The Morning After

Yes, yesterday was Super Tuesday. And yes, almost nothing had any meaning. Some did -- though for me, most of those were local races in California, and any close results won't be official for perhaps 30 days. (And yes, you read that right.) Because California is always, intentionally really, really slooooow.

And yes, the main races overwhelmingly were the Democratic and Republican presidential contests. And of course, those results were obvious and huge. No, Nikki Haley winning Vermont and picking up 17 delegates has no meaning. Right now, as I type this at 11 PM, Trump has 979 delegates, and Nikki Haley has 92. He needs 1,215 to win. He'll likely end up the night near 1,100 -- and she'll have close to 92. [UPDATE: on Wednesday morning, Trump has 1,057 delegates, and Nikki Haley 92.] And yet, the TV analysts are relentlessly talking about her chances to win the nomination.  

Nikki Haley has no chance to win the nomination. [UPDATE: on Wednesday morning, Haley suspended her campaign.] Trump will almost certainly win the nomination next week on March 12 when four states hold their primaries. He'll have over 1,215 delegates, and she can't win. Can't. The only way she can become the Republican nominee is if Trump drops out (he won't) or if somehow -- I don't know how -- he is pushed out. And even then, she'll still have to get 1,215 delegates, which will be really hard since Trump will have more than that. And other candidates, who only "suspended" their campaigns, will get back in the race. And if that somehow happens, the nominee will have a furious Trump burning the party down, crying the results are fixed (and this time, they would be!), and a lot of his most loyal supporters will refuse to vote.

And still, the analysts are breathlessly discussing her chances.

That said, there is something valuable to analyze about the Republican results, and that's the size of minority support for Haley, and how adamant it is against Trump. Right now, she appears to be getting around 25-35% percent of the Republican vote. Which is meaningful. But far more notable from that is a story about exit polls in Virginia and North Carolina showing 60-75% of Haley voters saying they would never vote for Trump. If this number across all swing states is only half that, it's a disaster for Republicans.

There were a few other results around the country that I was paying attention to. One of them, in North Carolina, I'll write about tomorrow. The short version is that the sitting Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, a maniacally, virulently racist neo-Nazi, won the GOP nomination for governor. He will be running against Democrat Josh Stein, the state's Attorney General.

Another race of interest to me was the Democratic primary in Texas for U.S. Senator, to find who will run against Ted Cruz. There were two very good candidates. Colin Allred is currently a member of Congress -- and a former NFL player, which is no small thing in football-crazy Texas. The other is Roland Gutierrez, a fiery state senator who represents the district where the town of Uvalde sits. A friend in Texas is a big Gutierrez supporter. I like them both a lot, but have long-admired Allred. In the end, Allred won fairly handily.

That leaves California. Even though official results won't be know for weeks, NBC has called the race for Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, who will run against each other in November. California has a weird "jungle" primary, where all candidates are grouped together, and the top two voter-getters get into the general election. The unfortunate thing is that two excellent Democratic members in the House of Representatives will be out of Congress, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee -- but the reality is that two of the three Democrats running in the primary would not win the general election and be out of Congress regardless of the "jungle" primary. (Schiff and Lee's districts are safe Democratic, so there will be no flipping there. Porter's district is deeply purple, and up in the air.) I do think that if President Biden wins re-election, there is a possibility for both Porter and Lee to have positions in the new Administration. As for the general election, there is basically no way for Republican Garvey to win, even if he wasn't totally inexperienced whose only credential is "former baseball star". California is a very blue state, and the three Democrats together totaled almost 60% of the primary vote.

Side Note: I wrote about the race and Katie Porter's relentless whining about Adam Schiff's strategy to edge her out in favor of the far-easier to beat Garvey. I was so glad to hear Lawrence O'Donnell and Claire McCaskill (who herself used a similar strategy to win re-election to the Senate) both defend Schiff's tactic as smart and good politics, and that the alternative (as I wrote, as well) would have been for him to run against Katie Porter and attack her.

There are several other California races I'm very interested in, but those are just me. So, it's getting late, and I'll leave it all at that.