So what’s up with the Sanders-Clinton fight in Indiana? The first round of exits – notoriously wrong – showed Sanders with a 12 point margin. But the initial results pointed to a solid Clinton win. Since then Sanders is doing pretty well in some key areas. He’s keeping it very close in Marion County (Indianapolis) where Clinton should run up pretty solid numbers. And statewide, with about 20% of precincts reporting it’s the thinnest possible lead for Sanders.
Right now, a pretty reasonable projection of the coming primaries gets Donald Trump really, really close to 1237 delegates. But I think that understates what’s going to happen. New York State did part of it. But the five states last week simply took the wind out of the anti-Trump forces. Once it’s obvious it’s over it’s really hard to keep people motivated to keep fighting. People also want to back a winner. Eventually the desire to back a winner begins to overcome that will to fight.
That’s what Indiana is showing us. This was a tailor-made state for Ted Cruz. But he got crushed. Some of that is because everyone hates Ted Cruz. The bigger factor is that people are simply done. Trump’s the nominee. They’re tired of dragging it out. Expect that trend to build in the final states. They’ll all be blow outs.
Trump is all about ‘dominance politics’. When he knocks out a once-star opponent it really shows. As he did with Rubio, Trump’s not just defeating Cruz. He drove him to an epic level of meltdown that it will be hard to forget, long after this nomination battle is over. Not unlike Rubio’s end of campaign dignity implosion, Cruz ended this week on a hapless splutter and now a crushing defeat.
The first round of exit polls tonight showed Bernie Sanders with a 12 point lead over Hillary Clinton. But I need to remind myself: Early exit polls tend to be wildly wrong. And the early results looks much better for Clinton. See the live results here.
So just how close is Donald Trump to the National Enquirer? Katherine Krueger takes a look.
Interesting mix of history, irony and the politics of purity in TPM Reader FH’s take …
After many years of listening in on the lively exchange between fellow (passionate) TPM readers, this is my first time writing in. I was a strong Obama supporter in ’08 and decided early on that I would vote for Hillary this time around.
What it really means to be #NeverTrump.
Longtime McCain staffer, advisor and alter-ego Mark Salter comes out for Hillary Clinton.
TPM Reader SB is pretty down on both of them …
The thing that stings me most about the primary is that Hillary Clinton is not a very good candidate. She plays well in the controlled atmosphere of a debate, yes, but so did Martha Coakley. I feel very strongly that she’s going to lose the general and, despite all evidence being that sanders supporters will fall in line, the left will be blamed for her total inability to run a competent campaign.
TPM Reader KL seems to be jumping off the train …
I contributed to Bernie’s campaign and voted for him in the New York primary, yet I am baffled by his current argument, which seems to be:
Over the years I’ve written a number of posts about the Crime Wave of the Late 20th Century, its causes, political repercussions and the long shadow it still casts over our society. What drove the rise of crime starting in the mid-1960s and its precipitous fall from the early-mid-1990s is no mere matter of historical interest. Today we talk a lot about mass incarceration, the militarization of policing and various other excesses of policing and corrections. But our ability to do so, to have any political shot at change is heavily, heavily tied to the drop of crime over the last 25 years. If crime shoots back up again, we’re back to the political environment of the 70s and 80s that created mass incarceration and all the rest. But we can’t have any confidence that it won’t shoot up again if we don’t have a clear idea why it dropped in the first place or, for that matter, why it started spiking thirty years earlier.
In the last few years I’ve been increasingly convinced that environmental lead poisoning played at least a significant role in the story. Now there’s new evidence strengthening the ‘lead as driver of crime’ thesis.