WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Front-runner Donald Trump said on Sunday that he will have essentially sealed the Republican U.S. presidential nomination if he wins Tuesday’s contest in Indiana, where he holds a big lead over chief rival Ted Cruz.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist opinion poll showed Trump with a wide lead in Indiana, 49 percent to 34 percent for Cruz and 13 percent for a third candidate, Ohio Governor John Kasich.

Trump, a 69-year-old billionaire real estate developer, sounded confident in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” when asked whether Indiana would basically end the long-running Republican race in his favor.

“Yes, it’s over,” Trump said. “It’s already over.”

The poll showed the depth of the challenge facing Cruz, a conservative U.S. senator from Texas who is trying to prevent Trump from winning the 1,237 delegates needed to seal the nomination.

Cruz’s hopes rest on emerging as a consensus alternative to Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 18-21. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 68, leads U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, 74, of Vermont in the race for the Democratic nomination.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Cruz, 45, was asked several times whether he would support Trump if the New York businessman was the Republican nominee. Cruz evaded the question each time and turned the questions into an attack on broadcast media.

“I recognize that many in the media would love to see me surrender to Donald Trump because that means that Hillary wins. The media has given $2 billion in free advertising to Donald Trump,” Cruz said.

Cruz said he has momentum in Indiana based on his choice of former candidate Carly Fiorina for his vice president and Friday’s endorsement by Indiana Governor Mike Pence.

Americans will elect a successor to President Barack Obama on Nov. 8.

‘THE MOST UNELECTABLE PERSON’

Trump, who has amassed 996 delegates, according to an Associated Press count, has momentum behind him and looks increasingly likely to win the nomination outright, without a contested convention, perhaps when California votes on June 7.

Indiana has 57 Republican delegates. Three are awarded from each of the state’s nine U.S. congressional districts with the candidate who receives the most votes taking them all. The 30 others are awarded to the candidate who wins the most votes statewide.

At a rally in Terre Haute, Indiana, Trump urged Republicans to join his “movement” and turn out for him in big numbers.

“The more we can win by in Indiana is so important. It’s a mandate … a really important mandate. It’s a mandate for change, but not Obama change. Real change. It’s a mandate for genius,” he said.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a leading Republican critic of Trump, called him the “most unelectable person” the party could nominate. Graham had sought the nomination himself.

“Keep fighting Ted,” Graham told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

CLINTON URGES SANDERS QUIT

On the Democratic side, front-runner Clinton told CNN’s “State of the Union” that rival Bernie Sanders has been “helpful” in bringing millions of people into the party’s presidential race, but it was time for him to step aside.

“There comes a time when you have to look at the reality,” said Clinton, who won four of the five Northeastern states that voted last Tuesday and who has a big lead in the delegate race ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 25-28.

But at a news conference in Washington, Sanders refused to get out, saying he believes the Democratic battle will end up in a contested convention.

Sanders said it was nearly impossible for Clinton to win the 2,383 delegates needed for nomination without superdelegates, who are unelected and free to support any candidate they wish. “We intend to fight for every vote and delegate remaining,” he said. Clinton has 2,165 to Sanders’ 1,357 delegates, according to an AP count that includes superdelegates who have said whom they support.

In his Fox interview, Trump defended at length his views on foreign policy, which he outlined in a speech last week in Washington that drew criticism for sometimes contradictory views. Trump said he would move quickly to destroy Islamic State’s militancy, but would resist interventionist policies in order to focus on nation-building at home.

Trump said “every move we made in the Middle East was wrong” over the past 15 years, with lives and money wasted. He said he would resist such policies.

Asked whether the United States should return to working with “strongmen” leaders like the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Trump said: “Isn’t it too bad that we knocked him out in the first place?”

 (Additional reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Howard Goller)

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. (Reuters) – A plan to block Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump struggled to gain traction on Friday as rival candidates rejected it, while Democrats revelled in the chaos they hoped would boost their chances of keeping the White House.

