Voters in five states weighed in on the presidential race today. This thread is for any comments related to the primaries in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, or North Carolina. Journalists have not settled on any shorthand reference for the March 15 elections; the Des Moines Register’s Jason Noble suggested “Super Tuesday. Superer Tuesday. Supererer Tuesday. Mega Tuesday. Ultra Tuesday. Uber Tuesday. Hella Tuesday. Big Tuesday and the Delegates.”
On the Republican side, today’s looking like “Four men enter, two men leave Tuesday.” Read fladem’s latest analysis of the GOP delegate race, if you haven’t already. I will update this post periodically with results as they come in. So far Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are heading toward big wins in Florida, which could give Clinton more delegates than she needs to stay on track to win the nomination. Ohio should be much closer on both sides, in part because independents can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primaries.
7:45 pm UPDATE: As expected, Marco Rubio dropped out after getting crushed in his home state. I was so wrong about Trump and Ted Cruz last year, but Rubio would have done better to run for re-election to the Senate and put off his presidential ambitions until 2020 or later.
CNN just projected Kasich to win Ohio, which keeps the “stop Trump” campaign alive, barely. But fladem has convinced me that the delegate math still favors Trump.
On the Democratic side, Clinton not only won Florida and North Carolina by apparently large margins, but has been declared the early winner in Ohio, which surprised me. Waiting for more detailed results to see how she did in the white working-class areas where Bernie Sanders exceeded expectations in Iowa, New Hampshire, and most recently in Michigan.
Further updates are after the jump.
8:30 UPDATE: I was disgusted by the punditocracy’s reaction to Clinton’s victory speech. Glenn Thrush, Howard Kurtz, and Brit Hume were just a few men who didn’t like her “shouting.” Campaigning while female: she’s not allowed to shout even to a packed arena after she just won three primaries.
Kasich’s victory speech was meandering and unfocused. Although he has no realistic path forward, he insists he will march on to Cleveland and win the GOP nomination.
Rubio won only one Florida county. How embarrassing.
ABC and NBC called Illinois for Trump around 8:40 pm.
11 PM UPDATE: Absolutely crushing night for Trump. Rubio won only one of Florida’s 67 counties (Miami-Dade). Missouri hasn’t been called yet, but Trump narrowly leads Missouri. Although Illinois is not a winner-take-all state, Trump is set to take most of the delegates.
GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini made an interesting observation: “Gerrymandering may be costing Trump alternatives district delegates,” because “Cruz and Kasich get more votes in urban centers. Mixing in rural areas leads to Trump wins.”
Anne Li explained that where Rubio’s delegates will go is a complicated question.
Eli Stokols and Shane Goldmacher published a brutal post-mortem of the Rubio campaign’s failures. Excerpt:
Rubio’s strategy was always an inside straight—overly reliant on a candidate’s ability to dominate free national media in order to outperform, outwit and eventually outlast a wide field of rivals. It was sketched out by an inner circle of advisers who believed they could eschew the very fundamentals of presidential campaigning because they had a candidate who transcended. […]
So while other campaigns touted “shock and awe” fundraising networks and precise, psychographic analytics and voter targeting operations, Rubio’s tight-knit group of mostly 40-something bros believed wholeheartedly that they didn’t need a specific early-state win. They didn’t need a particular political base. They didn’t need to talk process. They didn’t need a ground game. They didn’t need to be the immediate front-runner.
All they needed was Marco.
Their confidence bordered on arrogance. Sure, his closest advisers—campaign manager Terry Sullivan and media strategists Todd Harris and Heath Thompson—were right that their candidate was likable. He began the race as the second choice of many Republican primary voters. They just never figured out how to make voters embrace him as their first. […]
It’s not that Rubio’s team didn’t know the data science that powered Obama’s two campaigns or that studies showed that door knocks and personal phone calls are among the most effective means to get out the vote. It’s that they’re expensive and time-consuming. And Rubio’s team thought they had figured out a better way: targeting exactly their voters with pinpoint precision online, on TV and in the mail.
