Thank God Donald Trump had the presence of mind to drag Chris Christie up on stage at his victory rally last night, because if not we would have had literally nothing to laugh about through all our tears today.
Yesterday went pretty much as expected — significant gains for Hillary, Bernie still behind where he needs to be to win, and lots of delegates and attention devoted to Trump. I did notice one unexpected trend last night on Twitter, and this is based on pure anecdata so it may not mean anything: A lot of people seemed to be noticing for the first time that Trump is an actual threat.
It’s nice of them to have woken up about that, but I don’t know if it’ll actually help at this point.
How on Earth is Trump even still a thing? There’s a good explanation in Salon right now that basically boils down to: the Republicans have been playing voters for rubes for years, and now the rubes are figuring it out. The GOP basically exists to protect rich people (unlike the Democratic party, which exists to protect rich people AND gay marriage) and Donald Trump just happens to have done the best job of convincing Republican voters that he exists outside of that corrupt system.
That seems like as good a theory as any.
It’s possible it’ll be Cruz or Rubio, but they have to hope for a literal miracle at this point. And miracles have been known to happen! There’s a lot more momentum now behind the groups that exist exclusively to stop Trump, such as the Our Principles PAC.
Jeb! staffer Tim Miller is one of the people heading that up, and he seems optimistic about stopping Trump: “Hillary Clinton will destroy him even if she’s campaigning from jail,” he said. They’ll be running ads in primary states over the next few weeks, so those should be fun to see.
Bernie — remember him? — says he’s staying in the race all the way to the convention in July, so hang on for that bumpy ride. His campaign’s been tinkering with a technique they’re calling Facebanking, which sounds like a term a mass murderer came up with but just refers to nudging your Facebook friends to vote for Bernie. Getting vote reminders on Facebook is annoying, but at least it doesn’t involve cutting off anyone’s actual face. (YET.)
The data doesn’t show much of a path to victory for Bernie, since he tends to do poorly with the demographics that dominate a lot of the upcoming states. (So far he’s only won if there are a lot of white voters in a state.)
So maybe it’s time for Bernie to redefine victory: If he’s sticking around just to push Hillary to the left, well okay that’s reasonable. But in a general election, I’m not sure a leftier Hillary is going to play well against candidate Trump.
The next major milestone is March 15, with a bunch of additional states voting. Don’t expect any surprises there — it’ll almost definitely just repeat what we saw yesterday. At this point, the nominations are pretty much on autopilot.