The country’s top elected Republican, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, said he was not interested in an effort to draft him into the White House race.

And U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, a conservative presidential hopeful, ruled out a deal to pick a compromise Republican candidate at the party’s July convention, which senior party figures see as their best chance to stop the unpredictable billionaire.

“The D.C. power brokers will drop someone in who is exactly to the liking of the establishment. If that will happen we will have a manifold revolt in this country,” Cruz said at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington.

“You want to beat Donald Trump, you beat Donald Trump with the voters,” he said.

Party leaders worry Trump would not be able to beat Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in the election, but time is running out after he won most of the states that voted in this week’s Super Tuesday.

Senior Republicans also fear Trump’s plans to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and ban Muslims from entering the United States will turn off voters in November and upset U.S. allies.

Others note his past support for liberal policies and question whether he has any agenda other than advancing himself.

“I don’t think he actually carries the conservative mantle. He’s a little too crass for me,” said Michele Minter, a San Diego executive assistant who was attending CPAC.

Trump, a former reality TV star, often plays by his own set of rules. He cancelled plans to speak at CPAC, normally an essential stop for ambitious Republicans, and will instead attend a rally in Kansas.

The real estate magnate, who is drawing support from many blue-collar Republicans concerned about illegal immigration and stagnant wages, has won most Republican nominating contests and leads in many polls for the primary contests still to come.

“I’m not a normal Republican,” he said to huge cheers at a rally in Warren, Michigan.

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, the only candidate to ever challenge Trump’s months-long lead in opinion polls, officially ended his White House bid.

“There are a lot of people who love me, they just won’t vote for me,” Carson said in a speech at CPAC, held in National Harbor, Maryland.

RYAN ‘NOT INTERESTED’

A new group called the Committee to Draft Speaker Ryan filed papers with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday, seeking to raise money to push Ryan as a Republican alternative.

Ryan, a budget wonk who was the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2012, is seen by many in the party as a unifier after he took the speaker’s job last year to unite establishment Republican lawmakers and conservative upstarts in the House.

“He is flattered, but not interested,” Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in an email on Friday.

As Trump cements his front-runner status, senior party figures hope to deny him enough delegates to clinch the nomination, which would give them the chance to choose a compromise candidate at their convention in Cleveland.

The last time that happened at a Republican convention was  in 1948 when Thomas Dewey was nominated.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said there was an 85 to 90 percent chance that the party will not face that scenario this year.

Mitt Romney and John McCain, the party’s last two presidential nominees, called on Republicans to halt Trump’s rise by backing whichever candidate was strongest in their state, a form of tactical voting.

Few elected officials are rallying behind the “Dump Trump” banner. The party’s 31 state governors, for example, are not lining up behind an alternative. Only five have endorsed Florida Senator Marco Rubio and one has backed Cruz, in a sharp contrast to previous years when governors overwhelmingly endorsed the party’s eventual nominee.

Rubio has only one state so far and is gearing up for what could be a make-or-break contest in his home state on March 15. Cruz said Saturday he planned to open 10 campaign offices there, in what could be an effort to force the rival senator out of the race.

Trump is expected to extend his lead on Saturday, when a total of 155 delegates are at stake in Kansas, Louisiana, Maine and Kentucky.

Democrats were happy to let Republicans fight amongst themselves. “We can sit back and let them light their own dumpster fire and wait until they’re finished,” said Eddie Vale, spokesman for American Bridge, a Clinton-allied group which collects negative research on Republican candidates.

“They’re giving us so much great video footage that we could run ads between now and November of nothing but Republicans attacking Trump,” Vale told Reuters.

Nationally, Trump has the support of 41 percent of Republican voters, compared to 19 percent who back Cruz and 16 percent who back Rubio, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling data.

(Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Emily Stephenson, Eric Beech, and Ginger Gibson; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Bill Trott and Alistair Bell)

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