The above graph from Philip Bump:
That's the thing about Super Tuesday. For the first four contests, candidates had days (if not months) to focus on each state, making repeated appearances and getting to know the people at the Pizza Ranch. That's is now over, and, as a perhaps inevitable results, we're seeing very different states do very different things.
Georgia and Virginia went for Hillary Clinton on the strength of her support among black voters. Vermont went for Bernie Sanders on the strength of that not being the case -- and on the strength of it being his home state.
For those who worry about November, you should. This will be a tough race. But Trump will split the GOP (see above). And consider this, from YouGov:
It’s hard to win an election when almost half of the voters start out unwilling to consider voting for you. The best any Republican candidate does is Rubio, and, for him, nearly two out of every five voters still say “no chance.” In contrast, Democratic candidates are not making things worse for themselves. In December of 2015, 38% of respondents said they wouldn’t vote for Bernie Sanders and in February that percentage still stands at 38%. Hillary Clinton started with high negatives—48% in December---but these have fallen slightly to 47%. In short, Democrats are having a vigorous campaign that has, so far, not hurt their candidates’ chances, while Republicans have been destroying one another.
Jonathan Chait:
Donald Trump represents a threat to conservatism in two ways. He is extremely likely to lose if nominated, and even if elected, he engenders little confidence that he will see the party agenda through. The fact that Trump threatens rather than promotes conservative interests has enabled conservative intellectuals to see certain truths that they once obscured: There are deep strands of racial resentment and anti-intellectualism running through the Republican electorate. But these angry spasms of half-recognition attempt to quarantine Trump from a political tradition of which he is very much a part. Bret Stephens’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal provides a comic example of the sort of naïveté circulating among the anti-Trump right. William F. Buckley’s break with the anti-Semitic right, argues Stephens, established the conservative movement as racism-free. “The word for Buckley’s act is 'lustration,' and for two generations it upheld the honor of the mainstream conservative movement. Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious.” Now, Stephens laments, that sterling record of racial innocence is threatened by Trump.
Josh Marshall:
Listening to Clinton's speech, I'm struck by one of most unexpected, surreal parts of this campaign: Trump has given Hillary Clinton the turnkey campaign message she simply never had until right now. It's basically just the Trump message turned upside. And with Trump's message so rancid and cartoonish, it's a message that's fairly hard to quibble with.
Ryan Grim:
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) argued Tuesday that even if Donald Trump's controversial remarks about the KKK and David Duke were intentional, rather than a gaffe induced by a faulty earpiece, he's still a better choice for president than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Amanda Terkel:
The Republican Party's top strategist in the 2012 election would rather see Hillary Clinton as the next president than Donald Trump.
"Personally, I think Hillary Clinton would be a better president than Donald Trump because I think that Donald Trump is a dangerous person and is someone who would embarrass America," Stuart Stevens, who advised 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, said Tuesday on Bloomberg's "With All Due Respect."
Josh Marshall:
The establishment’s evolution on Trump was brought into sharp relief last Friday when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who went straight for Trump’s jugular when they were both vying for the Republican nomination, endorsed his former rival.
Now the Republicans in crisis fall into roughly three camps: the party loyalists who grudgingly pledge to back Trump if he's the GOP nominee; the slippery operators who rebuke Trump but are ambiguous when asked whether they'd back him as a nominee; and the emerging #NeverTrump movement of conservatives who say they’d stay home or vote third-party rather than consolidate around the real estate mogul.
Here's a look at where prominent players in the GOP currently fall.
NBC:
Despite speaking out against Trump, [Speaker Paul] Ryan reiterated his past position that he would eventually support whoever becomes the GOP nominee for president.
If they will nonetheless support Trump in the fall, they are bullshitting you.
Check this out, it’s terrific:
Some thought pieces on Bernie’s current positioning to follow:
I will not publish pieces claiming Bernie is winning when he is not. Look to the diaries for those. he fact is, it’s shaping up to be a Trump-Clinton race in the fall.
I also do not believe current head to head polls are useful. I do think ‘who will win” is more useful this far out. This is especially true with Bernie voters feeling miffed (not my imagination, see YouGov):
Two-thirds of Democratic primary voters now believe Clinton has a better chance than her opponent of winning the November election, up nine points from two weeks ago...
In fact, one in three Sanders voters would be “upset” if Clinton won the nomination. 16% would vote for Donald Trump if Clinton were the Democratic nominee, another 14% would find someone else to vote for. However, polls conducted in the heat of a primary campaign often overestimate the level of November desertion by supporters of other candidates for the nomination.
Those current negative ratings of Clinton by Sanders’ supporters have made Sanders the better-liked, though not the most popular, candidate among all Democratic primary voters. However, there is not much difference in the enthusiasm levels Democratic voters would have if either candidate won their party’s nomination
RCP with a conservative view of the Trump nomination, with demographic data:
Trump, on the other hand, does well in counties with low levels of education, high unemployment and lots of renters, and poorly in counties with high education and high income. Note that he does well in areas with large numbers of African-Americans. Since few African-Americans vote in GOP primaries, this probably has more to do with the whites who are living there, which could possibly be explained by the “racial threat” hypothesis in political science (tracing at least back to V.O. Key, which concluded that whites who lived in areas with high African-American populations were more susceptible to racialized appeals than elsewhere).
This is all consistent with Henry Olsen and Dante Scala’s theory in their forthcoming book, “The Four Faces of the Republican Party,” which finds Republican nomination battles are fairly stable within factions, but the order and rate at which the field winnows have a lot to do with who ultimately wins.
Because Trump was able to consolidate his branch of the Republican Party so early, while the others have fought among themselves, he’s been able to stay above the fray to a certain extent, and to build an air of inevitability around his nomination.
Editorial in six USA TODAY Network newspapers:
What an embarrassment. What an utter disgrace.
We’re fed up with Gov. Chris Christie’s arrogance.
We’re fed up with his opportunism.
We’re fed up with his hypocrisy.
We’re fed up with his sarcasm.
We’re fed up with his long neglect of the state to pursue his own selfish agenda.
We’re disgusted with his endorsement of Donald Trump after he spent months on the campaign trail trashing him, calling him unqualified by temperament and experience to be president.
And we’re fed up with his continuing travel out of state on New Jersey’s dime, stumping for Trump, after finally abandoning his own presidential campaign.
For the good of the state, it’s time for Christie to do his long-neglected constituents a favor and resign as governor. If he refuses, citizens should initiate a recall effort.
Hans Noel (co-author The Party Decides ):
Failure is hardly universal. Such indecision has not been a problem for the Democrats this cycle.
The Democratic Party has its own factions, but that conflict has mostly been worked out within party circles. This made the Democratic leaders’ choice much easier. And having backed Mrs. Clinton, party leaders are now going to the mat for her, just as they have done when outsiders challenged their choice in previous elections.
Mrs. Clinton’s march to the nomination shows that parties are still able to make decisions. But Mr. Trump’s success demonstrates that that ability may now be much easier to disrupt.