The Democratic Primary for President is over. The winner is Hillary Clinton. She will be the nominee.
Remember what I said on Sunday: “[B]est case scenario for Sanders on Tuesday: He wins Ohio, Illinois and Missouri. Those three wins, and the margins he wins them by, would give Sanders the first real momentum of this campaign, and first real panic in the Clinton camp. Worst case scenario: five losses to Clinton, which would end his campaign for the nomination. One win would keep him alive, on life support. Two wins would keep him alive as a competitive challenger, though with Clinton still in control of the race.”
So we have the worst case scenario for Sanders. I’m not going to pile on here, because I know the stages of grief a passionate supporter of a candidate goes through on days like this. I have been one, I am one, and I have been there. So take your time, BernieBros and BernieGals. There will be no demands of loyalty from me today.
And you should be proud of Bernie. You and he confounded expectations, and you took a 73 year old cranky socialist from Vermont and made him lovable, endearing, and most importantly, a credible competitor for the Democratic nomination for President. And you and he did a valuable service: you mainstreamed the left again. You made the Democratic Party proud to be liberal, by showing that’s where the votes are. So this is all great work by you.
What you, and Bernie, should do know is, yes, continue the campaign. BUT! Not for President. Sure, sure, he will still be running for President, his name will still be on the ballot, but the efforts and fundraising should be aimed towards identifying and electing and contributing to Revolution Bringers down the ballot. Bernie should travel the country in the months ahead and campaign with liberal and progressive candidates for the House, Senate and State House and Senate. He needs to take his army of passionate supporters and focus on building up the Democratic Party from the bottom up, rather than the top down. You want to make a President Hillary Clinton do what you want? Force her to by electing Revolution Bringers to Congress.
I did not think Sanders would still be fighting Clinton to close to a draw in states like Illinois. But Clinton will win either 4 of 5 or 5 of 5 states tonight, all big states, three of them major swing states. More importantly, Clinton’s edge in pledged delegates is now close to overwhelming. The Democrats don’t have winner take all primaries. So it’s not possible catch up with wins in a string of big states. Even if Sanders won every remaining state by a narrow margin, he’d probably still lose.
Politico says the odds of a contested convention for the GOP just went way up: “The impact of Rubio’s exit — and Kasich’s sudden rise — creates a mess of unpredictable scenarios that could end in Trump’s coronation, a contested convention or some kind of split decision that sends the GOP’s mid-July convention into fractious anarchy. For starters, it’s unclear where the Florida senator’s voters (15 to 20 percent of the GOP electorate) will go; the conventional wisdom is that Kasich will benefit more than Cruz, but that’s no lock.”
“The next batch of state contests — New Jersey, Arizona, Delaware, South Dakota and Montana — seem to favor Trump, but the race has entered a new volatile stage. And, increasingly, the stage seems set for some kind of showdown on the convention floor (and the streets outside) when the Republicans return to Cleveland.”
“The 2016 Democratic primary effectively ended Tuesday night, with Hillary Clinton as the all-but-certain winner but Bernie Sanders barely acknowledging it,” Politico reports.
“After noting that she now has a 300-delegate lead – which will make it essentially impossible for Sanders to catch up given the rules of the Democratic process — Clinton turned her attention to the front-runner for the Republican nomination.”
New York Times: “With landslide wins in Florida and Ohio, Mrs. Clinton re-established herself as the prohibitive favorite in the Democratic race. Taking Ohio by double digits, she eased fears that Mr. Sanders might become a breakaway favorite across the Midwest after his upset victory in Michigan last week.
Vox’s winners and losers from last night:
Winners–Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and John Kasich’s campaign consultants
Losers–Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders
On Hillary:
So Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee. Sorry Bernie fans, them’s the breaks. According to estimates by my colleague Andrew Prokop, she’ll only need about 42 percent of the delegates in every contest going forward to get a majority of pledged delegates.
In other words, Bernie Sanders would need to beat her by 16-plus percent, on average, in upcoming delegate splits. He’d need to start demolishing her — and not just in races where he’s likely to do well (like the causes in Washington, Hawaii, Alaska, and Idaho), but in Clinton’s home state of New York, in Connecticut, among the heavily black primary electorate of Maryland. There’s just no sign he has anywhere near the amount of support to make that happen.
On Sanders:
Sanders lost for all the reasons Clinton won, more or less. He now faces an almost impossibly hard road to the nomination, entailing landslide victories in unfavorable states like New York. The main question he has to answer is how to keep his grassroots engaged after he loses.
