Democrats have primaries in five large states today with 780 delegates at stake. After Super Tuesday, this is the biggest batch of delegates available on a single day. It could go a long way towards determining who the Democratic nominee will be. Here is a rundown of the five states in play today.
Florida (246 delegates). This is the big one today, but it is not even close. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) knew from the start that Hillary Clinton would win big here and didn't even campaign much in the Sunshine State. The state is full of blacks, Latinos, and elderly women. What else could Hillary wish for? Furthermore, both Clintons have campaigned heavily in Florida many times over a period going back decades. Bill is one of the most popular Democratic politicians in the state. Clinton could end up with 2/3 of the vote and 2/3 of the delegates. It will be brutal for Bernie.So look for massive Clinton wins in Florida and North Carolina, with closer votes in the other three, with a possible Sanders win in Missouri. When the delegates are added up for the day, expect Clinton to have a large net gain, no matter how many states Sanders wins. (V)
Republicans vote in the same five states as the Democrats today, plus one territory. They have 367 delegates at stake because (1) the Republican Convention is much smaller and (2) Republicans give bonus delegates to heavily Republican states and none of these five get Texas-sized bonuses. Here is a quick rundown.
Florida (99 delegates). This is the big fish with 99 delegates for whoever gets the most votes. Unlike the Democratic primary here, where a close second gets you almost half the delegates, a close second here gets you 0 delegates. This is the home state of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), so it ought to be a slam-dunk no-brainer for him. Trouble is, Donald Trump has led in every poll here for months. Not that it matters except for the amount of embarrassment it generates, but Trump could win by 20 points. In a way, maybe it does matter. Losing your home state by 20 points doesn't make you everybody's first choice for Veep. It is hard to imagine Rubio getting crushed here and still being in the race tomorrow evening. Bye, Marco. It was fun having you. Suggestion: Next time you run, try to figure out in advance why you are running and tell people about it. Hint: "I'm pretty and talk fast" isn't quite good enough.So the bottom line is watch Ohio and see who drops out in the next day or so. (V)
New PPP polls of Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri show Bernie Sanders catching up to Hillary Clinton in the first two states and passing her in the third one. All the results are within the margin of error, so all three could be close. Here are the results.
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A possible painful outcome for Sanders would be to win a majority of the states today but have Clinton run off with a majority of the delegates due to her expected blow-out wins in Florida and North Carolina. (V)
Here's an odd, but plausible theory: A Trump win in Ohio over Kasich could be the worst outcome for Trump. Why? Simply because if Trump wins Ohio and Florida, Kasich and Rubio will drop out, causing all the anti-Trump votes to go to the sole remaining contender, Ted Cruz. Trump's ceiling so far has been about 40% and if the other 60% all goes to Cruz, he could start winning lots of delegates. If Kasich wins Ohio, he will certainly stay in the race, expecting money to fall out of the sky into his outstretched hand. Trump might do better in a three-way race than in a two-way race. Unfortunately, we can't run the experiment with both outcomes to see which works better. (V)
One of the smartest things Hillary Clinton did this election cycle compared to 2008 was dump her pollster, Mark Penn, who basically cost her the nomination because he didn't understand the proportionality rules and thought she would clinch the nomination on Super Tuesday. She replaced him with Obama's pollster, Joel Benenson. Although many people in Clinton's campaign, especially her notoriously jelly-kneed donors, are scared of Donald Trump's winning angry blue-collar workers all over the rust belt and costing her the general election, Benenson is unfazed. He pointed out that if you look at the states the Democrats have won at least five times in the past six presidential elections, the Democrats have a base of 257 electoral votes. They need only 13 more. Virginia, Ohio, and Florida all have 13 or more. So do Colorado plus Nevada. Benenson doesn't think Trump can win any of the states in the 257 electoral-vote group. Furthermore, he thinks that North Carolina, which Obama won in 2008 and didn't compete for in 2012 would be winnable in 2016. While the media act like Trump has a real shot at the White House, remember that Obama's campaigns were the most numbers-driven campaigns in history and Benenson was the guy who produced all the numbers. (V)
Sasha Issenberg at Bloomberg News has a very interesting piece: on exactly how the machinations needed to deny the Republican nomination to Donald Trump may play out (and, indeed, are already playing out). Here's the executive summary:
March—The Search for Double Agents: The great majority of delegates to the RNC are required to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. But that only lasts for one to three ballots, then nearly all are free agents. There's nothing stopping the non-Trump forces from recruiting Trump delegates (many of whom may not actually be Trump supporters) to defect as soon as they are able. Indeed, Trump delegates who are not Trump supporters can help undermine him even before ballots are cast with their votes on procedural rulings and the like. Ted Cruz's organization is already hard at work on this angle.The bottom line is that the people who run political parties are professionals for a reason. Even if Donald Trump sweeps miniTuesday today, the pros still have many tools at their disposal, such that one should not assume that The Donald will be the nominee until he actually is the nominee.