“It’s almost like they wanted to prove they could win without doing some of the stuff people have to do to win,” said one Rubio supporter very familiar with the campaign’s planning. “Were they just fucking lazy or arrogant?”
Nate Cohn pointed out that the Democratic polling was dead on this week, after missing the Michigan primary by a mile.
Clinton campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon tweeted that Barack Obama’s largest lead over Clinton during the 2008 primaries was 157 pledged delegates. “After tonight, Clinton will lead by 300+ over Sanders.”
David Redlawsk pointed out that with the delegate math stacked against him, “Sanders [is] pretty much back where he started: A message candidate who pushed Clinton to move to the left.”
Illinois was called for Clinton at around 11:20 pm. Missouri is still too close to call on both sides.
11:30 UPDATE: It’s not Throwback Thursday, but here’s a fun walk down memory lane from May 2015.
Former two-term Gov. Jeb Bush, and incumbent first-term Sen. Marco Rubio are dominating the emerging battle for Florida. In the process, they appear to be crowding other candidates out of the primary. That only raises the stakes of the March 15 contest for Bush and Rubio, already locked in a quiet grudge match for supremacy.
“I don’t think there’s any upside at this point for anyone trying to compete in Florida other than Jeb and Marco,” said Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, who oversaw the campaign of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. […]
Veteran Republican operatives believe one of them could be effectively knocked out of the 2016 race before Florida Republicans vote, either through underperforming in the four early-state nominating contests or in the Super Tuesday Southern primary on track for March 1. In that case, the survivor could win the Sunshine State’s winner-take-all contest for 99 delegates without a fight. Conversely, he could find himself fending off confident challengers who decide Florida is worth risking their precious resources. […]
“There are a network of very loyal supporters of Jeb Bush that are clamoring for there to be an official campaign they can sign up for,” said a Republican operative who would advise the governor’s presidential bid. “The only candidate who could come into Florida and challenge him would be Marco Rubio…And, Jeb still has the upper hand.”
TIME politics editor Ryan Teague Beckwith made me laugh with this comment:
Anchor: [Election result.]
Correspondent: [Campaign spin] or [other campaign spin]?
Pundit: [Correlation=causation]!
Nate Silver noted that “So far, Trump has won 37.1 percent of the votes throughout Republican primaries and caucuses. That percentage is up tonight after Trump had strong results in Florida and other states. And it could climb further in subsequent states, especially with only three candidates remaining in the race. But the percentage is still on the low end by the standards of previous nominees.”
TIME’s Jay Newton-Small weighed in on male pundits who didn’t care for Clinton’s “shouting” or wanted her to smile more.
The incomparable Sady Doyle, whose “Likable” post is still the best piece I’ve read about the double standards applied to Clinton, commented tonight, “Gonna go give a speech to a room full of drunk cheering football fans who just won a game, hope I don’t raise my voice to be heard :(”
MIDNIGHT UPDATE: Missouri was called for Trump and Clinton. A far worse night for Cruz and Sanders than I expected.
I’ve been wondering whether Clinton won Ohio because fewer Democrats crossed over to vote against Trump after seeing what happened in Michigan.
Philip Bump wrote in the Washington Post that Clinton won Ohio by doing better among white voters than she did in Michigan.
We’ve been talking for months about how non-white voters are Clinton’s fail-safe. Black voters in the Deep South gave Clinton massive margins of victory in those states, helping to power her huge delegate lead. But in Ohio, it was white voters. In both Ohio and Michigan, about a fifth of the electorate was black, according to preliminary exit polls reported by CNN. In both states, Clinton won the black vote by about 40 points. But in Ohio, she ran about even with Sanders among white voters. In Michigan, she trailed him by 14 points with whites.
WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: fladem observed that Trump took 39 delegates and Cruz 10 from Missouri, where Trump won the popular vote by less than a 0.2 percent margin. “Most of the states remaining are similar.”