad buy, which also features the now-retired Tyson recently saying: “I like Trump, yeah. He should be president.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIC8mHUg8Rk

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Poll: Ted Cruz leads Donald Trump in Indiana

Stephanie Wang,

A new poll gives U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz a significant lead in Indiana's Republican presidential primary, with support from 44.8 percent of voters polled.

The Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics poll puts GOP front-runner Donald Trump in second place with 29 percent and John Kasich in third with 13.3 percent of the vote.

But 13 percent of Hoosier voters surveyed said voluntarily that they didn't know who they would vote for — and, paired with a 4.9 percent margin of error, that could still put the candidates in a neck-and-neck race.

"I can understand this might be an incredibly optimistic poll for Cruz," said Andy Downs, director of the politics center. "But I think there must be something going on in the electorate that makes the race closer than some people think."

On the Democratic side, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leads U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, 55 percent to 40.3 percent, with 4.8 percent of voters undecided.

The poll was conducted among 400 voters across the state from April 13-27. Downs said 30 percent of the surveys were completed before Cruz and Kasich announced a pact for Kasich to pull out of campaigning in Indiana, intended to block Trump from winning the state.

Downs said in a statement that the poll results are still “good news for Cruz, but the volatility of the electorate means all campaigns should view these results cautiously.”

Downs said he thinks the Cruz-Kasich pact is not likely to help either of the two candidates, because they didn't effectively tell voters whether they should stick with their preferred candidate or switch over to support Cruz.

A handful of responses were completed after Cruz announced Carly Fiorina would be his vice presidential pick if he won the Republican nomination, he said.

Two other polls provided to IndyStar and conducted prior to those two announcements gave Trump slight leads over Cruz in Indiana. An aggregation of six polls by Real Clear Politics gives Trump a lead of 2.3 percentage points.

Trump and Cruz, who have made numerous campaign trips throughout the state, will return to the Indianapolis area Monday to make a final push for votes before Tuesday’s primary.

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Photo by Bob WellinskiMembers of the audience show their support for Sen. Ted Cruz during a rally on Sunday in La Porte.

Cruz tells LaPorte crowd VP choice 'terrifies Hillary Clinton'

Rob Earnshaw

LAPORTE — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, brought his presidential campaign Sunday to a standing-room only capacity of about 3,000 people at the Civic Auditorium.

More than 2,000 people attended the rally sponsored by Keep the Promise PAC and just ahead of Tuesday’s Indiana primary and on the same day a poll by NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist Poll showed Cruz trailing GOP front-runner Donald Trump by double digits.

“God bless the great state of Indiana,” Cruz said.

Cruz opened his speech commending the character of, Carly Fiorina who will be his running mate if Cruz wins the Republican presidential nomination.

“Carly stands up to bullies,” he said. “Carly utterly terrifies Hillary Clinton.”

Cruz said under his leadership, jobs would return to the U.S. from China and Mexico and manufacturing jobs would return to Indiana. He also said the military won't be governed by political correctness.

"We'll have a president willing to utter the words 'radical Islamic terrorism,'" he said.

Cruz said he couldn't be happier that the Republican campaign was coming down to the Hoosier state.

"Across this nation Americans are calling for Indiana to pull us back and bring us to the constitutional liberties that built our great nation," he said. "I believe in the American people and I believe in the Hoosier state."

Preceding Cruz was talk show host Glenn Beck, a Cruz supporter, who arrived a few hours before the start of the rally and shook hands with people waiting in line. He riled up the crowd inside when he said the campaign will be decided in the heartland.

“I’ve driven in your streets today,” he said. “You are the heart of America. And when we have a president who will take the shackles off of you we will start the heart again. If we do the right thing our nation will be better off.”

Beck said before he walked onstage that he and Cruz got down on their knees and prayed for the nation, “and you.”

“I ask that Tuesday you get everyone you know and do absolutely everything you can,” he said. “This will decide the course of the nation. I’ve watched this man the last few years and I don’t think there’s a better man who can be found for these times.”

The first speaker of the rally, Curt Smith, of the Indiana Family Institute, praised Cruz for campaigning in Indiana for two weeks and said Cruz is strong on issues that matter to Hoosiers.

“He will not compromise our religious liberties no matter what,” he said. “And he will not compromise our second amendment rights. I can go right down the list. The hour is late and the need is great.”

LaPorte Mayor Blair Milo emceed the rally and told The Times beforehand that it’s “tremendously exciting” for Indiana to have the opportunity to play such a critical role in both parties in this primary.

“It’s a great opportunity for voters, especially across the state because we have a unique chance to actually hear in person from some of these candidates,” she said.

Jeff Peterman, running for Congress in Indiana’s 2nd District, was there to support Cruz and before the rally had a chance to meet Beck, whom he called, “so geniune.”

