US Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz won nominating contests in Kansas and Maine on Saturday, staking his claim to be the prime alternative for Republicans bent on stopping front-runner Donald Trump.

Trump won Louisiana and Kentucky, taking another step toward the Republican nomination in the Nov. 8 presidential election on a night when five U.S. states voted in nominating contests.

It was a bad night for the other Republican candidates, with U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Ohio Governor John Kasich shut out in the day's four Republican contests and falling behind Cruz in the battle to lead the party's anti-Trump forces.

The next big contest, and a crucial one, will be Tuesday's primary in the industrial state of Michigan. Republicans in three other states, Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii, also will vote on Tuesday. Puerto Rico Republicans will vote on Sunday.

On the Democratic side, front-runner Hillary Clinton won in Louisiana, and her rival Bernie Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, won in Kansas and Nebraska in results that did not substantially change Clinton's big delegate lead.

Cruz, a first-term U.S. senator from Texas who has promoted himself as more of a true conservative than Trump, said the results showed he was gaining momentum in the race to catch the billionaire real estate mogul.

"The scream you hear, the howl that comes from Washington, D.C., is utter terror at what 'We the People' are doing together," Cruz told supporters in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, after his early win in Kansas.

Cruz, 45, has run as an outsider bent on shaking up the Republican establishment in Washington. A favorite of evangelicals, he has called for the United States to "carpet bomb" the Islamic State militant group and has pledged to eliminate the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service and four cabinet agencies and to enact a balanced budget amendment.

"What we're seeing is the public coming together, libertarians coming together, men and women who love the Constitution coming together and uniting and standing as one behind this campaign," Cruz said in Idaho.

Trump still has a substantial lead in the delegates needed to secure the nomination at the Republican National Convention, but since winning seven of the 11 contests on Super Tuesday he has come under withering fire from a Republican establishment worried he will lead the party to defeat in November's election.-Asfar
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Source: The Financial Express