Can Donald Trump really hit 1,237 before Cleveland?

By MJ Lee and Gregory Krieg, CNN

Story highlights

• Trump still has a climb to clinch the GOP nomination before Cleveland
• Ted Cruz must win 100% of remaining delegates to get to 1,237 on the first ballot
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(CNN)Donald Trump is now the only Republican presidential candidate with a realistic chance of winning the 1,237 votes to clinch the nomination before the national convention this summer.

But getting there will be a tough undertaking, and one that leaves little room for error.

Trump's commanding victory in New York, where he won more than 60% of the vote and the vast majority of the 95 delegates up for grabs, marked a turning point in the delegate race. The Manhattan real estate mogul now has improved his chances of winning the nomination outright, while his chief rival, Ted Cruz, would need a minor miracle to win on the first ballot.

"We don't have much of a race anymore," Trump said in his victory speech at Trump Tower on Tuesday. "We're going to go into the convention I think as the winner."

There are 15 contests remaining, with 674 bound delegates still up for grabs. Trump has 846, and if he were to continue on at his current rate -- 47% -- he would still finish about 75 short of the magic number, according to according to CNN estimates.

Cruz, meanwhile, would have to win every single remaining bound delegate to reach precisely 1,237 and ensure a first-ballot win.

Because the Texas senator has worked to capture delegates who would in theory back him once they are freed from their formal obligations to Trump or other candidates, winning at the outset is potentially critical for the New Yorker's overall chances.

Trump's campaign is publicly confident it will get there. In talking points circulated to surrogates Wednesday, the campaign predicted that the front-runner would accumulate more than 1,400 delegates -- "and thus a first ballot nomination win in Cleveland."

To get across the finish line before July, he will need to score at least one more tough victory. Trump figures to do well in next week's contests on the Eastern seaboard, but could be tripped up or held in later contests in states like Montana and Oregon.

It's expected that Trump will pick up a sizable chunk of California's 172-delegate haul on June 7, meaning the real wild card will be Indiana. The Hoosier State, which votes on May 3, offers 57 delegates. Like in New York, it employs a hybrid system that awards those delegates on both winner-take-all basis statewide and by congressional district. Nebraska, one week later, will deliver all 36 of its delegates in a winner-take-all contest.

But Trump on Wednesday signaled the importance of Indiana, making it his first stop after his New York victory.

"It's a rigged, crooked system that's designed so that the bosses can pick whoever they want," he said of the primary contest, re-upping his attacks on RNC during a Wednesday rally in Indianapolis. "It's rigged for lobbyists. It's rigged for the donors and it's rigged special interest. It's dishonest."

Cruz, who will be in the state on Thursday, is saying he is confident the contest will extend into the summer.

"We are headed to a contested convention. At this point, nobody is getting 1,237," Cruz told Philadelphia radio host Chris Stigall. "Donald is going to talk all the time about other folks not getting to 1,237. He's not getting there, either."

Cruz's declaration essentially sets up the final weeks of the campaign as a choice for Republicans: Trump or No Trump.

To help him defy Cruz and other naysayers, Trump has beefed up his political operation.

For months, the campaign relied on an unusually small and insular operation at the top. But in recent weeks, it became clear that Trump was frustrated by what he believed was the Cruz campaign outmaneuvering him on delegate collection. He appeared especially troubled by the results in Colorado, where Cruz swept all of the delegates there at the state's Republican Party convention.

Sensing that something had to change, Trump shook up his operations, bringing on veteran GOP consultant Paul Manafort to serve as convention manager. Manafort is now tasked with the broad responsibility of overseeing the "nomination process."

Speaking to reporters after Trump was declared winner of the New York primary Tuesday, Manafort said the campaign had simply entered a new phase.

"We're in a phase where the end game requires winning smart," he said.

Harriet Tubman to appear on $20 bill, while Alexander Hamilton remains on $10 bill

By Ana Swanson  and  Abby Ohlheiser The Washington Post

Black abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman will appear on the front of the $20 bill, relocating the slaveholding former president Andrew Jackson to its rear, and founding father Alexander Hamilton will remain on the face of the $10 bill.

The changes were announced Wednesday by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew as part of a historic overhaul of U.S. currency aimed at addressing America’s legacy of slavery and gender inequality. They came after a viral online campaign to feature a woman on the currency and, later, a push to preserve Hamilton’s place by historians and fans of the hit Broadway musical bearing his name.

Lew called Tubman’s story “the essential story of American democracy” and the power of an individual to make a difference, adding that “so much of what we believe has changed for better for this country is reflected in what she struggled for.”

The saga over how U.S. currency would recognize the role of women and minorities has been fraught since the Treasury’s announcement last summer that it would seek to feature a woman on the $10 bill, the next in line to be redesigned with additional features to guard against counterfeiting and to assist the blind.

The choice involved questions of who, on millions of pieces of paper currency, would represent the achievements of women and minorities in American history, and which historical figures to displace to make room for them.

In the hotly anticipated unveiling, Lew described other changes to the $5 and $10 bills. Fans of Hamilton had worried that an announcement last year by the Treasury that it would put a woman on the $10 bill would displace the father of the modern U.S. economic system. But the new $10 bill will now recognize the role of women by featuring on its back an image of the 1913 march for women’s suffrage that ended at the Treasury Department. It will also honor women’s suffrage leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth.