“All through the last 10 or 15 years you hear about how important the next presidential election is — well this one really is,” Peterman said. “ This represents going off the cliff or taking the last exit off the road. I feel that Ted Cruz is the man for the job.”

Joe Howard, of LaPorte, and four of his friends arrived at the auditorium around 2 p.m. with lawn chairs and pizza in anticipation of the rally. Howard said out of all the candidates, Cruz by far the truest as far as where this country needs to be.

“The other ones are taking it places where it doesn’t want to go or trying to keep it where it is already and that’s not a good place,” Howard said.

Ted Cruz handles a young boy who disrupts his speech in La Porte:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SWW_gXrE4Q

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How Ted Cruz Got Indiana WRONG

The only problem with Cruz’s socially conservative message? The voters he has to win over on Tuesday don’t like it.

By ADAM WREN May 03, 2016

On a sunny day at the Oasis Diner in Plainfield, Indiana, roughly 20 miles west of Indianapolis, Ted Cruz breezed through a 1950s-era diner with a gleaming steel facade. One of the last diners of its kind, the Oasis sits along the Historic National Road, the iconic highway traversing the state that fancies itself the Crossroads of America. Here, four days before he named Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential pick, Cruz met a crowd of a few hundred supporters. He mugged for photos, noshed on a fried pickle offered to him by a customer, then shot straight behind the counter. Pleasantries aside, it was time to get down to the business at hand.

“Alright, can I get anyone some fill-ups?” he asked to no one in particular, grabbing a pot of coffee and holding it up, as a peal of laughter pierced the humid air inside the packed diner. “Refill of coffee for anyone?”

Everything seemed to be going well for Cruz, who gripped and grinned amid his biggest fans, wearing copious amounts of camouflage and Dale Earnhardt No. 88 hats and “Don’t Tread On Me” T-shirts. As he spoke from the back of a red Chevrolet pickup truck, one could even hear a few “Amens.”

But then it happened.

Outside the diner, in a gaggle with reporters, Cruz unloaded on North Carolina’s transgender bathroom law. “There is no greater evil than predators, and if the law says that any man, if he chooses can enter a women’s restroom, a little girl’s restroom and stay there and he cannot be removed because he simply says at that moment he feels like a woman, you’re opening the door for predators,” Cruz told reporters.

The comments went over well with the Cruz crowd, but moderate Republicans watching Cruz’s comments on the local news later that night might as well have heard a record scratch—the amens replaced by sighs. “I don’t like any campaign that puts one class of humans against another,” a central Indiana Republican delegate to Cleveland who was turned off by Cruz’s comments, told me.

It was not supposed to go this way for Cruz. Indiana seems to be, at least from 30,000 feet, a barn-red bastion of Bible-believing IndyCar social conservatives—a place where a Washington Wiseman like Senator Richard Lugar can lose a primary to a bomb-throwing conservative like Richard Mourdock 60 to 40 percent.

But over the past year, the state’s Republican landscape has shifted. Last March, when conservative Gov. Mike Pence signed the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) into law, the once-lockstep Republican coalition here fractured, putting daylight between the state’s social conservatives, who backed Pence, from the fiscal conservatives, who have become squeamish over divisive social issues—and who long for the days when the state was ruled by pragmatic, coalition-building Republican Mitch Daniels.

Today, vast swaths of the state’s Republican electorate, from Indianapolis to West Lafayette, have retreated from the culture wars. And like the 50s-era diner itself, Cruz’s dogged socially conservative message seems anachronistic—and perhaps a little tin-eared—to these fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicans, the kind Cruz has to win over in the state’s crucial, populous and well-heeled “doughnut” counties surrounding Indianapolis (if you remove Marion County, the remaining surrounding counties form a doughnut-shaped ring) in order to have a shot at beating Donald Trump in the primary on Tuesday.

Cruz might have thought that he didn’t need to appeal to this section of the electorate—that it would be enough to preach to the choir of Pence’s base, but his 15-point deficit in the polls shows that he might have made a fatal miscalculation.

“There’s no doubt that doughnut county Republicans are more fiscally focused and less socially conservative,” said Pete Seat, a former member of the George W. Bush administration based in Indianapolis, who is aligned with the John Kasich non-campaign here. “You want to call them Mitch Daniels Republicans. Cruz needs to earn their votes to earn the state. Any statewide party comes down to the doughnut, and it’s not a natural constituency for him.”

While Cruz’s selection of Fiorina as his running mate—who last appeared in Indiana in swank Carmel, located in the doughnut’s Hamilton County, and who struck a chord with educated, moderate Republicans here during her campaign—could help Cruz win some of them over, it’s likely too late.

