Right About Trump, Wrong About Bernie

Honestly, I ought to know better than to try to predict what any Democrat/Socialist/Commie candidate like Bernie Sanders will do.  Monday, I predicted he would probably abandon the race after a loss to Hillary Clinton in California ensured he has no means of actually becoming the Democratic Party's presidential nominee.

Obviously, he didn't do that, although we did see a report this morning that he's jettisoned about 75% of his campaign staff and is beginning to wind things down.  I made the terrible mistake of assuming the man might show a little class in defeat, forgetting that he's a commie, and thus has no class at all.

Ah, well, live and learn.

On the other side of the ledger, Donald Trump firmly and irrevocably clinched the GOP nomination, for better or worse, running his total of committed delegates up over 1400, far more than the 1237 he will need to prevail at the convention on the first ballot.  Those of you who have been reading first my Facebook feed and later this blog know I've been predicting this would be the case since December for three main reasons:

• Trump understands the crucial role that communications and persuasion play in a political campaign far better than any of the actual politicians who ran for the office this go-round;
• Trump understands how concerned most of the U.S. population is with the unfettered refusal of the Obama administration to enforce our country's immigration laws and has owned that issue throughout the campaign; and
• Trump was the clear leader in the polls in December, and the GOP has always, in every election cycle since 1952, ended up nominating the candidate who led in the national polling data in December.

So, despite all of the hyper-emotional rhetoric and goofy schemes that came out of the #neverTrump crowd, despite all of the efforts of Trump's 16 primary opponents, despite all of the myriad efforts by the establishment news media to kill his candidacy, this day when Trump irrevocably clinches the party's nomination has been a foregone conclusion since about December 15.

Below I have cut and pasted a piece I posted to my Facebook page on January 13 of this year.  While I failed then to foresee the refusal of John Kasich to give up the ghost when it was obvious he had no chance at all, it turned out to otherwise be a pretty accurate projection of how the race would ultimately go.

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Doing the Math on the GOP Race

I see a lot of discussion among the DC punditry and around the Interwebs about the theory that, once Iowa and New Hampshire have come and gone, the GOP Establishment will consolidate around a single candidate and that person will then be highly competitive with Trump for the nomination. Let's take a look at the current numbers, using the RealClearPolitics average of recent public polls, and see how the math works:

Current National RCP Average:

Trump 35
Cruz 19
Rubio 11
Carson 8
Bush 5
Christie 3
Fiorina 3
Huckabee 2
Kasich 2
Paul 2

So, between Trump/Cruz/Carson, you have - honestly amazingly - the magic 62% of GOP voters supporting a non-establishment candidate. (The support for those three candidates has for the last four months totaled up to within a percentage point or two of that 62% number in almost every poll take – it’s astonishingly consistent, and frankly spooky.) Add in Fiorina, Huckabee and Paul, none of whom are establishment favorites, and you are at 69%. The total for the other, establishment candidates comes to 21%. 10% remain undecided.

Let's say that, after New Hampshire, Christie and Kasich get out because they didn't do well (Jeb! will stick it out through March or until his super pac runs out of money). And let's give 100% of their votes to Rubio. That gets Rubio to all of 16%.

Let's also say that, after NH, Carson, Fiorina, Huckabee and Paul all finally get out. Let's be generous and split their votes 1/3 each between Trump, Cruz and Rubio, basically 4% each.

Now, after all of that, you have:

Trump 39
Cruz 23
Rubio 20
Bush 5

So you get to the end of March, and Bush is finally, at long last, out of money and has to do what he needed to do in December. If you give every single one of his votes to Rubio, you now have:

Trump 39
Cruz 23
Rubio 25

The math simply never works for Rubio, barring some magical event that causes Trump to finally fade.

The truth is - and I pointed this out a couple of times back in October and November - that the Party leadership needed to go to Jeb! over the Christmas holiday season and convince him to get out then. Even that timing was extremely late for it to make enough of a difference.

Barring some miracle finish in NH by one of the establishment guys who are engaged in their own circular firing squad right now in that state, this is over. And, to be fair, such miracles have happened in New Hampshire at times in the past.

But barring that, this is a Trump/Cruz race.