Month: March 2016

On the Democratic side, FiveThirtyEight gives Hillary Clinton the same 99 percent plus chance of winning Louisiana as it gave her in South Carolina, which isn't surprising because it has a similar African-American majority in its primary electorate and Clinton's carrying that demographic by a similar 5-1 margin in recent polls. In much-whiter Kansas and Nebraska, Sanders is favored, though not overwhelmingly; even though these are technically closed caucuses, they are like Iowa in that independents and Republicans can change their affiliation at the caucus site. Maine is assumed to be big-time Bernie Country. He could use some bragging rights about now, though any loss in the caucus states will be cited as a sign of waning strength. Anyone wanting to follow returns from all these events is going to have to be patient. Probably the first returns to come in on Saturday will be from Kansas Republicans, who end their caucuses at 2 p.m. CST. Kansas Democrats begin caucusing at 3:30 p.m. CST. Kentucky Republicans (expecting a low turnout in an unusual caucus arranged strictly for the convenience of former presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul) will end their voting at 4 p.m. local time (EST and CST). Nebraska Democrats and Maine Republicans will caucus at locally determined times ranging from mid-morning to early evening. In Louisiana polls will close at 8 CST. On Sunday Maine Democrats will spread their local caucuses around from 1 to 9 p.m. EST, and in Puerto Rico polls will close at 3 p.m. EST. Then we all have to wait two more days until four more Republican events and two more Democratic primaries are held.

The bottom line is that the Republican Party is now on track for a major disaster. One possibility is that Trump will eek out a narrow victory against a divided field in the face of dogged opposition from his own party's elite. Far too many anti-Trump things have been said at this point to take them all back, and the divisions inside the party will hurt Trump badly in the general election. For Democrats, this is fun to watch. But more than fun to watch, it's a key reason why Democrats, though they should avoid complacency about Trump, can also confidently view him as a weaker-than-average nominee. Presidential candidates who run at the head of a united party have no guarantee of victory, but candidates who run without the wholehearted support of their party's prominent leaders and mid-ranking professional staffers tend to lose. But the alternative is also disastrous. If the Republicans running against Trump actually did cooperate with some explicit or implicit alternative in mind, then they could assemble an anti-Trump majority and hand the nomination to their champion. But instead they are all running independent, entirely uncoordinated campaigns and simply hoping to work out the nomination via a chaotic convention floor fight of the sort we haven't seen for two generations. Nobody knows who or what would emerge from that, but one guarantee is that it would leave Trump and his supporters enraged and demoralized at what they will see as an underhanded theft of a nomination they earned.