Just like last week, the best of the analysis for yesterday will come tomorrow. In any case, if you like primaries, stick around because it may be post March 15, but we ain’t done yet. And Bernie voters, come around at your own speed. Don’t feel pushed.
Jeet Heer:
If his only goal is to win the nomination, then it might be time for him to call it quits. But if his goal is to remake the Democratic Party by creating a powerful faction to the left of Clinton, then Sanders has every reason to stay until the end—and doing so could help Clinton defeat the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
Hunter Walker:
Tuesday was always supposed to be one of the most important nights in the Democratic presidential primary, but for Hillary Clinton, it was even bigger than she and her team expected.
Clinton’s victories in Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina put her firmly on course to defeat her primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.). As the results were announced on Tuesday evening, she took the stage before a boisterous crowd of supporters here and seemed to pivot towards the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, who also won in Florida.
Five Thirty Eight:
Exit poll results are coming back and telling us a bit more about why Clinton won in Ohio and not in Michigan — her victory can be boiled down to her performance with white voters, older voters, and voters who are concerned about trade issues.
In Michigan, Sanders won white voters, but in Ohio, Clinton won them, 51 percent to 48 percent, and that seems to have made a difference. Her support with black voters in the state also remained strong — she won them 68 percent to 30 percent — but that was less an overwhelming win of the demographic than her record in other states.
Nate Cohn:
Tuesday night could not have gone much better for Hillary Clinton. The results on the Democratic side moved her closer to winning the nomination. The results on the Republican side pushed the G.O.P. even closer toward nominating a candidate who would be at a serious disadvantage in the general election.
None of this means the primary season will end soon. The Democratic contest could go all the way until the California primary June 7. The Republican contest could last all the way to the convention.
But the Democratic contest now looks like a foregone conclusion. Mrs. Clinton significantly added to her delegate lead with a 30-plus-point win in Florida and a comfortable margin of victory in North Carolina and Ohio.
For today, I’m still focused on the fascinating GOP contest and all the moving parts. Some differing views on a Stop Trump movement to follow, before during and after the convention.
Matthew Yglesias:
It's now clear that only a Democrat can stop Donald Trump
Donald Trump's ongoing evisceration of the Republican Party establishment has earned him a reputation in some circles as a Teflon-coated magician, a politician whose mind meld with the American people is so strong it makes him immune to attack.
He's not.
Of course, liberals should not be complacent about Trump's ability to win a general election. Winning a primary is harder than winning a general, and anyone who's secured either major party's nomination is just a bit of good luck away from taking the White House. But the antidote to complacency is not panic.
Brendan Nyhan has some words about institutional failure:
Donald Trump is an American disaster. Lots of institutions let this happen. And people are not done protesting. Sure, most Rs will line up behind him if he is not the nominee, but:
Across the five states voting today, in preliminary exit poll results, slightly more than half of GOP primary voters say they’d definitely vote for Trump; two in 10 say they’d “probably” support him – and about a quarter of primary voters within his own party say they would not vote for him.
That is a lot of voters.
Sasha Issenberg on more from the NeverTrump movement:
How to Steal a Nomination From Donald Trump
An insider’s guide to what could be the struggle to win a contested convention.
All three of Trump’s Republican opponents are now convinced (even if some are loath to concede it publicly) that the current front-runner is the only candidate in the field who still has the chance to win the 1,237 delegates that would ensure his nomination in Cleveland. But if Trump is unable in the remaining primaries and caucuses to line up the necessary delegates, the convention will be deadlocked on its first ballot and then have to vote again—and possibly again and again—until a majority emerges.
That could offer mainstream conservatives and party regulars the opening they would need to take the nomination from a candidate who almost certainly will have accumulated more delegates and possibly millions more popular votes than his rivals. Of the other candidates, only Ted Cruz is focused on trying to finish ahead of Trump in the delegate count, even if neither gets the majority; Marco Rubio and John Kasich are resigned to the reality that they will be playing from behind.
John Ziegler:
I have written many times on this outlet about the dangers of Donald Trump’s candidacy. Last year, I predicted how the conservative media was going to allow him to at least negatively alter the process, if not win the GOP nomination. Now that he has effectively clinched that nomination (or at least created a situation where it would require an unprecedented act to stop him), someone needs to explain, from a media perspective, how and why this happened. Since no other conservative has both the guts and the knowledge to do so, I guess that person will be me.
Alex Isenstadt:
Top Republicans are looking beyond Tuesday’s make-or-break primaries and preparing for a nasty nomination fight that could push all the way to this summer’s GOP convention in Cleveland.
The planning, detailed in conversations with nearly a dozen party officials and strategists, is stretching from Ted Cruz campaign headquarters in Houston to the Republican National Committee’s offices on Capitol Hill. And this week, following Tuesday’s primaries, wealthy GOP donors — many of whom have directed millions of dollars toward defeating Donald Trump — will gather in Florida to discuss what the party’s path forward looks like.
