Clinton’s, Trump’s big nights mean different things for their parties
Here’s the new narrative on the 2016 race for the presidency, after five more states voted Tuesday:
▪ Donald Trump won big and continues his march toward the Republican nomination. He won four of Tuesday’s contests – not counting the Northern Marianas islands, where he won all the available delegates. Realistically, the only way he can be stopped now is at the convention in Cleveland in July.
▪ Marco Rubio dropped out after losing his home state by 19 points. John Kasich survived by winning all 66 delegates from his home state, but it’s not clear he’ll be able to win any others. Ted Cruz over-performed and solidified his status as the main alternative to the polarizing front-runner, despite not winning a state on Tuesday.
▪ But Kasich’s victory means a three-way race for the next three months and will make it significantly harder for the Texas senator to consolidate the anti-Trump vote during the remaining contests, culminating with California on June 7.
▪ Hillary Clinton got her mojo back after Michigan, and Bernie Sanders fell further behind in the delegate count despite very strong finishes in the Midwest. It was a sweep for Clinton, carrying five states. Three of Clinton’s wins were not close: Florida by 31 points (64-33), North Carolina by 14 (55-41) and Ohio by 13 (56-43.) She won Illinois by a much slimmer margin, and appears to have won Missouri by some 1,500 votes.
▪ Clinton has now won every state in the South (minus Oklahoma, if that counts), thanks to her firewall of support from minority voters. She won 73 percent of the nonwhite vote in Florida, which accounted for 51 percent of the Democratic electorate (according to exit polls).
▪ Sanders’ advisers believe he has a path to win the three states that vote next Tuesday: Arizona, Idaho and Utah. About 7,000 people came to see him speak in Phoenix Tuesday night. But whatever momentum he had has been blunted. Cable news is Berned out: None of the channels even covered his speech live Tuesday night.
▪ “A good night for Trump and a better night for Clinton” is how Dan Balz sums it up in his Washington Post column: “Clinton holds a lead of nearly 300 pledged delegates, those determined by the results of the primaries and caucuses. That is a bigger lead in pledged delegates than then-Sen. Barack Obama had in his epic battle against Clinton eight years ago. Her lead among so-called super delegates – party leaders and elected officials – is even more overwhelming.
“Because Democrats award pledged delegates proportionally, Sanders needs not only a string of victories but also popular vote margins large enough to pick up delegates in bushel baskets, contest by contest. For those who have questioned the quality of Clinton’s campaign, there’s no doubting the effectiveness of her delegate-focused strategy.”
WHAT’S NEXT?
A contested Republican convention looks increasingly possible, if not probable:
▪ Kasich’s only hope is a convention at which Cruz and Trump both remain unacceptable to the party establishment. Otherwise, the delegate math is impossible for Kasich:
“He would have to win more than 100 percent of the remaining available delegates to get to the 1,237 delegates he needs to be the party’s nominee,” the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza points out. “Kasich now seems likely to hang around at the periphery of the Trump-Cruz race for the next few months.”
Kasich pledged to stay in through the convention. “We’re going to go all the way to Cleveland and secure the Republican nomination,” he said to cheers Tuesday night.
▪ If no one comes in with a majority of the delegates, anything could happen at an open convention. If you watch cable, you’re hearing lots of talk about Rule 40, which says you need the most delegates from eight states to be entered into nomination. What that misses is the ability of a rules committee to literally change the rules of the game on the eve of the convention.
▪ House Speaker Paul Ryan has opened the door to being a consensus nominee: The speaker would not categorically rule out accepting his party’s nod during an interview with CNBC. The 2012 VP nominee played coy when given multiple chances to offer a Shermanesque denial of his interest.
“I don’t see that happening,” he said. “I’m not running for president.”
Note the use of the present tense.
Pressed by John Harwood, Ryan added:
“You know, I haven’t given any thought to this stuff. People say, ‘What about the contested convention?’ I say, well, there are a lot of people running for president. We’ll see. Who knows?”
This story was originally published March 16, 2016 at 2:51 PM with the headline "Clinton’s, Trump’s big nights mean different things for their parties."