Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sen. Ted Cruz must win next month’s Wisconsin primary to make a viable case to be the Republican nominee.
“The Cruz theory all along had been that if other people got out, that in a one-on-one race, the anti-Trump vote was larger than the pro-Trump vote,” Gingrich said Sunday on Fox News. “The first real test of that, I think, is going to be in Wisconsin in about two weeks.”
“Cruz has to win Wisconsin in order to make sense out of his strategy,” Gingrich said. “But if he does win Wisconsin, it’s going to force Trump to really focus on winning states like New York in order to get to the numbers he needs to be nominated.”
“This is not a done deal,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich has spoken favorably of both Trump and Cruz in the past.
“It’s an extraordinary moment which nobody could have predicted six or eight months ago,” Gingrich continued. “It’s a little dangerous to predict now, because the truth is none of us knew that you’d have Donald Trump as the front-runner. Nobody would have dreamed you’d have Ted Cruz as the savior of the establishment. It’s pretty remarkable.”
Gingrich attended Monday’s Jones Day meeting in Washington between Republican congressional leaders and Trump, and has defended Trump from broadsides on Twitter.
