Primary #HotTakes, Part Deux

With Michigan official, I wanted to elaborate on a point (I think) Paul was making below. Clinton supporters will have an obvious response to tonight’s results: as their candidate learned the hard way in 2008 it’s about delegates, not states won, and on terms of the raw delegate math Clinton went further ahead with another night shaved off the calendar. This is true as far as it goes, but it’s more complicated than that. Obviously, Clinton remains a large favorite, and if the shape of the race isn’t transformed will win the nomination. But. Tonight’s win for Sanders has real, and not merely symbolic, significance. Beating the polls by 20 points isn’t just an ordinary event that can be easily dismissed. And as Paul said, the exit polls suggest that he did it by doing much better among African-American voters than he has in the South. We can’t simply assume that the shape of the race will remain stable.

Perhaps this is something unique to Michigan and will prove ephemeral, Clinton wins Ohio, and this will seem in retrospect like an aberration. But I think it’s also possible that Sanders could overperform in other upcoming states and make this interesting. Given how badly the polls were wrong tonight, and given that Sanders has already far overperformed any reasonable expectation, wait and see seems like the appropriate reaction.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, I can’t resist kicking some more dirt on Little Marco:

As of this writing, Little Marco is getting 9% of the vote in Michigan and 5% in Mississippi. He not only finished 15 points behind Kasich in the former but 3 points in the latter. He did a touch better in Idaho but that still means zero delegates on the mainland. I haven’t been kind to his campaign but this really is astonishingly terrible. Kasich at least will lose with some dignity; Rubio went down trying to out-asshole Trump. (Say this for Christie: at least he could pull of the murder part of the murder/suicide strategy.) He would have to overperform the polls like Sanders even to salvage his home state, and not only is he no Sanders I’m not sure he’s even Fred Thompson.

Trump may or may not win an absolute majority of delegates, but after tonight it’s pretty clear that Trump and Cruz will collectively dominate the delegate count, and producing a non-Trump or Cruz nominee would be an extraordinarily messy process, producing a nominee who would almost certainly be weaker than either a Trump or Cruz who won fair and square would be. And there’s every reason to believe that a Trump or Cruz who won fair and square would be a pretty terrible candidate. A good night for progressive politics all around, then.