Jonathan Chait:
The modern Republican Party is an awkward contraption that harnesses a politics of white ethno-nationalism to a policy agenda dominated by Ayn Rand–inflected anti-statism. Donald Trump has exploited the wedge between the party’s voters and the ideologists of its master class, placing the latter in an awkward spot. In the face of this threat, there are many possible responses for an advocate of traditional Goldwater-Reagan conservatism to make. The most bracingly honest may come fromNational Review’s Kevin Williamson, whose antipathy for Trump has expanded to include Trump’s white working-class supporters.
Williamson’s latest column, which his NR colleague David Frenchenthusiastically endorses, has attracted some notoriety for its display of contempt (rendered in Williamson's florid, trademark-infringing imitation Buckley prose) for low-income white voters who make up a major share of Trump’s base. They are losers, druggies, layabouts, and so on. The solution Williamson offers them is to move out of their pathetic dying towns. (“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets.” Etc.)
John Hagner and Paul Tencher:
The truth about primary voter turnout
There actually is no historic correlation between primary turnout and general election turnout. None. The highest turnout in a Democratic primary—before the outlier of 2008—was in 1988. Gov. Michael Dukakis got killed in November. Democratic primary turnout was actually lower in 1992—two million fewer Democrats voted in the primaries that year. The drop in turnout didn’t stop Bill Clinton from winning the general election convincingly.
Turnout data also shows Americans don't vote in primaries because they're excited about November. They vote in primaries when the outcome of the party nomination is in doubt. The outcome of this primary hasn't been in doubt for most Democratic primary voters despite a hard-fought race. That’s a statement that may strike people who read campaign news every day as odd, especially given the fundraising success of the Sanders campaign. Democrats have seenHillary Clinton as our party’s likely 2016 nominee for years and her strength is beginning to catch up to this underlying reality. Turnout is lower because there has been less suspense about the outcome.
Molly Ball:
After a young black protester was dragged out of one of his rallies last week—getting sucker-punched by a 78-year-old white man on his way out—Donald Trump looked out at the jeering, seething, booing crowd in front of him. “Nasty, nasty!” he said. A plaintive look came over Trump’s face.
“Why are they allowed to do things that we’re not allowed to do, can you explain that to me?” he said fretfully, pointing his right index finger upward and jouncing his hand up and down. “Really a disgrace.”
It was a potent summary of the identity politics that seem to form a significant part of Trump’s appeal: the idea that they, the others, enjoy privileges, resources, and status to which we are denied access. It is a sentiment I have repeatedly heard from the dozens of Trump supporters I have met over the past eight months I have spent covering his campaign. More complicated than the overt bigotry of, say, the Ku Klux Klan, it is a form of racial resentment based on historic white entitlement and a backlash to the upsurge in leftist identity politics that has marked American politics in the age of Obama.
Sam Wang:
The aforementioned scenario, in which Rubio drops out and Kasich stays in, may be Trump’s best option. Perhaps counterintuitively, it is worse for Trump to win Ohio since that would likely cause Kasich to withdraw. In this scenario, Trump would be left in a one-on-one matchup with Cruz. National surveys from ABC/Langer and NBC/Wall Street Journal show Cruz leading Trump by 13 and 17 percentage points. A two-candidate race might not only leave Trump far short of a majority of delegates but also open up the possibility of Cruz ending up with the most delegates.
Michael Cohen:
That Trump is a public menace should really come as little surprise. For months, he’s been talking about the “good old days” in which political protesters would end up on “stretchers.” He’s even talked about wanting to punch them in the face. All of this is consistent with a politician who, to energize his listeners, is unabashedly playing on xenophobic and racist fears of Muslims and undocumented immigrants…
The bottom line is that if Republicans want to stop Trump, they need to make it clear he is unfit to be president and that they are willing to put the nation ahead of the party.
But that alone won’t suffice. They must make amends with their own role in creating the monster that is Trumpism.
Frank Bruni:
There are Republican traditionalists rooting for Trump over Cruz, and the thinking of some goes like this: Neither candidate can win the presidency. But while Cruz has almost no crossover appeal beyond committed Republicans, Trump might draw enough independents, blue-collar Democrats and new voters in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania to buoy Republicans in tight Senate races there.
Besides which, he scrambles all rules and all precedents so thoroughly that you never know. Victory isn’t unthinkable, and better a Republican who’s allergic to caution, oblivious to actual information and altogether dangerous than a Democrat who’ll dole out all the plum administration jobs to her own party.
Republican traditionalists who prefer Cruz are no more ebullient in their outlooks.
“Cruz is a disaster for the party,” one of them told me. “Trump is a disaster for the country.”
“If Cruz is the nominee, we get wiped out,” he added, with a resigned voice. “And we rebuild.” The party needs that anyway.
In fact, a few Republican traditionalists have insisted to me that a Cruz nomination and subsequent defeat would have a long-term upside. It would put to rest the stubborn argument, promoted by Cruz and others on the party’s far right, that the G.O.P. has lost presidential elections over recent decades because its nominees weren’t conservative enough.
This is Cruz-serving hogwash: If anything, those nominees weren’t sufficiently moderate. A Cruz wipeout would prove as much.