Super Tuesday: Now things get interesting
How did we get here?
The deathless cliché of journalism holds that presidential campaigns are born in a lonely quest in the snows of New Hampshire, but it used to mean in the same year as the election. But the 2016 campaign began last March, when Sen. Ted Cruz entered the race. By June, when Donald Trump threw his hair into the ring, the field was almost complete. As Super Tuesday dawns, the nation can look back a year to a time when Trump’s candidacy barely rose to the level of a joke, and Sen. Bernie Sanders was almost unknown outside his home state of Vermont.
And tomorrow, after voting in 12 states, the race could look very different — or, quite possibly, the same, only more so. While only a handful of (mostly small) states have cast votes thus far, the field has been winnowed all along through the mechanisms of polling and fundraising. The last major candidate to enter the race, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, declared on July 21, and less than two months later, on Sept. 11, Texas Gov. Rick Perry became the first to drop out.
Slideshow: Voters cast their ballots on Super Tuesday >>>
But today, for the first time, ballots will be counted by the millions in the first megastate to vote (Texas); in a Midwestern state (Minnesota); in an urban Democratic state (Massachusetts) and across the mid-South and Deep South (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia).
The conventional wisdom is that Hillary Clinton will cement her big delegate lead over Sanders, which reflects her strength among appointed “superdelegates.” Sanders has held her much closer in votes cast by actual voters, but Clinton’s strength among African-Americans, heavily represented among Southern Democrats, should give her an edge today. Sanders’ home state of Vermont is voting, and he may do well also in Massachusetts and in Minnesota, with a shot at winning Colorado. But most observers expect today to mark the beginning of the end for his campaign, although he has the money, supporters and passion to stay in the race at least through the next few rounds of voting.
On the Republican side, the vote comes amid a chaotic descent into what in any other year would have been described as madness, with the leading candidates trading crude schoolyard insults; mugging, chortling and shouting over each other in debates, and one (you know who) blaming a faulty earpiece for his inability to renounce the support of a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. One can imagine the GOP’s power brokers, regardless of their actual preferences, secretly hoping all the candidates will lose, enabling the party to start over with someone new — or give Jeb Bush, who dropped out in February, a second chance. But the rules are that someone has to win. In polling, generally, Trump holds leads ranging from moderate to overwhelming in most states, with the notable exception of Cruz’s home state of Texas. To stay in the race, Cruz has to win there, at least, and Marco Rubio, who has made the most of any candidate in history out of second- and third-place finishes, has to show he can win somewhere. Trump just has to avoid any embarrassing losses; Kasich is mostly just trying to hang on until the electoral map becomes friendlier. His home state, Ohio — a must-win for him — votes on March 15, the same day as Florida, Rubio’s base, where Trump has held a big lead in polls. Ben Carson is now considered a nonfactor in the race after a string of distant finishes.
The parties don’t want their nominations locked up too quickly, so the states voting today will apportion their convention delegates by various formulas. But they also don’t want the process to go on forever, so beginning on March 15 most primaries will be winner-take-all. If the nominations aren’t well on their way to being settled by the end of the day today, they should be soon. In 2008, both Clinton and Barack Obama claimed victories after Super Tuesday voting, and the contest continued for months. Four years later, Mitt Romney pronounced himself the nominee after Super Tuesday, although his two leading opponents, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, hung on until mid-April and early May, respectively.
So the long road that began with one man’s — actually, nearly two dozen men’s and women’s — quest in the snows of New Hampshire, has brought us, at last, to this pivotal point in a contest for the most important job in the world. That’s how we got here.
Now, where do we go from here?
(Cover tile photo:Brian Snyder/Reuters)
