Donna Brazile
A month ago, Hillary Clinton won Iowa by a photo finish and then took a shellacking in New Hampshire. Political analysts said she was in trouble. Not to be immodest, but I predicted her fortunes would change once she reached those primary states with more diverse populations. Nevada proved my theory.
Clinton went on to trounce Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in South Carolina and followed up on Super Tuesday with huge victories in seven states. According to exit polls, Clinton swept to victory among rich and poor, men and women, blacks and Hispanics – lacking tallies only among younger voters, which she offset with massive support from older voters.
Clinton dwarfed Sanders by her ability to pull in African-American votes, winning them in six states by margins of 70 to 80 percent. In all Democratic primaries combined, exit polls showed she captured the Hispanic vote by 57 percent. Given the base of the party’s electorate, this should help her in upcoming states like Michigan, Ohio and Florida.
According to The New York Times’ delegate count, Clinton has 44 percent of the 2,383 delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. That includes superdelegates (roughly 15 percent of the total), who were included during reforms to give party leadership a say in the nomination. The Washington Post did a 2008 analysis of these delegates and concluded the superdelegates give no evidence of being there to “steal” the nomination from anyone. Besides, there are more pledge delegates available for Sanders to capture if he can break Clinton’s firewall of support with minorities and seniors.
Clinton’s campaign strategy for the nomination is right on track. She has also started to sharpen her message to respond to the Republicans’ doom-and-gloom mantra. In the meantime, Sanders is sticking to his economic reforms, which, evidenced by the votes he has won, have substantive appeal. But his economic revolution has yet to win a wide enough swath of votes to carry the entire Democratic Party, not to mention Republican and independent voters.
If Clinton had performed as Trump did on Super Tuesday, the pundits would be saying she failed expectations. One network’s chief political correspondent outlined how Super Tuesday could make Trump “unstoppable.” The media was rife with predictions that Trump could very well make a clean sweep of all Super Tuesday states.
This was an overcorrection to last fall’s predictions that Trump couldn’t possibly get the nomination, given his abrasive and often offensive campaign style. Today, political analysts err in the opposite direction. With predictions of crushing victories in 11 states, Trump instead lost four, giving just two of his opponents (Rubio and Cruz) more delegates combined (336) than he won (319).
If Rubio and Cruz should go into the Republican convention with enough delegates between them to win, one, by sacrificing his ambition and delegates, could trump Trump. I’m not saying that will happen. I am pointing out that Trump’s opponents won more delegates than he did on Super Tuesday, and that doesn’t make him “an unrivaled favorite,” as one news outlet put it.
Some of my fellow talking heads were breathless on Super Tuesday talking about Trump’s win in Massachusetts. But it was Trump’s inability to win big in Cruz’s backyard, where the bulk of the delegates were located, that will send the GOP’s nomination into another month of mud wrestling.
No one should underestimate Donald Trump. But I feel a responsibility to assert that this early in the season, no one without the magic number is “unstoppable.” I hold that the myth of Trump marching relentlessly to the nomination stems mostly from the mystery of how he’s doing it. Trump cuts across demographic lines in the Republican Party, and increasingly he captures the discontent of GOP voters who feel betrayed by the party’s establishment and its Washington insiders.
Now that he appears “unstoppable,” the party insiders are designing a contingency plan to break Trump’s grip on the electorate. In a hastily called news conference in Utah, Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 nominee attacked Trump as “a phony, a fraud” who is “playing the American public for suckers.” Meanwhile anti-Trump super PACs and the Club for Growth are pouring millions of dollars into efforts to stop Trump.
It’s not clear if any of this will work, and it will be a traumatic process for the GOP, but it certainly can be done. Super Tuesday was not the end.
— Donna Brazile is a senior Democratic strategist, a political commentator and contributor to CNN and ABC News, and a contributing columnist to Ms. Magazine and O, the Oprah Magazine.
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