Trump whittles down Cruz support

Senator Ted Cruz’s hopes of a massive victory in his home state of Texas in his bid to become the Presidential candidate for the Republican Party are eroding as conservative fury over immigration leads more and more voters to his political rival Donald Trump.

Polls show that the Texas Senator is likely to win his state’s nomination contest in what is the 2016 campaign’s biggest voting day thus far, but they also indicate that he may not be able to reach the threshold he needs to get its 155 delegates to the Republican convention if enough of the votes are won by other candidates, including front-runner Trump. To stay competitive against the maverick real estate billionaire, who is expected to storm to victory in the majority of states, Cruz needs a massive win.

Interviews with over two dozen Texas voters suggest that the anti-immigration platform Trump has built much of his campaign on – including deporting all undocumented immigrants in the United States and building a wall on the border with Mexico – could be the largest weakness Cruz is faced with against the rogue billionaire. Fort Worth resident, Sharon Neil, says that “Trump has been honest enough to say what we’re all thinking, but we’re all scared to say”.

Immigration is ranked as the country’s third most important issue by Republicans in the state of Texas, which is home to around 1.5 million undocumented immigrants, in comparison to seventh in the United States as a whole, Reuters/Ipsos polling suggests.