The only thing the Party has to keep at the back of its collective mind is that unlike the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which had no power, no money, and no Twitter account, Donald Trump has all of those plus an ego the size of the Republican Party symbol. He might react poorly to having "his" nomination being taken away by Party hacks. (Z)
Politico also has a piece today on how the Republican Party might try to wrest the nomination from Donald Trump at the convention. It is all about the 112-member Rules Committee, which has one man and one woman (just like a Republican marriage) from each of the 56 states and territories in the RNC. By majority vote, the committee can do just about anything, including throwing out the chairman, House Speaker Paul Ryan. Tom Lundstrum, an Arkansas Republican who served on the 2012 committee said: It'll be a bloodbath.
The committee hasn't been chosen yet since its members must be delegates and half the country hasn't chosen its delegates yet. There will be hand-to-hand combat to get onto the Rules Committee. Once the committee has been chosen, it will only get worse. One anonymous source reported: There might be things like in a mad scientist's laboratory where you could screw with the rules for the convention. One cataclysmic rule change would be one that unbound all the delegates on the first ballot. It would cause an uproar but the Rules Committee has that power—although in a few cases a delegate who didn't vote as he or she was supposed to would be violating state law. Last week, RNC member Curly Haugland supported such a change under the slogan: "Every delegate is a Superdelegate." While this is far fetched, this year it doesn't take long for the impossible to become the inevitable. (V)
The Tampa Bay Times has a lengthy profile and takedown of Marco Rubio, just in time for the Florida primaries. In it, they throw everything but the kitchen sink at the Florida Senator.
One of the major themes of the profile is that Rubio is lazy, from his lackadaisical 2.1 high school GPA to his longstanding habit of not showing up for committee meetings, press conferences, and legislative sessions unless absolutely necessary. He's also portrayed as a backstabber whose opportunism rivals that of Ted Cruz. One early ally, Hialeah mayor Raúl Martinez, says that he "wouldn't support [Rubio] for dog catcher" now. Another, GOP official Tony DiMatteo, says he's supporting Donald Trump specifically to derail Rubio.
Undoubtedly, it's hard to be a career politician without making some enemies. But to make this many enemies, and have them be this vociferous, is not a good look, particularly on a day when you need every vote you can get. (Z)
At a Donald Trump rally in Fayetteville, NC, last week, an older white man punched a young black man who was in the process of being removed from the rally for protesting Trump. Now the sheriff of Cumberland County, where the incident happened, is investigating whether Trump incited a riot, which is a misdemeanor under North Carolina law. In previous rallies, Trump has suggested that supporters "knock the crap" out of disruptive protesters. The sheriff, "Moose" Butler, an elected Democrat, has not yet decided whether to press charges against Trump. If he does, it will certainly bring the violence at Trump's rallies onto the front pages for quite a while. On the other hand, Trump will dismiss the whole thing as a stunt by a partisan Democratic sheriff.
The possible misdemeanor charge by a Democratic sheriff aside, the Black Lives Matter protestors may be helping Trump. None of them are old enough to remember the 1968 Democratic National Convention, but a bit of reading might serve them well. Antiwar protesters swarmed Chicago during the convention and were beaten back by a violent police response. Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey denounced the police's "stormtrooper tactics" and many Democrats spoke of a "police riot." But Republican candidate Richard Nixon read the country better. He realized that a majority of the country supported Mayor Daley and the cops, so he campaigned on a "law and order" theme, a thinly veiled suggestion that blacks were causing all the crime and he would get tough with them. It worked and he won. Then, as now, a majority of the country supports the police, which are outranked in public confidence only by the military and small business. As a political strategy, disrupting Trump rallies is probably an extremely bad one. So far, it has happened on a small scale, but if starts to happen nationwide all the time, it could swing a lot of votes to Trump. (V)
Update: Sheriff Butler has decided not to charge Trump with inciting a riot.