Chris Cillizza
The biggest day -- and night -- of the 2016 presidential primary season is
(mostly) in the books. Voters in 11 states, from Texas to Vermont, cast ballotswith hundreds of delegates at stake on both sides. I
watched, tweeted and jotted down some of the best and worst of
the night that was. My picks are below.
Winners
* Hillary Clinton: It's (close to) all over. The former
secretary of state won convincingly in all of the big states on Super
Tuesday — relegating Bernie Sanders to a handful of wins in states that
award relatively few Democratic delegates (Vermont, Oklahoma). Clinton's margins
matter too; she won by wide spreads in the biggest delegate-awarding states
such as Georgia, Tennessee and Texas. Like in South Carolina, Clinton
dominated — and that may not even be a strong enough word — among black voters.
In Georgia and Virginia, for example, Clinton won more than 80 percent of the
black vote. And, it's not just tonight that looks good for Clinton. It's hard
to see where Sanders wins a bundle of states in a row somewhere later this
month or next month (or the month after that.) Clinton has a death grip
on the Democratic nomination. The only question is how and when she and her
team negotiate a peace with Sanders. And she knows it. Her victory speech
Tuesday night in Florida was aimed directly at Trump — talking about why
America is and always has been great and why we need to break down, not
build up, walls. Expect lots more of that.
* Donald Trump: What Super Tuesday proved is that, barring some sort of
cataclysmic event, the real estate billionaire will end the primary process with
the most delegates of any candidate in the field. The only question that
remains is whether he can get more than the 1,237 delegates he needs to
cinch the GOP nomination. The breadth of Trump's wins — he won seven states,
including Massachusetts, Georgia, Virginia andAlabama — make it hard to cast
him as a candidate limited by either geography or ideology. No Republican nominee has won the
panoply of states that Trump has. Yes, Trump would have liked to win Texas to
close out Cruz and probably Oklahoma (which Cruz also won), too. But wins in
seven out of 11 voting states — Trump's haul for Super
Tuesday — is pretty good. The two most probable paths for the race at this
point are 1) A Trump delegate win or 2) A near-Trump win with the possibility
of an open convention where the party establishment tries to take it from him. I like Trump's odds.
* Ted Cruz: Combine the wins in Alaska, Texas and Oklahoma for
the senator from Texas with Rubio's inability to bring home a victory in
Virginia — and suddenly Cruz looks like the favorite to be the alternative
to Trump. That is, without question, the best-case scenario coming out of
Super Tuesday for Cruz given that a loss in Texas would have effectively ended
his campaign.
Plus, the votes between Tuesday and the March 15 primaries —
Louisiana, Kansas, etc. — look like potential Cruz wins. Major problems exist
for Cruz —most notably that he isn't dominating among evangelicals or in the South as he should, and that the D.C.
establishment loathes him so much it's hard to see them uniting behind him to
stop Trump. Still, all in all, a good night for Cruz -- and one that keeps him
in the race and viable for at least two more weeks. "Our campaign is the
only campaign that has beaten and can beat Donald Trump," Cruz said
Tuesday night. Hard to argue with that.
* Liberals: For years, "liberal" was a bad word. No
longer. A majority of Democrats in every state that voted on Super Tuesday
called themselves "liberals." Sanders may have lost on Tuesday night,
but the re-claiming of the word "liberal" for Democrats is a
testament to his influence on this race.
* Political junkies: The best (only?) hope of Republicans who
want to stop Trump is to keep him under the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch
the GOP nomination. That means an open convention — a fantasy that most
political junkies thought would never come to pass — might well come to
pass.
Losers
* Marco Rubio: If you want to be the Republican nominee,
you have to win things. Yes, that's an obvious point. Rubio's only Super
Tuesday win was in Minnesota — meaning that he was 1-for-15 in the states
that have voted in the Republican presidential primary process. You can try to
spin that if you are for Rubio, but the numbers are the numbers. It's very hard
to make the case to the candidates not named Marco Rubio that they need to
clear the field for him so that he can take on Trump, given what happened on
Tuesday night. And that's not just because of Trump's wins and Rubio's losses.
It's because Cruz won three states as well. Sure, it was
his home state of Texas and nearby Oklahoma as well as Alaska, but wins are
wins.
For those pointing to Florida on March 15 as a state where a Rubio
comeback can begin, I would note that the most recent polling in the state showed Trump ahead of
the state's junior senator by double digits. It's hard to
see how those numbers move in Rubio's direction after a night like this one,
although Rubio did promise that "two weeks from tonight, right here in Florida, we
are going to send a message loud and clear. We are going to send a message that
the party of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidency of the United States will
never be held by a con artist." Uh, okay.
* Bernie Sanders:
Tuesday's results showed that Sanders simply didn't do enough to disrupt the
race in the first four states. Clinton built momentum in Nevada, added to it
Saturday night in South Carolina and watched as it crested on Super Tuesday. It
was telling that Sanders gave his victory speech at 7:30 p.m. Eastern
before the vast majority of states voting on Super Tuesday had been called.
It was also telling that nowhere
in the speech did Sanders suggest where his campaign goes from here.
Sanders can
and probably will remain in the race for the foreseeable future because he
still has a rabid following and plenty of money. But nothing that happened on
Tuesday night alters the narrative of the Democratic race — that Clinton
is on a steady march to the nomination.
* Republican establishment: What happened Tuesday
night looks like a worst-case scenario for the GOP establishment. Why? Because
Trump kept up the pace he needs to come close or go over the delegates he needs
to be the nominee. And Cruz emerged as the most probable Trump
alternative. That is a rock and a hard place choice for establishment
Republicans who fear Trump and hate Cruz. And it may be the only choice they
have left.
* Chris Christie:
The New Jersey governor, who stunned the political world by endorsing Trump, is
-- not surprisingly -- a terrible second fiddle. He looked awkward and
uncomfortable standing rigidly behind Trump after introducing the real estate
mogul in Florida.
* Fairfax County: This is the county where the Fix family resides. It's a
highly educated and affluent county. And yet, it was one of the
slowest-reporting counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Come on, man. What are we even
doing out here, man?
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