We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson’s take at The Washington Post on whether the Republican Party can stop Donald Trump:
For decades, the Republican Party gave voters the impression that they get to pick the presidential nominee. The much-weakened GOP establishment theoretically has the power to choose someone else — but not, I believe, the strength of purpose to do it. [...]
Trump would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what’s coming. In recent speeches, he has staked out the position that the candidate who comes to the convention with the biggest number of delegates should be the nominee, period. Polls show that a majority of Republicans agree with the helmet-haired billionaire. It turns out that once you tell people they get to choose their standard-bearer, they don’t take kindly to being patted on the head and told to go sit in the corner. [...] if he narrowly misses the magic number, I don’t believe the debilitated establishment can muster the solidarity it would need to deny him. At this point, I’m afraid, the GOP is much more Trump’s party than theirs.
On the New York primary front, John Cassidy at The New Yorker believes that the results may not change the campaign dynamic much, since Trump’s lead has been consistent and the chance of a Michigan-like victory for Sanders is slim given the closed primary:
From that perspective, it has been a healthy campaign in a state that often feels as if it doesn’t get to participate fully in Presidential primaries. But what impact will all of the speechifying, advertising, Facebook sharing, and kibitzing have on the outcome? Obviously, we won’t know until Tuesday night. If the opinion polls are to be believed, though, the stark reality is that the answer might be “not much.”
Heidi Moore at USA Today looks at the New York primary as “a wayback machine”:
This New York primary, in other words, is primarily a parade of the city’s ghosts and not much about its future — one that depends heavily on immigration to keep the social and municipal infrastructure going, gun control to cut back on crime, and pay equality for women who fill the workforce of every major industry. (And yes, much to the chagrin of upstate citizens, the city is in the spotlight because downstate controls half of the state's Republican delegates.)
Even the polls themselves will be ghostly. Polling places in some upstate areas don’t open until noon. Even where the hours are longer, voter turnout is infamously low. New York ranked 46th out of the 50 states in the 2014 midterm elections, with only 29% of those eligible casting ballots, as the Daily News points out. The 2008 presidential primaries drew an even less impressive 19%.
Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine analyzes Ted Cruz’s campaign strategy:
Cruz cannot really start worrying about Trump voters until he's fully used the #NeverTrump movement to put himself into a position to win the nomination. If Cruz goes out of his way to remind Republican officeholders that he was their nightmare candidate until Trump showed up as the real devil, the temptation to go for the gold in a contested convention and blow up Cruz on a third ballot after Cruz blows up Trump on the second ballot will be powerful.
Beyond all that, you just don't get the sense that the junior senator from Texas was cut out to be a unity figure, even for a party suddenly divided between Satan and everybody else. Unity candidates are reassuring and have a knack for making you see your own reflection in their soft and soulful eyes. Cruz has the persona of someone who's been told by his crazy father a thousand times that God has chosen him to redeem America from its secular socialist captors. He's in the presidential race not to unite Republicans but to smite Babylon and maybe bring on the End Times. He thus does not represent a natural compromise between those who want to lower their marginal tax rates and melt the polar caps and those who mainly want to ensure they'll never have to "press 1 for English" or hold their tongues in the presence of women and minorities ever again.
Gary Stein at Newsday writes about Ted Cruz’s New York snub:
It was Cruz, you may recall, who criticized “New York values” back when he was campaigning in Iowa.
New Yorkers have long memories. That is why Cruz is polling third in New York, about 35 points behind Trump.
Over at Forbes, Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, takes on Ted Cruz’s claims on abortion:
How can Cruz get away with such blatant nonsense when it comes to the lessons that science and medicine have to teach about embryos and fetuses? It is partly because the medical and bioscience communities long ago abandoned any serious effort to shape the debate over abortion. Many, I suspect, don’t want to alienate the main source of their financial support—Congress and state legislators. They have decided to stay out of the whole divisive issue leaving pro-life politicians like Cruz to make claims that are just as much junk science as climate denial, creation ‘science’ and efforts to link autism to vaccines.
Meghan Keneally at ABC has five things to watch for in New York:
There is a chance that Trump could win in a landslide, taking all of the state's 95 delegates.
The Republican delegates in New York are awarded proportionally for any candidate who receives at least 20 percent of the vote. But if a candidate gets the majority of the vote (more than 50 percent) in each individual congressional district, he will take all three delegates allotted to that congressional district. So if Trump gets more than 50 percent of the vote in each of the state's 27 congressional districts, he will take all 81 delegates.
On top of that, the remaining 14 at-large delegates are awarded based on the state totals, so if Trump wins a popular majority in the state, he gets those as well, leaving his rivals Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich with no delegates at all.
On a final note, please share this New York Times editorial debunking Republican myths on health care:
“Disaster.” “Incredible economic burden.” “The biggest job-killer in this country.”
Central to the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has been the claim that the Affordable Care Act has been a complete failure, and that the only way to save the country from this scourge is to replace it with something they design.
It’s worth examining the big myths they are peddling about the Affordable Care Act and also their ill-conceived plans of what might replace it.