Columnist.
Perhaps the most important results of the March 22 Republican primary in Arizona and caucus in Utah were numbers that didn't appear on your television screen, no matter how late you stayed up for the poll closing times. Those were the numbers of votes cast for Marco Rubio in Arizona — 70,587 of them at this writing.
Many Donald Trump supporters think he is a slam dunk to beat Hillary Clinton in the general election. The candidate himself certainly takes this view. But Trump's analysis of current public polls is preposterous. In the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent polls, Trump trails Clinton by 6 points, 47 to 41 percent. Ted Cruz, in contrast, leads Clinton 46 to 45 percent. Ex-candidate Marco Rubio and splinter candidate John Kasich have been running even better. All at least equal the 46 percent that is the lowest percentage won by either party's nominee this century. Against each of them Clinton falls short of that.
Can Donald Trump be stopped from winning the Republican nomination? The answer is yes. Despite his big win over Marco Rubio in Florida and his narrow wins over Ted Cruz in Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina, he has not won a majority of delegates yet awarded — 661 at this writing, with several more to be added when Missouri and Illinois congressional district totals are tabulated. Any candidate needs to get a 1,237-delegate majority to be nominated. To get there, Trump needs to get a majority of delegates in the contests ahead. The March 15 results show how that could happen. For Republican voters who fear Trump's nomination will damage the party, the nation or both, the question is what to do about it.
The likely presidential nominee of the Republican Party and the certain (barring indictments) nominee of the Democratic Party have something in common, something more than residences in New York: campaign appeals based on nostalgia. Consider Donald Trump's official campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again." His reference point is not the Founding Fathers, whom Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz frequently invoke. It's also not the New Deal, the civil rights revolution or post-World War II European socialism, which Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders sometimes celebrate. No, Trump is invoking Ronald Reagan and the America of a generation or so ago.
Bad news for both parties in the primaries and caucuses in the seven days in March following Super Tuesday. Start with the higher-ratings, higher-turnout Republican race. Donald Trump won two solid victories in Michigan and Mississippi Tuesday, after weak showings in the five contests over the weekend. From March 2 to March 8 he netted 124 delegates, to 125 for Ted Cruz, 41 for Marco Rubio and 27 for John Kasich.
The Republican race for president last week converged, suddenly and briefly, in Detroit. In the Fox Theatre, one of the nation's great 1920s movie palaces, the four remaining presidential candidates fought it out in the Fox News debate. Earlier that day, Mitt Romney, who grew up in Detroit and suburban Bloomfield Hills when the Motor City was thriving, urged Republicans not to let Donald Trump win the party's nomination. John McCain joined in with words of support, and the views of the George Bushes can be taken for granted. All this is a reversal of the usual pattern when the front-runner in the first dozen contests attracts widespread support. But such candidates have also been widely acceptable to a majority of primary voters and caucusgoers. Exit polls establish that Trump isn't.
The Republican race goes on after Super Tuesday. In ordinary years, Donald Trump's wins in seven of the 11 Super Tuesday contests after three out of four wins in February, together with his delegate lead, would make him the nominee. Politicians would hurry to back the apparent winner. But, thanks to Trump, this is not an ordinary year, and his extraordinary campaign seems to leave many Republican politicians and voters not eager to join his campaign but desperate to stop it.
In last Thursday's slam-bang Republican debate everyone saw Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz do a fine job of demonstrating Donald Trump's ignorance and inconsistencies. But many may not have noticed Cruz's citation of a Feb. 9 Wall Street Journal article that casts light on the immigration issue — and suggests strongly that Cruz's and Rubio's serious immigration policies could prove more effective than Trump's bombast about building a wall and getting Mexico to pay for it.
In 2008, Barack Obama's great victories in February primaries — Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia and Wisconsin — gave him an unstoppable delegate lead for the Democratic nomination. In 2012, Mitt Romney's wins in Florida (technically on Jan. 31) and Michigan sent him on his way to the Republican nomination. This year, with the foreshortened schedule, there are a couple of February contests to go. But the Feb. 20 Republican primary in South Carolina and the Democratic caucuses in Nevada make it plain what this cycle will look like, even if it's not entirely clear who the winners will be. Let's start with the Democrats. Hillary Clinton prevailed over Bernie Sanders, 53 percent to 47 percent, in Nevada. This was identical to her percent share of the vote there against Obama in 2008.
With the likelihood that the Supreme Court vacancy will not be filled this year, voters' minds are going to turn to questions of electability, writes my Washington Examiner colleague David Drucker. The November elections will arguably determine which side will control all three branches of the federal government, and many of America's strongly partisan voters may put aside qualms about one candidate or another to increase the chances their side wins.
