Trump endorsed by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani – as it happened

In most states, delegate support is dictated by results in individual counties, congressional districts or, in the case of winner-take-all states, the victor of the state’s support. But in Colorado, Republicans don’t get primaries or caucuses - which means that 21 of the state’s 37 delegates have been up for grabs at district conventions.

Each of Colorado’s seven congressional districts picks three delegates and three alternates to attend the national convention in Cleveland this summer. Of the two districts that have already held their conventions, both were swept by Texas senator Ted Cruz, who now has six delegates from Colorado to his name.

Tonight, the Colorado 7th elects its delegates, where the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs reports that certain candidates’ ground operation are showing cracks:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz told CNN’s Dana Bash that an apology to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell for calling him a liar last July “ain’t gonna happen” anytime soon.

“If the Washington lobbyists want to see that happen, they can hold their breath a long, long time,” Cruz said. “My focus is on the American people.”

Cruz delivered the broadside in a speech on the Senate floor after claiming that McConnell had given that there was no deal to allow a vote to renew the federal Export-Import Bank.

Fox News Channel personality Geraldo Rivera accused Texas senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz of anti-Semitism on The O’Reilly Factor this evening, saying that his now-infamous “New York values” advertisement and commentary was a coded slur against American Jews.

“Aside from the stinking anti-Semitic implications that I see in that whole ‘New York values’ money- and media-coated message that he put out there pandering to those Iowa voters, he also voted against Hurricane Sandy relief,” Rivera said. “He also voted against compensation for 9/11 victims. This is a man whose interests are absolutely antithetical to New York.”

O’Reilly, for his part, pushed back against the allegation.

“If he says ‘New York Values’ to a bunch of Evangelicals, its not anti-Semitic,” O’Reilly said.

“He could have very easily said that,” Rivera rebuked. “There’s a million ways he could have said that that he did not.”

A White House spokesman has come to the defense of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, rebutting a claim by her primary opponent Bernie Sanders that she is not “qualified” to be president.

“The president has said that Secretary Clinton comes into this race with more experience than any other non-vice president in recent campaign history,” White House spokesperson Eric Schultz told reporters aboard Air Force One, according to The Hill.

Schultz added the president was “fortunate” enough to have Clinton as his secretary of State for four years, when they “worked together on complicated, on complex issues.”

Returning to the institution where he taught constitutional law for over a decade,Barack Obama today said Republicans were pursuing a path that “erodes the institutional integrity of the judicial branch” by refusing to consider his supreme court nominee, Merrick Garland.

Addressing students in a discussion at the University of Chicago Law School, the president said his pick to replace the late justice Antonin Scalia was “as good of a judge as we have in this country” and deserved a fair hearing.

“He embodies and models what we want to see in our jurisprudence,” Obama said of Garland, chief judge of the US court of appeals for the DC circuit.

His remarks came as the Republican leadership in the US Senate remained steadfast in its opposition to filling the supreme court vacancy under Obama’s watch. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, declared earlier this week that it was “safe to say” there would be neither a vote nor a hearing on Garland’s nomination.

That position, Obama warned, threatened the core of American democracy.

“If you start getting into a situation in which the process of appointing judges is so broken, so partisan, that an eminently qualified jurist cannot even get a hearing, we are going to see the kind of sharp polarization that has come to characterize our electoral politics seeping into the system,” Obama said.

Some bad polling news for Donald Trump: Seven in ten people view the billionaire Republican frontrunner negatively, including almost half of Republicans, according to a new survey from the Associated Press.

The voter antipathy cuts across nearly every demographic: men, women, whites, blacks, young people, old people, conservatives, moderates and liberals all told the Associated Press that they have an unfavorable view of Trump. Even among white voters with no college degree, often seen as the backbone of Trump’s support, the candidate is viewed negatively by 55% of likely voters.

It’s an 11-point increase since the same question was asked in February.

New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte told a home-state radio host today that she would back billionaire Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump if he were to become the party’s nominee.

“What I have said is that, at this point, I plan to support our Republican nominee,” Ayotte said. “That said, I gotta tell you, I don’t know who that’s gonna be. I think that this is far from over, this process still has to play out, and I want to see what happens at this convention, obviously.”

When pressed by host Dan Mitchell to say whether she would support Trump, Ayotte stood firm. “I plan to support our Republican nominee.”

It’s a bold stance for a senator whose seat has been seen as one of the most vulnerable in the upcoming general election. Although Trump won the New Hampshire primary with the support of 35% of the electorate, his presence at the top of the ticket may pose a threat to the Republican majority in the senate.

The Indian Point Energy Center, a controversial and ageing nuclear plant near New York City, has split the Democratic presidential candidates.

As campaigning continues, Bernie Sanders called the facility “a catastrophe waiting to happen”. Hillary Clinton said only that it needed more oversight.