But the specifics of tonight’s loss also served to debunk a favorite Sanders supporter talking point: that while Clinton does well in Republican-leaning states, Sanders wins blue states. The implicit argument was about electability: if Democrats in blue states like Sanders, they’ll turn out in bigger numbers for him than for Clinton, whereas Democratic turnout in, say, Mississippi, basically doesn’t matter for the presidential race.
Well, Clinton won Ohio and Florida, the two swingiest of swing states. Under the logic of the red state/blue state pro-Sanders argument, this would suggest that Clinton, not Sanders, is the candidate best positioned to win purple states.
Nate Silver says Hillary is following Obama’s path to the nomination:
I’m intrigued by the parallels to the 2008 campaign perhaps because it’s where FiveThirtyEight cut its teeth. I spent a lot of time in the spring of 2008 arguing that Obama’s lead in elected delegates would be hard for Clinton to overcome. But Clinton’s lead over Sanders is much larger than Obama’s was over Clinton at a comparable stage of the race. At the end of February 2008, after a favorable run of states for Obama, he led Clinton by approximately 100 elected delegates. Clinton’s lead is much larger this year.1 Clinton entered Tuesday’s contests ahead of Sanders by approximately 220 elected delegates. But she’ll net approximately 70 delegates from Florida, 20 from Ohio, 15 from North Carolina and a handful from Illinois and Missouri. That will expand her advantage to something like 325 elected delegates.
Sanders will need to win about 58 percent of the remaining 2,000 or so elected delegates to tie Clinton. Since the Democrats allot delegates proportionally, that means he’d need to win about 58 percent of the vote in the average remaining state to Clinton’s 42 percent, meaning he’d need to beat Clinton by around 16 points the rest of the way. […]
We’re fond of sports metaphors here at FiveThirtyEight. If the Republican race is Calvinball, with everyone making up the rules as they go along, the Democratic race is more like — zzzzzzz — golf. Clinton entered Tuesday night with the equivalent of a four-stroke lead with four holes to play. Then on the 15th hole, when Sanders already needed a minor miracle, she birdied while Sanders bogied. It’s not that it’s mathematically impossible for Sanders to win; Clinton could have some sort of epic meltdown. But she controls her own fate while Sanders doesn’t really control his, and she has quite a lot of tolerance for error.
Sanders has run a good campaign, and the fact that he ran competitively with Clinton in diverse states such as Michigan, Missouri and Illinois is more impressive in many ways than his early successes in Iowa and New Hampshire. But around 15 million Democrats have voted and, simply put, more of them seem to want Clinton as their nominee.
Jeet Heer has a reason for Bernie Sanders to stay in the race, besides mine:
Sanders’s greatest impact on the Democratic primary has been to tug Clinton to the left on economic issues. He likely won Michigan by hammering home his opposition to free-trade agreements, and Clinton seems to have picked up the message: In Tuesday night’s speech, she said that no one “takes advantage of us—not China, not Wall Street,” words that echoed both Sanders and Trump’s rhetoric on trade and the outsized influence of corporate America.
Trump’s likely nomination gives Sanders a strong incentive to continue in the race— not only to pull Clinton to the left on economic issues, but to argue that her pursuit of well-to-do Republicans is a mistake. This strategy would essentially cede the white working class to Trump, which is risky not only in immediate electoral terms but fraught with danger for the country. If Democrats don’t make a pitch to win back the white working class, they will become ever more alienated and susceptible to the next Trump-style demagogue who comes around. Sanders-style economic populism offers a chance to peel away these voters from Trump, dooming any chance he has of defeating Clinton in November.
Here, then, is Sanders’s new mission: to be the spokesman for the Democratic Party’s alternative to Trumpism. That’s reason enough to stay in the race.
So long as he does so with an eye on combating Trump rather than Clinton. If Bernie continues a negative campaign against our nominee, then I will require his absence from the campaign trail.
Hillary’s HQ early this morning:
Meanwhile at @HillaryClinton HQ… #ImWithHer pic.twitter.com/7k237mLMAU
— John Buysse (@JohnBuysse) March 16, 2016
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.
Cruz welcomes Rubio supporters into the fold pic.twitter.com/5a1KjIYCxn
— Eliot Nelson (@eliotnelson) March 16, 2016
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.
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 French enthusiastically 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.)
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.