Donald Trump swept Florida’s Republican primary Tuesday night, adding 99 delegates to his overall count and forcing Sen. Marco Rubio to abandon the race.
The densely-populated southern state was one of five to hold their nominating contests Tuesday, and its winner-take-all status puts Trump just 50 delegates behind the halfway mark of the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination.
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Before Tuesday, Trump carried 469 delegates after his big wins in thirteen states and the Northern Mariana Islands. He is currently the only Republican candidate eligible for the nomination, having satisfied Rule 40(b) created by the Republican National Committee’s Standing Rules Committee, which requires majority primary victories in eight states.
“This is my second home,” Trump, who carried around 45 percent of the vote in Florida, told supporters late Tuesday night at his Mar-A-Lago estate. “To win by that kind of number is incredible.”
Trump continued to echo a message he’s adopted recently – that Republicans leaders ought to rally behind him and acknowledge the new voters he’s bringing into the party.
“The fact is, we have to bring our party together,” Trump said, noting that he had “great conversations” with two GOP heavyweights – House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – earlier this week.
The New York businessman led Rubio by nearly 20 percentage points in the hours leading up to the Sunshine State’s primary and had reportedly employed nearly four-dozen poll watchers in the Miami-Dade county area to monitor voting stations and campaign activities. The cosmopolitan county, located on Florida’s southern tip, is home to Rubio and nearly 275,000 other Hispanic Republicans.
Miami-Dade is also where Rubio delivered his concession speech Tuesday night and announced the suspension of his presidential campaign.
“We live in a Republican and our voters make these decisions,” the Florida senator told a pair of pro-Trump hecklers who interrupted his speech Tuesday at Florida International University. Rubio ended his remarks with a prayer and a pledge to continue to serve the country.
“I want you to know that I will continue every single day to repay some of this extraordinary debt that I owe this country,” he said.
Following Ohio and Florida, Trump’s next big challenge comes next week when Utah and Arizona are set to hold their nominating contests. The billionaire topped 40 percent in a recent state-level survey of Arizona Republicans, but his position in Utah — where he’s polling behind Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and where Republicans are holding a presidential caucus for the first time — is far less certain.
Trump is scheduled to deliver a victory speech at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. at 9 p.m. ET.