The CBS presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina, started off with a moment of silence in memory of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death was announced earlier in the day. And the debate that followed was a sort of tribute to the late jurist. Not that Scalia was much talked about. Every candidate agreed that the Senate should not confirm an Obama nominee, and all but John Kasich promised to appoint a conservative originalist. But the back-and-forth had a certain resemblance to Supreme Court arguments in which Scalia typically peppered lawyers with sharp questions from the get-go.
New Hampshire voters issued a rebuke to conventional party leaders when they voted by large margins for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in Tuesday's primaries. But Sanders is not going to win the Democratic nomination, and it's by no means certain Trump will be the Republican nominee. The results show that Hillary Clinton has a clear but clunky path to the nomination but is a problematic general election candidate. They show that the Republicans have a potential advantage in November but first must get through a problematic nomination process. Consider turnout, which is the one thing pollsters have trouble forecasting. As in Iowa, more people in New Hampshire voted in the Republican contest than the Democratic. That's the opposite of 2008, the last time both parties had contests. Both these target states seem to tilt Republican this time.
Benning Wentworth is not a name you'll run across in New Hampshire primary coverage. But he arguably did as much as anyone else to establish the political culture — or cultures — of America's first-in-the-nation primary state. Wentworth was governor of New Hampshire from 1741 to 1766, the longest-serving colonial governor, and with his father he successfully lobbied to make New Hampshire, surrounded by Massachusetts and its Maine territory, a separate colony. This insulated New Hampshire's religiously diverse seacoast and backwoods from Massachusetts' Puritan busybodies — and from its customs and tax collectors.
Now that the results of last Monday's Iowa caucuses are in, speculation naturally turns to next Tuesday's New Hampshire primary. Will Donald Trump fail once again to receive the percentage he's getting in polls? Will Marco Rubio build on his close third-place Iowa finish to overshadow rivals Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Chris Christie, who have been rivaling him in New Hampshire polls? In a state where evangelical Protestants make up only 22 percent of primary voters, will Cruz fail to replicate what he got in Iowa (where 64 percent of GOP primary voters identify as evangelical Protestants)? Will Hillary Clinton lose as badly to Bernie Sanders as current polling indicates?
Donald Trump was absent from Fox News' Republican debate Thursday night, presiding at his own event seven minutes' drive away featuring cameo appearances by the two previous Iowa Republican caucus winners exiled now to the undercard debate, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. But the issue Trump raised to high-decibel level at his announcement last June was front and center at the main event: immigration. It was raised midway through the debate by the moderator Trump cited as the reason for his non-participation, Megyn Kelly. She ran videotape montages of previous comments on the issue by Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and asked them to explain the discrepancies between what they said then and their positions now. She could have played a similar montage for Trump if he had shown up.
From someone whose title is senior political analyst you might be expecting a forecast of who will win the Iowa caucuses next Monday night. Will Donald Trump voters turn out in enough numbers to give him the narrow win over Ted Cruz that polls indicate he has now? Will Hillary Clinton withstand the challenge and excitement generated by Bernie Sanders? But the answers to these questions are, in historical perspective, trivial. By Tuesday noon anyone interested will know the answers, and it will be time to forecast the results of the New Hampshire primary seven days later. So instead let's focus on a topic that candidates of either party haven't talked much about. How do they propose to get the current sluggish American economy to generate more jobs? And what will that mean for voters?
How stupid and vicious do they think we are? That's a question that I think explains a lot of things about politics and society today — and about this year's unpredicted presidential race. The "us" in that question are ordinary citizens and the "they" are political and media elites who hold them in contempt — which they do over and over again by trying to obfuscate and cover up the source and motives of terrorist attacks. Barack Obama, who refuses to use phrases akin to "Islamist terrorism" is a prime, but far from the only, offender. His predecessor, George W. Bush, after the attacks of Sept. 11 made a point of visiting mosques and calling Islam a religion of peace.
The economy has been staggering, with stagnant or no growth, for several years, after a financial crisis. Loud complaints have been raised against Wall Street financiers and the concentration of great wealth in few hands. Rapid technological development is generating massive economic change, with many old-line jobs vanishing. Majorities disapprove of the Democratic president, as they had of his Republican predecessor. All this is happening after a protracted period of partisan polarization and political deadlock between roughly equal-sized Democratic and Republican parties. The polarization is all the more bitter because it is based on vastly different outlooks on cultural issues.
The race for president is accelerating in high gear, or, rather, the *races* for president — in the Republican and Democratic parties, in the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary and primaries and caucuses to come. How's it going? Let's look at these separate races. The Iowa Republican caucuses: The polls show a two-way race here between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, with little room for an outsider to crash through to victory as Mike Huckabee did in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012. Each of the poll leaders has recently lobbed a cheap-shot attack on the other, and each slapped the other down in last week's Fox Business debate.
