Donald Trump refuses to rule out independent run if he loses GOP nomination

Donald Trump refused Sunday to rule out running as an independent if he fails to win the Republican presidential nomination, renewing a threat that party leaders thought they had quashed months ago.

“I want to run as a Republican. I will beat Hillary Clinton,” Trump said in a taped interview that aired on “Fox News Sunday.”

When pressed to rule out an independent run, the New York billionaire said, “I’m gonna have to see how I was treated. It’s very simple.”

The prospect that Trump will launch an insurgent third party run and draw supporters away from the Republican nominee, widening the divisions in the GOP, is a nightmare scenario for party leaders.

Some are supporting efforts to try to deny Trump the nomination if he cannot lock up enough delegates during the primaries to secure the nomination at the Republican National Convention, a movement that Trump has complained is unfair.

Underscoring the importance of California’s June 7 primary, presidential candidate John Kasich will address the state Republican Party at their April convention, according to a source familiar with the event.

The Ohio governor and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will speak to hundreds of party leaders and activists during the three-day gathering in Burlingame.

Businessman Donald Trump, who is leading in the race for the GOP nomination, also has been invited.

The late date of the California primary, at the end of the calendar of primary and caucus states, usually makes it an afterthought in the nominating process.

But the unusual three-way scramble this year means California will play a key role in determining whether Trump can win the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the party’s national convention in Cleveland in July.

A poll by USC and the Los Angeles Times shows Trump leading Cruz by seven points, 37% to 30%, among the state’s registered Republican voters, with Kasich trailing at 12%.

Campaigning at black churches in New York, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton sharpened her attacks on rival Bernie Sanders’ record on gun control, one of the few issues where she appears to his left.

Polls suggest Sanders will best Clinton in the Wisconsin primary this Tuesday, and she appears to be trying to build a firewall in the state where he was born and she was elected senator.

“We have to end racial profiling and we have to retrain our police officers so they can do a job that doesn’t require reaching for their gun when it is absolutely unnecessary,” she said at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn.

“And that’s a big difference between me and my opponent, Sen. Sanders,” she said, according to a pool report.

“He has voted with the National Rifle Association, the big gun lobby. He voted against the Brady Bill, which has kept more than two million guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have had them in the first place. Then, he voted to give immunity from liability to gun makers and sellers. I just disagree with that,” she added.

Sanders argues that Clinton has distorted his record, and that he has supported gun control measures.

Hillary Clinton said she will join Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday when he signs legislation setting New York’s minimum wage at $15 per hour.

Clinton, who is ramping up her efforts to win New York’s primary on April 19, has also praised similar minimum wage legislation in California, which Gov. Jerry Brown is scheduled to sign the same day.

However, unlike Bernie Sanders, her rival for the Democratic nomination, Clinton has not called for a federal minimum wage of $15. She has said it should be raised to $12.

Donald Trump turned the Republican presidential debates into high-rated TV spectacles. But the fate of his quest for the nomination may be decided by a far more intimate televised forum.

The “town hall” — in which a candidate typically has a one-on-one exchange with an anchor and takes questions from voters — has become an increasingly popular format on cable news networks. There have already been 24 of them across CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, up from just a handful in the entire 2012 campaign. While town halls don’t deliver the same massive Nielsen numbers as the debates, they are still potent from a ratings standpoint and give TV news a chance to drill deeper into the candidates’ policy positions.

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Two groups of California voters — women and Latinos — have powered the Democratic Party’s ascent here and delivered a near-death knell to the state’s Republican Party.

A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll released last week showed that the prominence of those groups also explains why the two hottest candidates this year aren’t running away with the state.

Across the country, in the states contested so far, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have forwarded a similar message on the topic of the economy: that trade deals have decimated jobs in this country and that those making less money have been ignored as politicians have hewed to policies that benefit the rich and powerful.

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