Another prominent Indianapolis Republican operative summed up in a few words what many Daniels Republicans here are thinking about Cruz: “He has a terrible message.”

***

Celebrating its bicentennial this year, Indiana holds in its hands two great gifts from history in the month of May: the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500, and, to hear pundits and politicos tell it, the opportunity to decide the fate of Western Civilization.

“By the time you get to Indiana, usually the race is decided,” Trump told a few thousands people in the Indiana Farmers Coliseum at the Indiana State Fairgrounds on Tuesday night, the same megarally at which he touted the endorsements of former boxer Mike Tyson, who spent three years in prison for rape down the road in Plainfield during the early 1990s, and legendary Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight, who praised Trump’s “guts” to drop an atomic bomb. “The greatest endorsement in the history of Indiana,” Trump said of Knight’s nod. Later, he declared: “If we win Indiana, it’s over.”

Not quite. But the stakes seem that high here—a rarity for a state whose primary comes so late in the nominating process. In 2008’s Democratic battle royale between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, national candidates lavished attention on Indiana; but before that, not since the spring of 1968—when Bobby Kennedy battled with Eugene McCarthy and favorite-son candidate and Lyndon Johnson stand-in Indiana Gov. Roger D. Branigin—has Indiana promised to be so pivotal in a presidential campaign.

All of which explains the buzz you feel from Bloomington to South Bend on radio stations and restaurants and coffee shops, as all five remaining presidential candidates crisscross the state, in a presidential campaign like the Hoosier State has never seen but for which it has long pined. Enthralled with the chance to press the flesh with politicians and journalists they see only on television, Hoosiers gawk and rubberneck at national reporters just as much as they do at the candidates.

“A lot of Hoosiers have always looked to Iowa, two states over, with a lot of envy,” Seat said. “All these candidates going to diners and basketball gyms. We’ve always sat here and thought, why not us?”

But for all of Hoosiers’ aw-shucks, thanks-for-noticing-us excitement about their brief moment in the political sun, they also harbor a chip on their shoulders about the “Indianoplace” wrap. When Hillary Clinton questioned an aide in 2010, “Are you still in basketball-crazed Indianoplace?” Hoosiers bristled. (“It was a joke,” Clinton recently told CBS4.)

To understand the offense, one needs only to consider how the city and state has come to view itself differently over the past several decades. “Naptown,” no more, Indianapolis’ downtown has blossomed. At first, during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the city pined to become the Amatuer Sports Capital of the World. In 1987, the city hosted the Pan American Games in virtually the same space where Cruz named Fiorina his running mate. The NCAA hung its shingle here in 1999. By 2012, the city had graduated to hosting Super Bowl XLVI—to rave reviews. Under a procession of well-liked mayoral leaders, from Richard Lugar to Bill Hudnut to Bart Peterson to Greg Ballard, the city, and the state, landed on the national map. Where chain eateries once reigned, now James Beard-recognized restaurants pop up along Eat Street on Virginia Avenue and other places across the city.

This hard-won goodwill and civic optimism seemed in danger this time last spring, when the city and state weathered national blowback from battle over RFRA, the so-called religious freedom bill, which allowed businesses to discriminate against customers from the LGBT community. After Gov. Pence, successor to the walking think tank Daniels, signed the bill, an imbroglio roiled the state, as critics castigated the law, and the governor, for endangering the LGBT community’s civil rights. The blowback, which included canceled concerts and fears that the NCAA could relocate its March Madness basketball tournament, cost the city and state $60 million and 12 national conventions—and damaged Pence badly. The big-tent confederacy of pro-business and socially conservative Republicans that Daniels, who in May 2011 talked of a so-called truce on divisive issues in favor of focusing on fiscal matters, had pieced together fractured. Pence became persona non grata to many Chamber of Commerce Republican-types in his own party, especially around Indianapolis, the state capital.

Which is why it struck some Central Indiana politicos as curious, then, when Cruz veered into the culture wars back at the Oasis Diner on that Saturday.

***

“I bring greetings from my beloved Indiana, a land of surprises where, as we say, South Bend is in the north, North Vernon’s in the south, and French Lick is not what you hoped it was,” Daniels said at the Gridiron Club Dinner in 2011, as he considered a bid for president.

A land of surprises indeed. Indiana, despite its reliably red-state status, is full of political contradictions. In 2008, Barack Obama managed to turn the state purple, narrowly eking out a victory over John McCain, the same year in which pragmatic conservative Daniels won reelection by 18 points. It’s the home of Hoosier Hospitality, and it’s also been called the South’s middle finger to the North—the site of “the last classic lynching north of the Mason-Dixon line,” which took place in 1930, according to author Cynthia Carr.

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http://nypost.com/2016/05/03/donald-trump-...ndiana-primary/

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