Ted Cruz, fresh off Wisconsin win, visits the Bronx to talk �New York values’

That’s a step further than Clinton went earlier in the day when she was interviewed on MSNBC.

And the Clinton team was not pleased with the new line of attack from Sanders.

When your brand is all about winning and you’ve just been clobbered in a high-stakes presidential contest, how do you respond?

If you’re Donald Trump, you simply ignore it.

In his first public appearance since Ted Cruz made Swiss cheese of the New York businessman in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, Trump said not a word about his landslide defeat and very little about his two remaining GOP rivals.

Speaking Wednesday night on Long Island to a large and boisterous audience that included several branches of the Trump family tree, he took a few shots at Cruz — or “Lyin’ Ted,” as he prefers — scoffing at the crowd the Texas senator drew at a stop earlier Wednesday in the Bronx.

He taunted “the other one running” — that would be Ohio Gov. John Kasich — for his failure to win anywhere besides his home state. Then, as though feeling sorry, Trump suggested he would just let Kasich be.

Mostly, the Queens-born-and-bred Trump luxuriated in the fact he was home again, talking about growing up in New York City, early-morning tee times on the golf course in Bethpage and the grit and heroism shown by fellow New Yorkers in their response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Do you remember during the debate, when he started lecturing me on �New York values,’ like we’re no good. Like we’re no good!” Trump said of an exchange with Cruz, prompting a rumble of disapproval from the crowd. “Who could have rebuilt that hole? There was never anything like it in this country!”

“And you’ve got this guy,” Trump went on, “looking at me talking about �New York values’ with scorn on his face, with hatred, with hatred of New York. So folks, I think you can forget about him.”

Which Trump then did.

His mood was doubtless helped greatly by the fact Trump is an overwhelming favorite in his home state’s April 19 primary, which could, in a fell swoop, more than offset the 33 delegates that Cruz gained on the Manhattan real estate magnate with his Wisconsin victory.

“We are going to win, win, win!” Trump shouted as the crowd hollered its affirmation. “We are going to make America great again!”

Buoyed on Tuesday night by his decisive victory in Wisconsin, Bernie Sanders insisted that he had a path to the Democratic nomination, one that goes straight through New York.

“Do not tell Secretary [Hillary] Clinton -- she’s getting a little nervous, and I don’t want her to get more nervous -- but I believe we’ve got an excellent chance to win,” he told a crowd of supporters.

Wednesday, Clinton moved aggressively to try to block that path, questioning Sanders’ readiness to be president and his Democratic bona fides, even as her allies attacked his opposition to some gun-control measures and other groups went after his positions on the Middle East.

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Fresh off a victory in Wisconsin’s GOP primary, Ted Cruz turned his attention to New York on Wednesday, where he faces an uphill battle against presidential front-runner Donald Trump in the state’s crucial April 19 primary.

The Texas senator, who has assailed Trump for so-called “New York values,” told reporters after a campaign event in the Bronx that New Yorkers “know exactly what those values are.”

“They’re the values of liberal Democratic politicians ... all of whom Donald Trump has supported,” said Cruz, noting that Trump has given money to help elect New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo.

“If you want to know what liberal Democratic values are, follow Donald Trump’s checkbook,” Cruz said.

During a GOP candidates’ debate earlier this year, Cruz noted that “not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan,” a jab at Trump, who lives in the borough.

With 95 delegates up for grabs in New York, polls show Trump has a double-digit lead over Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Trump is scheduled to hold a rally on Long Island on Wednesday night.

Cruz hopes to do well enough in New York and in a handful of remaining states, including California, to block Trump from capturing enough delegates to secure the GOP nomination before the party’s convention in July.

Cruz sounded optimistic on Wednesday.

“The interesting thing about polling is that it can change and it can change quickly,” Cruz said. “Three weeks ago in Wisconsin we were down ... we just won a landslide victory by 13 points, sweeping the state.”

Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders reveled Tuesday in hard-fought victories in the Wisconsin primary, but both men confront an implacable challenge ahead: math.

What Cruz and Sanders are attempting is exceedingly difficult this far into in a presidential contest -- translating momentum from individual contests into race-altering movement among delegates.

Hillary Clinton lost to Sanders on Tuesday but retains an expansive delegate lead over the Vermont senator. Her margin over him can be diminished enough to deny her the nomination only by a series of swamping defeats in the remaining contests, which would upend the way the race has comported itself so far.

Donald Trump’s loss to the Texas senator had a bigger effect because Trump’s path to the nomination already was narrower than Clinton’s. That, plus the evidence from Wisconsin that Trump continues to struggle to expand his portion of the electorate, increased the chance that the summer Republican convention will open without any candidate having seized the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination.