“In my view, we cannot sit idly by and hope that the unthinkable will never happen,” Sanders said in a statement. “It makes no sense to me to continue to operate a decaying nuclear reactor within 25 miles of New York City where nearly 10 million people live.”

The Vermont senator elaborated on his stance, calling for the US to phase out nuclear plants along with more polluting resources such as fossil fuels.

“Nuclear power is and always has been a dangerous idea because there is no good way to store nuclear waste,” he said.

Clinton, a former New York senator, accused Sanders of tardiness in his attention to the controversial plant.

“I’m glad he discovered Indian Point,” she told a local talkshow, Capital Tonight. “We also have to be realistic and say, ‘You get 25% of the electricity in the greater New York City area from Indian Point.’

“I don’t want middle-class taxpayers to see a huge rate increase. So this needs to be done in a careful, thoughtful way.”

After calling on Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to correct a statement he made to the New York Daily News regarding casualties in the 2014 war in Gaza, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has released a statement welcoming Sanders’ “clarification” on the issue.

“The Anti-Defamation League today welcomed the clarification by presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of his misstatement about Palestinian casualties during the 2014 conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas,” the non-profit, which combats anti-Semitism, said in a statement.

Sanders reportedly held a phone conversation with ADL chief Jonathan A. Greenblatt in which he “clarified” his recollection that there were 10,000 civilian deaths, calling them inaccurate.

“The senator assured me that he did not mean his remarks to be a definitive statement and that he would make every effort to set the record straight,” Greenblatt said in the release. “We appreciate his responsiveness on this issue, especially at a time when there are many false and incendiary reports blaming Israel for applying disproportionate force in its struggle for self-defense.”

The United Nations’ independent commission of inquiry into the 2014 Gaza conflict found that 2,251 were killed in Gaza. Roughly 65% were estimated to be civilians.

Bill Clinton struggled to handle protesters in Philadelphia on Thursday, after a group briefly took the spotlight from him with chants and signs against the Clintons’ politics.

The mostly African-American demonstrators shouted down the former president at several moments, and said that he and spouse Hillary Clinton contributed to the surge of incarcerations in the 1990s, mostly of black men. Clinton signed a crime bill in 1994 that sharply increased sentences for minor offenses, and last year the former president himself said the law did too much harm.

He admitted no regret in Philadelphia, however, and defended the bill from protesters who held signs reading “Clinton Crime Bill Destroyed Our Communities”. Another held a sign that said “Black Youth Are Not Super Predators”, an allusion to his wife’s 1996 remark about “the kinds of kids that are called super predators”.

“No conscience, no empathy,” the then-first lady said at the time, referring to a debunked and racially charged theory. “We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

Twenty years later and after a confrontation with a protester, Clinton acknowledged the words were poorly chosen. “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today,” she said in a statement.

Her husband defended her today, saying: “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13 year old kids hopped up on crack, and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children.”

“Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t.”

Clinton also defended his own achievements at length, including an expired ban on assault weapons and welfare reform bill that is now criticized for unwise cuts that have actually contributed to increased poverty. Chief among those critics is Bernie Sanders, the rival candidate for Democratic nominee and a champion of fighting inequality.

“They say the welfare reform bill increased poverty,” Clinton said. “Then why did we have the largest drop in African American poverty in history when I was president?”

The number of families living in extreme poverty has increased by 130% since 1996, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan. Some groups, including single-mother households, benefited more from the reform bill than others.

The former president also noted that his wife had no voting power in the government at the time. “Hillary didn’t vote for that bill cause she wasn’t in the Senate, she was spending her time trying to get healthcare for poor kids.”

Clinton admitted “it’s also true that there are too many people” in federal and state prisons, and said that his wife, along with Sanders and Republicans, are eager to reform the justice system.

Eventually, Clinton gave up on his various attempts to engage, placate and rebut the protesters, and opted for changing the subject: “I’ll tell you another story about where black lives matter: Africa.”

One of the protesters spoke with reporters after the rally, saying she resented the treatment showed her by the former president and Clinton supporters. “We silently held our signs up and we have a right to do that,” Erica Miles said. “People attack us and we become the thugs.”

“I’m not here to say that Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton is not a good person. Their politics have hurt the black community, that’s all that is. This is not about whether I like them.”

Senate pro tem Orrin Hatch told reporters this afternoon that there is “potential” for Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to be picked as a compromise candidate at a contested Republican national convention this July, calling him “one of the great leaders” that would unify a divided party.

“I think it’s just natural that that speculation would happen because he’s one of the great leaders here on Capitol Hill and one of the people who brings both sides, all sides together, I should say,” Hatch said, according to The Hill.

The senior senator noted that although Ryan, a former vice presidential nominee, is “a very, very fine human being,” there was no organized effort to draft him into openly campaigning for the nomination.

A Rasmussen survey released earlier today may put a damper on Hatch’s enthusiasm, however: In hypothetical head-to-head match-ups with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, Ryan loses the general election by a minimum of six points.

