Columnist.
Let's look back on the primary campaign — completed for Republicans, still ongoing for Democrats — and see if we can identify what Sherlock Holmes referred to as dogs that didn't bark. For what's unusual about this campaign is not only that unexpected things happened — improbable candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders getting more than 40 percent of their parties' popular votes — but that things everyone has come to expect did not.
Nearly a century ago, in 1920, the Census Bureau caused a ruckus when it announced that, for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in cities — even though its definition of a city included every hamlet with a population of 2,500 and above. Today a majority of Americans live in what are by any reasonable definition very large cities, metropolitan areas with populations above 1 million. But the urban planning profession remains fixated on just one small portion of these metropolises, the central city downtowns, though none outside New York contains more than 10 percent of metropolitan area jobs.
It was conventional wisdom among the political cognoscenti during most of the primary season that Donald Trump could not win the general election. The evidence seemed strong. Over 12 months of polling from May 2015 to April 2016, Hillary Clinton ran ahead of Trump in 63 national polls, while Trump led her in only six and tied her in three. Polls in the dozen or so 2012 target states showed similar results.
Women, lamented Hillary Clinton in an April 2014 tweet, make just 77 cents on the dollar to men. As a presidential candidate she has repeated that lament again and again, updating the numbers, in line with government statistics, to 78 cents in July 2015 and 79 cents this year.
University of Missouri at St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld has had "second thoughts." Like many academic criminologists, he had pooh-poohed charges that skyrocketing murder rates in many cities in 2015 and 2016 result from a "Ferguson effect" — a skittering back from proactive policing for fear of accusations of racism like those that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.
What's your benchmark? What is the historical era with which you compare life in contemporary America? For many astute commentators on various points of the political spectrum, it is postwar America, the two decades after the United States and its allies won World War II and before Lyndon Johnson sent half a million U.S. troops to Vietnam.
An irresistible force meets an immoveable object. The irresistible force is the sense of discontent with how things have been going during this young century. Americans are displeased with a sluggish economy that fell into a deep recession and with foreign policies that seem to have produced disappointing results. The immoveable object is the strong partisan polarization of American voters, who have been casting almost equal percentages of their votes for each political party in presidential and congressional elections for two decades now, except for a surge against Republicans in 2006 and 2008.
John Quincy Adams, our greatest secretary of state (sorry, Hillary Clinton fans), thought that Cuba would inevitably become part of the United States. It hasn't, at least not yet, but two Cuban-Americans were serious presidential contenders this year. Yes, neither Marco Rubio nor Ted Cruz won the Republican nomination, instead suspending their campaigns the nights they lost the Florida and Indiana primaries, respectively. But they did become Donald Trump's most serious competition. And if you imagine that a few things had happened a bit differently, you might plausibly believe that one of them would now be mulling his VP pick and preparing an acceptance speech for Cleveland.
So Republicans now have a presumptive nominee — one headed to a clear delegate majority without visible opposition — sooner than the Democrats. It's another way in which this year's presidential race has defied expectations and ignored precedent. Donald Trump will now have 10 months to stage-manage his Cleveland convention, while Hillary Clinton must spend the next four weeks going through the motions of campaigning against Bernie Sanders in 10 primaries and the North Dakota caucus.
The unexpected successes, forecast by almost no one 12 months ago, of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in winning 40 percent and 42 percent in Republican and Democratic primaries and caucuses is widely taken as evidence of raging discontent among American voters. There's something to that. But Trump's better-than-even chance of winning the Republican nomination and Sanders' success in pushing Hillary Clinton to the left owe something to another factor: Each party's nominating process has proven better suited this year to the other party. Over the 44 years since primaries started dominating the nominating process, both parties have adopted rules that suited their separate and different historical characters. They have often served their intended purposes. But not this year.
Donald Trump has declared himself, after following up his New York win April 19 with victories in five other Northeastern states Tuesday, the "presumptive nominee" of the Republican Party. Is it a done deal? Not quite. Trump's 40 percent of total primary votes so far have yielded him 48 percent of pledged delegates — not exactly the unfair system he's been decrying. He must win about 56 percent of those yet to be chosen to get to the 1,237 majority necessary for the nomination.