The result could be a historic clash over the party’s direction and its standard-bearer, played out inside the convention hall and on the streets of Cleveland.

As politicians do, the winners on Tuesday glossed over the difficulties ahead as the race now careens into New York, where a titanic primary is set for April 19. At present both Trump and Clinton hold big leads in the state, where Trump and Sanders were born and where Clinton lives and served as senator.

But the challenges were evident in what the winners said and didn’t say.

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As the presidential campaign heads to New York, Hillary Clinton won’t be pulling any punches.

Looking to turn the page quickly after a double-digit loss to Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin on Tuesday, Clinton said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that her rival’s answers -- or lack thereof -- to substantive questions in a New York Daily News interview “raised a lot of serious questions” about his ability to follow through on his campaign promises.

“The core of his campaign has been break up the banks. It didn’t seem in reading his answers that he understands exactly how that would work under Dodd-Frank,” she said. “That means you can’t really help people if you don’t know how to do what you are campaigning on saying you want to do.”

Asked directly if she thought Sanders was prepared to be president, Clinton said he “hadn’t done his homework.”

“Really what it goes to is for voters to ask themselves, �Can he deliver what he’s talking about?’” she said. “I think I’m by far the better choice.”

Clinton brushed off her defeat in Wisconsin, saying she still earned delegates that will help her eventually clinch the nomination, and looked forward to campaigning in New York, the state she represented for eight years in the Senate.

She said she hoped to unify the Democratic Party at the end of the primary process, and understood why Sanders planned to stay in the race until the end.

“I’m the last person who would tell anybody to walk away from a campaign,” she said, alluding to her own 2008 candidacy.

She also implied she hopes Sanders mirrors her previous race in another respect. When that primary ended against Barack Obama, she noted that she quickly endorsed him, instructed her delegates to back him at the convention where she herself nominated him, and ultimately campaigned for him in the fall.

The daughter of the principal killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting shamed Bernie Sanders on Tuesday for opposing a proposal to allow victims of gun violence to sue firearms manufacturers.

Erica Smegielski, daughter of Dawn Hochsprung, criticized the Vermont senator for going against the families of the 26 adults and children killed when a mentally ill man opened fire on the school.

She blasted Sanders after a scathing New York Daily News cover story Wednesday attacking the Vermont senator for siding with gun maker Remington in a class lawsuit against the firm brought by Newtown families.

In the interview with the paper’s editorial board, Sanders, who represents a state with a strong hunting culture, said he didn’t think victims of gun crime should have the right to sue a gun maker.

Shortly after the polls closed in Wisconsin on Tuesday night, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was declared the victor in the Republican primary and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was called as the winner among Democrats. Minutes later, I got a text from my wife: “Bernie/Ted general election?”

My sweet spouse is as big a political junkie as I am, and I was intrigued that she came up with a provocative question that no one else has asked up to this point. A year ago, the conventional wisdom was that the Democrats would nominate Hillary Clinton for president, the GOP would nominate Jeb Bush, and the general election would be a contest between two political dynasties. In recent months, the bet has been that Hillary would, instead, be facing off against Donald Trump, the billionaire reality TV star who has been the central protagonist of the Republican primary race. That still seems likely, but what if?

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Ted Cruz romped to victory Tuesday in the Wisconsin primary, dealing a setback to Donald Trump and complicating the GOP presidential front-runner’s efforts to win the delegates he needs to secure the nomination without a fight at this summer’s Republican convention.

The primary contest offered just 42 of the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the party convenes in July.

But with the national count expected to be very close, every delegate has come to matter, and Tuesday’s win helped Cruz slice Trump’s delegate lead, albeit narrowly.

Speaking to cheering supporters in Milwaukee, Cruz declared his primary win a turning point.

“It is a rallying cry,” the Texas senator said. “It is a call from the hardworking men and women from Wisconsin to the people of America. We have a choice. We have a real choice.”

Trump, who put on lavish displays to celebrate his earlier victories, made no public appearance.

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With a decisive win in the Wisconsin primary Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders showed once again he remains a powerful force in the Democratic presidential race, setting the stage for a lively political brawl during which he hopes to reshape the race with a defiant surge in New York.

Speaking to supporters in Laramie, Wyo., Sanders said the win would give him momentum to carry on toward larger contests later this month. Wyoming is set to hold its caucuses Saturday.

“With our victory tonight in Wisconsin, we have now won seven out of eight of the last caucuses and primaries,” Sanders said. “And we have won almost all of them with overwhelming landslide numbers.”

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