Trump Adds to Clinton’s Inevitability
Let’s do some quick political math.
Let’s do some quick political math. If Republican primary voters choose Donald Trump as their candidate — and they’re certainly headed that way — they will have essentially chosen Hillary Clinton to lead the country. Of all the candidates Republican and Democrat, Clinton had the best night of them all Super Tuesday. Clinton swept up Massachusetts and the Southern states (Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas) and shored up hundreds of delegates to rally for her at the Democrat National Convention. With her 1,001 Democrat delegates, she holds a comfortable lead on Bernie Sanders and his 371. Chances are rising that she really will become the inevitable Democrat nominee.
The question for Republicans becomes: Who can go head-to-head against Clinton and win? Forget the polls at this moment. Instead, look at the possible way the Electoral College will vote, as the Examiner’s Ryan Witt did in a recent analysis. Needing 270 Electoral College votes to win the presidency, Witt projected that Clinton would pick up 358, easily dominating Trump and his 180.
It comes down to which states are safe for each party to win. Clinton would easily win 217 delegates based on the states that voted for Barack Obama by more than 6% in the 2008 election. Meanwhile, Trump would win 164 delegates in states that supported Mitt Romney by at least 10% in the 2012 election, according to Witt. Most of the remaining swing states lean Democrat and contain high Latino and black demographics — which are fleeing Trump and falling behind Clinton. Of course, the head-to-head race is months away, and this projection is like all the others, a projection. But if voters are given the choice between two big-government New Yorkers who have track records of not telling the truth, most of them will probably cast ballots for the woman who told supporters at a Super Tuesday rally in Miami (a swing state city), “Instead of building walls, we’re going to break down barriers and build ladders of opportunity and empowerment.”