Ethnicity still matters. That's one lesson I draw from the results so far of this year's Republican and Democratic primaries and caucuses. We're encouraged to believe ethnicity doesn't matter much anymore; only race does. This is the implicit assumption behind the analyses that divide the electorate into four racial categories: whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians.
Home-state candidates notched up impressive victories in New York's presidential primaries Tuesday. Donald Trump topped 50 percent for the first time — and handsomely, with 60 percent of Republican votes. And Hillary Clinton won 58 percent of Democratic votes in her adopted home state.
*Noo Yawk.* That's the state with this week's presidential primary, in which candidates who have spent time in New York recently are currently running ahead, according to polls. Hillary Clinton, who as a resident of Chappaqua in suburban Westchester County was elected the state's junior senator in 2000 and 2006, leads Bernie Sanders, who left his native Brooklyn for Vermont in 1968, 48 years ago. And on the Republican side, Donald Trump, who grew up in Jamaica Estates, Queens, and lives in a pseudonymous Manhattan skyscraper, has a "yuge" lead over John Kasich, native of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, and Ted Cruz, who grew up and lives in Houston.
"Gestapo tactics." That's how Donald Trump's recently installed campaign manager, Paul Manafort, characterized the Ted Cruz campaign's successful effort to win all 34 of Colorado's pledged national convention delegates at the long-scheduled Republican congressional district and state conventions. "Today winning votes doesn't mean anything," Trump complained. "It's a corrupt deal going on in this country and it's not fair to you people."
If you live any distance beyond the Capital Beltway you probably didn't notice, but an important part of government in Washington shut down on Wednesday, March 16. That's when the Metro subway system's recently installed general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, ordered a one-day shutdown of the entire 117-mile system for emergency inspection of track-based power cables. The result was not quite as dire as many feared. Some Metro commuters took a day off; others climbed into buses or cars early to weather expected traffic jams. The federal government and the city's lawyers and lobbyists continued to function.
"Donald J. Trump withstood the onslaught of the establishment yet again." That's the first sentence in a Trump campaign statement tweeted out Tuesday night by the Washington Post's Robert Costa. It's also a strange way to respond to a solid defeat, reminiscent of the Monty Python knight who insists he is winning after both his arms are hacked off. Ted Cruz — "Lyin' Ted" to the Trump campaign — won 48 percent of the votes in Wisconsin's Republican primary. Trump won 35 percent. John Kasich got only 14 percent. The delegate count was even more one-sided. Cruz won 36 delegates. Trump won six. Kasich won none.
What you hear when you listen to many fervent supporters of Donald Trump is that they are victims — victims of globalization and trade agreements that have sent their jobs to Mexico or China. Victims of competition from illegal immigrants from Mexico willing to work for starvation wages. Victims of a Republican establishment that promised to get rid of lots of things they don't like and then failed to deliver. Their complaints, in some cases, have some validity, but not always and not a lot. Economist Gordon Hanson writes that without the ability to move lower-wage jobs to Mexico after NAFTA was ratified in 1993, "there might not be much left of Detroit at all." Which is to say, the U.S. wouldn't have the 800,000 relatively high-wage auto-sector jobs it has today.
On June 23, when Donald Trump will or will not have won the 1,237 delegates he needs to be nominated, voters in Britain will decide an issue as divisive as Trump's candidacy: whether the United Kingdom will remain in or leave the European Union. It's not a decision that has attracted much attention in the United States. The Obama administration has weighed in, urging Britons to vote to remain. That's the same approach taken by every American administration for 60 years. The default assumption is that we have done pretty well over the last 240 years with a Union of disparate states, so we should encourage Europeans to form one of their own.
How can one make sense of the electoral divisions in this year's Republican primaries and caucuses? The contours of Donald Trump's support and opposition don't fall on traditional lines. There's not a regional division, for example. Trump's best states have been Massachusetts, Mississippi and Arizona. We're not seeing the divide between evangelical Christians and others apparent in the 2008 race between Mike Huckabee and John McCain. We're not seeing the suburbs/countryside division of 2012, when in crucial primaries Mitt Romney carried million-plus metro areas and Rick Santorum carried almost all other counties. Trump carried metro Detroit and Chicago — Romney country last time — but lost to Ted Cruz in Raleigh-Durham and Kansas City.
