WASHINGTON: Indiana voters cast their ballots in key US presidential primaries on Tuesday, with Republican Donald Trump hoping to knock out his rivals and Hillary Clinton seeking to further cement her status as the Democrats’ presumptive pick.

The latest contest in the 2016 race for the White House is seen as a day of reckoning for the movement to “stop Trump” led by his closest rival Ted Cruz.

But the billionaire real estate mogul — who has thus far defied all political logic to lead the Republican race — looked set to deliver a death blow to Cruz, with a new NBC poll giving Trump a 15-point advantage over the conservative Texas senator.

“I don’t think he’s got the temperament to be president,” Trump said of Cruz in an interview with Fox News after polls opened.

“People are tired with what’s happening with these politicians and they’re just tired of seeing our country get ripped off.” Clinton and her rival Bernie Sanders were locked in a closer race in Indiana, with the former secretary of state in the lead by just under seven percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics poll average.

The 68-year-old Clinton is already so far ahead overall that Sanders’ only hope now lies in the unlikely scenario of her failing to win a majority of delegates in the primaries, in which case her nomination could be contested at a Democratic convention in July.

Cruz was counting on a similar scenario, with Indiana acting as a Trump firewall, blocking him from receiving the 1,237 delegates necessary to secure the nomination at the Republican convention in Cleveland in July.

Mathematically eliminated from winning outright, Cruz’s goal is to snatch victory on a second ballot, when most delegates become free to vote for whomever they choose — but which will only be held if Trump falls short of a majority in round one.With momentum favoring the 69-year-old Trump, who has clinched the last six contests, the two rivals attacked each other on an unlikely front Tuesday — a tabloid report linking Cruz’s father Rafael to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

Trump invoked the recent National Enquirer story in his interview with Fox News.

Published in Dawn, May 4th, 2016