For a guy who can’t win, Bernie Sanders is certainly defeating Hillary Clinton a whole lot. And for a guy who supposedly can’t be outrun in the race to acquire 1,237 delegates to win the Republican nomination before the July convention, Donald Trump sure is feeling the surprisingly nimble Ted Cruz coming up on the post.
What Wisconsin’s stunning primaries Tuesday night revealed is that the two parties have two very damaged front-runners — and two very nimble also-rans.
Sanders’ triumph in Wisconsin is his sixth victory in the last seven primaries and caucuses — and it changes the preferred mainstream-Democratic storyline about the central weakness of his candidacy.
Sanders won a significant victory in a primary state, which muddies the argument that he wins only in caucuses dominated by white leftist kids.
Moreover, his win follows victories in five caucuses by almost unthinkably large margins, considering Clinton’s front-runner status — 40 points in Hawaii, 45 points in Washington, 57 points in Idaho, 59 points in Utah and 63 points in Alaska.
To date, Sanders has won 16 contests to Hillary’s 20. He’s in contention in the next primary here in New York. This should be considered a barn-burner of a race.
But in the end, what matters is the delegate count, and in this regard, Clinton does seem to have it sewn up — unless she melts down over the next two months.
She probably isn’t doing that, but this string of defeats is no indication of a candidate’s strength. It’s self-evident she shouldn’t be losing this way and this late. She is the least dominant likely nominee in her or any party’s history.
Meanwhile, Ted Cruz just walloped Donald Trump, and the exit polls suggest he did so in exactly the way he needed to win — by broadening his usual support from evangelical and “very conservative” voters to the “somewhat conservative” voters who actually make up the plurality of the Republican Party’s primary electorate.
If he can continue to do that, and maybe become so clearly the Trump alternative that moderate and liberal Republicans swallow their distaste for him in their greater loathing for the front-runner, he will alter the dynamic of the race. He will slow Trump’s march to a crawl and will go toward an open convention having staged a late surge. He will have the winner’s gleam in this scenario, while Trump will look scuffed-up.
When the race for Wisconsin began in earnest two weeks ago, Trump was polling in the low 30s. And that’s where he has ended up. That means the real story of Wisconsin is not Trump’s tiresome gaffe streak but Cruz’s merger of his own base vote with the not-Trump vote.
New York’s Republican voters will now tell the tale on April 19, and bear the responsibility. Polling shows Trump with a 20-point lead, but the Cruz landslide was so convincing, it will surely have some effect on voters who haven’t had a significant role to play in either party’s nominating process for 24 years.
Conventional wisdom is already blaming Trump’s gaffes — on abortion, women and foreign policy — plus his campaign manager’s arrest for his terrible showing in Wisconsin. But the truth is Trump behaved and spoke badly earlier as well.
The difference was that with four or five people in the race, he could win despite his gaffes with vote totals in the mid-30s. Indeed, only in seven of his 20 states has Trump secured 40 percent of the vote or more.
Cruz has now won nine states — and all of them with more than 40 percent of the vote.
This suggests, oddly enough, that even though Cruz has received fewer votes and has many fewer delegates than Trump, he doesn’t have the Trump ceiling.
Indeed, after Wisconsin, as after every one of the 10 GOP primary or caucus nights this year, the aggregate Republican vote for Donald Trump will be around 37 percent.
This means that yes, Hillary is a historically weak front-runner, but so is Trump.