It was a Super Tuesday for both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as they trounced their less-famous rivals on the biggest day in the 2016 presidential campaign. The real estate billionaire won 7 out of 11 states on the Republican side while the former Secretary of State won 8 out of 12 contests on the Democratic side. Is it over? Is it now inevitable that the campaign has moved from a primary to a general election between two of the most famous people in America?
On the Democratic side, I would say that yes, it is over. Unless the FBI recommends criminal charges against Clinton before she wraps up the nomination, she will be the nominee for president. The 74-year old socialist senator from Vermont didn’t have an awful night; he won four states but, except for his home state, his margins of victory were fairly modest. On the flip side, Clinton wiped Sanders out in the bigger states, running up enormous margins in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia on the strength of an overwhelming advantage among African-American voters.
Because of the fact that she has now 468 superdelegate votes in her back pocket, Secretary Clinton now has a delegate lead of 1,074 to 426. So Clinton now has 45% of the delegates she will need to win the nomination even though only 15 out of 50 states have voted. Given that the Dems allocate delegates proportionally in all states, by my calculations, Bernie would have to win 60% of the votes in the remaining 35 states to catch Hillary in the delegate derby. That seems like an impossible task unless, UNLESS there’s a big development in the email scandal.
On the GOP side, Trump’s win was huge but not a knockout blow to his opponents, although they are all clearly on the ropes. One of the pretenders, Dr. Ben Carson, dropped out of the race today. It was an significant victory for Trump for two different reasons. First, he won. Duh. Winning is good. But the second reason is that both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio didn’t lose badly enough to drop out of the race. Cruz had the better night to be sure, taking three states (his home state of Texas plus Oklahoma and Alaska). Rubio averted a total disaster by winning his first state in the Minnesota caucuses.
In my Super Tuesday preview, I speculated on what the ultimate delegate haul would be by each of the candidates by the end of the day. I predicted Trump would finish with 340 delegates; he fell 8 shy with 332. I pegged Cruz with 198, a total he out-performed (finishing with 230) based on the bigger than expected win in Texas and his two other wins. Rubio is the one who under-performed, ending the day with 113 delegates (I had predicted 126). The Florida Senator’s shortfall was due to getting virtually shut out in Alabama and Texas due to not meeting the 20% delegate threshold.
So, although Trump is clearly on the path to overall victory, he still has only 27% of the delegates needed to secure the nomination. With a bunch of “winner take all” states looming on March 15th, he has the potential to wrap up the nomination quickly but the potential is also there for another candidate to mount a comeback if/when it gets to a two or three person race.
Before those winner-take-all’s start on the 15th (which includes Rubio’s home state of Florida and John Kasich’s home state of Ohio), there are 7 contests taking place in the next 6 days. Here’s the list (with the number of delegates up for grabs):
Sat, March 5th:
Kansas Caucuses (40 delegates)
Kentucky Caucuses (46 delegates)
Maine Caucuses (21 delegates)
Louisiana Primary (46 delegates)
Sun, March 6th:
Puerto Rico Primary (23 delegates)
Tues, March 8th:
Hawaii Caucuses (19 delegates)
Idaho Primary (32 delegates)
Michigan Primary (59 delegates)
Mississippi Primary (40 delegates)
If there is a ray of hope for the Rubio and Cruz supporters it is that all of the contests taking place this Saturday are “closed.” That means that only registered Republicans are able to participate; Trump has gotten a lot of support from independents. Also, three of the four are caucuses, not primaries, which tend to decrease the percentage of first-time voters (who have also been a big part of Trump’s coalition). Not coincidentally, Cruz’ two non-Texas victories (Oklahoma and Alaska) were in closed Republicans-only events. Also not by chance, Rubio’s win in Minnesota was in a caucus state.
One of the notable trends in the Super Tuesday exit polls is that, in almost every state, more than 50% of the Republican voters would be “dissatisfied” if Donald Trump were the nominee. He still won many of those states with a plurality, with the other four candidates splitting the rest of the vote. This continues the “ceiling” trend that Trump’s support is locked into cement and that he has a difficult time building on that core. Although, because of the allocation thresholds, Trump won 42% of the delegates on Tuesday, he won “only” 35% of the popular vote. Even if you take the Texas results out of the equation, he still was under 40% in the other ten contests.
In a case of astounding incompetence and one of severely short-sighted strategy, for the first seven months of this nominating contest, the Super PAC’s supporting the non-Trump candidates (mostly Jeb Bush’s) spent over $200 million attacking each other. One might call that a circular firing squad. Each Super-PAC set out a goal to help their candidate become “the one” to go mano-a-mano against The Donald by trashing all of the others.
Well, that strategy has just changed on a dime. You can’t go 30 minutes watching Fox News without seeing a negative TV spot against Trump. Some of the ads are hitting him in the correct way, by exposing some skeletons that have been in the public domain for years but were unknown to Republican primary voters until recently. These skeletons are not of the “he used to be a liberal” variety: his supporters already know that. They are of the “con man” and “hypocrite” variety, with the one most likely to stick being Trump University, an over-hyped real estate school that charged students between $1,500-$35,000 to learn the secret of The Donald’s success.
Let’s be clear here: the hill that either Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz have to climb is very steep. For John Kasich, it’s Mount Everest. However, there’s another prime time opportunity for Rubio and Cruz to pound on Trump with tomorrow night’s debate on Fox News. This debate will include a rematch between Trump and moderator Megyn Kelly, who kicked off the entire campaign with a question about the flamboyant billionaire’s misogyny. With Carson out of the race, it’s now a four-person debate. One would think that this would make it more substantive but it’s more likely that it will be another name-calling shit show (pardon the term). I would expect both junior senators to once again challenge Trump to share specifics about his policies and probably hurl a few insults towards the king of insults. It may be appalling but it won’t be boring.
Thanks for reading!
Chris Bodig
only thing left is to enjoy the food fight