The back of the new $5 bill, which features Abraham Lincoln on the front, will honor the civil rights movement with depictions of Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt and black opera singer Marian Anderson, who famously sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Treasury hopes to release the design concept for the new bills by 2020, the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, but it could take years more for all the bills to enter circulation.

“It is just absolutely beautiful to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman, because where Jackson represented the worst side of American history, Tubman represents the best ideals of American democracy,” said Kari Winter, a professor who studies slavery and dissent at the University of Buffalo. “She really represents the highest ideals of community, working for the common good, thinking about others beside yourself, risking everything for justice.”

Tubman, who was born a slave in Maryland about 1820, will be the first African American and first black woman whose picture appears on U.S. currency. She helped bring dozens of slaves to freedom in her lifetime through the network of abolitionists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She escaped when she was in her 20s but returned to secretly help her family members and dozens of other slaves escape to freedom. Tubman suffered from fits and seizures, the result of physical trauma received when she was a slave, according to Catherine Clinton’s biography of Tubman, called “Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.”

Later in life, she served as a Union Army spy during the Civil War, where she aided the North by scouting terrain and recruiting slaves as soldiers. Before her death in her late 80s or early 90s, she was an outspoken activist for women’s right to vote.

The last woman represented on U.S. notes was Martha Washington, on the $1 silver certificate, while several other women have been featured on coins.

Though it had been contemplating a change for years, Treasury was moved in part by a viral campaign in early 2015 to put a woman’s portrait on the new $20 bill in 2020 — to mark the centennial of women’s suffrage. The group “Women on $20s” received more than 600,000 votes for a choice of 15 American women, including Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt. Tubman received the most votes.

Almost everyone celebrated Lew’s decision to feature a woman. But, for some economists and historians, there was a vociferous reaction against the choice — never clearly stated but widely assumed — to relocate Hamilton from the front of the $10 bill. They noted ruefully that Hamilton was the mastermind behind America’s financial system, while Jackson, the seventh president, was a fervent opponent of a nationally integrated economic system whose tenure included a violent campaign against Native Americans.

Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote in June that he was “appalled” at the idea of removing Hamilton from his position on the $10 and that honoring a woman on a paper bill was “a fine idea, but it shouldn’t come at Hamilton’s expense.”

Hamilton received added support after the breakout hit of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical “Hamilton,” a hip-hop biography of the first Treasury secretary that is one of Broadway’s biggest sensations in years. Miranda, who first got notice for his unusual take after a White House appearance seven years ago, won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama this week for “Hamilton.”

After a visit to Washington last month, Miranda himself assured his anxious fans that Lew told him he would be “very happy” with the new $10. “#wegetthejobdone,” Miranda tweeted.

But as the Treasury gave hints it would acquiesce to pressure to retain Hamilton’s prominence, some women’s groups were alarmed that he might delay his promise to move forward in featuring a woman. On Wednesday, there was mixed reaction to the Treasury announcement.

Lisa Maatz, the vice president of government relations for the American Association of University Women, said that her organization’s members were “thrilled” by Harriet Tubman’s ascension to the front of the $20. However, the ultimate decision to keep Hamilton on the front of the $10 was a disappointment. “Obviously we don’t feel like women need to settle for just one bill. I think getting women on the front of more than one bill would be a great idea.”

Others were more positive. “I’m very happy because of the fact that these changes are going to occur simultaneously,” said the founder of the “Women on 20s” campaign, Barbara Ortiz Howard.

On Twitter, Hillary Clinton, running to be the first female president, wrote: “A woman, a leader, and a freedom fighter. I can’t think of a better choice for the $20 bill than Harriet Tubman.”

Republican presidential candidates did not offer an immediate response to the decision. In a September debate, they were asked who they’d put on the $10 bill. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz both agreed it should be Rosa Parks. (though Cruz said she would be more appropriate on the $20 bill.) John Kasich said Mother Teresa.

“United States history is not Andrew Jackson versus Harriet Tubman. It is Andrew Jackson and Harriet Tubman, both heroes of a nation’s work in progress toward great goals,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, which Jackson also represented in Congress. “It is unnecessary to diminish Jackson in order to honor Tubman. Jackson was the first common man to be elected president.”

Others objected to the decision to feature Tubman because they said it was inconsistent with her history.

“I’d imagine the Treasury aren’t masters of irony,” feminist writer Zoe Samudzi told The Washington Post in an email, “but I’m mulling over the irony of a black woman who was bought and sold being ‘commemorated’ on the $20 bill (without also taking steps for economic recompense for black folks who are descendants of enslaved peoples) and I can’t stop shaking my head.”

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Net Worth: $79.2 billion (+ $3.2 billion vs 2014)
Citizenship: Untied States

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Net worth: $77.1 billion (+$5.1 b vs. 2014)
Citizenship: Mexico

Warren Buffett
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Net worth: $72.7 billion ( +$14.5 billion vs. 2014)
Citizenship: United States

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Citizenship: Spain

Larry Ellison
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Net worth: $54.3 billion (+$6.3 billion vs. 2014)
Citizenship: United States