Trump has canceled an event in California in order to focus on the New York contest in the run-up to voting on 19 April, CNN reports. The majority of New York’s 95 Republican delegates will be won in the 16 congressional districts (out of 27) making up New York City and Long Island. A haul of all 95 for Trump would expand his delegate lead over Cruz by more than 40%.

California, which also awards Republican delegates per congressional district, votes on 7 June.

The LA Times has more on the cancellation here.

Update: Here’s video of that Ben Carson moment on CNN in which he suggests that co-host John Berman has “been charged with something.”

“I actually haven’t,” Berman replies.

Hundreds of new documents relating to Donald Trump’s arms-length friendship with the Clintons are due to be published:

Meanwhile, back in Washington:

Megan Carpentier continues her dispatches from Ted Cruz’s town halls in Scotia, New York:

Someone brought an Israeli flag to the Cruz rally in Scotia, NY just to wave during Cruz’s promise to support Israel.

Ted Cruz just cracked a (recycled) joke about how often Democrats commit voter fraud. Hardee-har-har.

Ben Carson, the retired presidential candidate and neurosurgeon who has endorsed Donald Trump for president, makes another claim to the title of worst surrogate ever.

Speaking on CNN, Carson said that there were “probably” better choices out there than Donald Trump for president. Later, in response to a question about criminal charges being filed against Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Carson told co-host John Berman that he’d probably had charges filed against him too.

Update: transcript:

Last month Carson went on The View TV show and was confronted with a question about Trump being racist.

“What’s the alternative?” Carson said.

The president sent senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, one of two Republican senators to agree to meet with his Supreme Court nominee, a handwritten thank-you. Senator Susan Collins of Maine also met with DC circuit judge Merrick Garland.

The Guardian’s Megan Carpentier is at a rally with Ted Cruz in her upstate hometown:

Ted Cruz just promised that if Heidi becomes First Lady “meat is coming back to the cafeteria.” We’re at Mekeel Christian, a private school.

The Guardian’s Megan Carpentier is in position to take in a Ted Cruz town hall in Scotia, New York, outside Schenectady.

Megan snaps a shot of one of two protesters to pop up at the event (the other is an anti-war protestor, she says):

Hillary Clinton ducked into the New York City subway Thursday to thumb her nose at rival Bernie Sanders, who incorrectly told the Daily News last week that you “get a token” to ride the train. The subway system switched over to flimsy plastic cards in 2003.

Update: the Republican political group America Rising is circulating video revealing that Clinton required multiple MetroCard swipes to pass the stiles. This never happens to city natives, except like half the time, especially if the card is more than a week old, although those auto-refill ones are a little stiffer and seem to work better.

In one respect, the video below does make Clinton look like an out-of-towner, in the sense that the malfunctioning stile does not draw from her even a single audible imprecation.

Clinton flies out of town this afternoon, with fundraisers scheduled for later today in Colorado and Ohio. Tomorrow she is holding a rally in Buffalo, NY.

On the Republican side, Ted Cruz has an event scheduled in Albany for Friday morning. Ohio governor John Kasich, meanwhile, is in the Bronx this midday and at a Brooklyn town hall with Montel Williams tonight in Bay Ridge. Trump has no public events scheduled.

This from Clinton’s traveling press secretary:

Say what you will about Ted Cruz, he shows chutzpah. On Tuesday he told reporters in Wisconsin that he would arm the cheese curds.

Now, seated in an incredibly uncrowded breakfast spot in New York – must’ve got an ‘F’ from the health department – he tells George Stephanopoulos that he does not regret slagging off Donald Trump’s “New York values”.

Cruz, a Princeton and Harvard alum, may exaggerate his removal from New York and all it values. Last year, he made headlines for fundraising in Manhattan including one reception at the apartment of two prominent gay hoteliers, one of whom later got kicked out of a Fire Island bar for hosting Cruz, according to reports. Cruz’s wife, Heidi Cruz, is on leave from her post as managing director at Goldman Sachs, but she worked for them out of Houston.

Hello, and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House. Can Donald Trump top 50% in New York state – statewide, and then in each congressional district? A Monmouth University poll released late Wednesday had Trump at 52% support, John Kasich at 25% and Ted Cruz at 17%.

The 50% mark is important because any candidate consistently crossing it would win a lion’s share of the state’s 95 delegates. That number would grow Trump’s delegates lead on Cruz by about 40%:

Cruz won a Bronx cheer on the cover of today’s Daily News – a paper that has repeatedly tangled with Trump. Cruz was heckled in the New York City borough on Wednesday for his anti-immigrant views (see video here).

Trump, meanwhile, received a jubilant welcome from supporters at a rally on Long Island Wednesday night. “It’s great to be home,” he said. Here’s the video:

Thanks for joining us today and please let us know what’s cooking in your corner of the political world in the comments.