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| Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images |
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump continued an inexorable
march to their party’s nominations and a once-unimaginable
general election matchup.
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| (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) |
Donald J. Trump routed Marco Rubio in Florida and won North Carolina and Illinois, giving Mr. Trump a delegate advantage that will be very difficult to overcome.
Hillary Clinton won a major victory in Ohio, rebounding from her loss in Michigan a week earlier, while also winning in Illinois, Florida, North Carolina and Missouri.Her victories kept her on track to lock up the nomination. It's a delegate game at this point and Clinton's massive win over Bernie Sanders in Florida alone would have made her a winner from these primaries. But, she also won Ohio -- a place where the Sanders folks were sneaky confident in their chances -
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| Joe Raedle/Getty Images |
Republicans were ultimately unwilling to entrust high office to Senator Marco Rubio, who dropped out after losing in his home state of Florida.Years of carefully laid plans to repackage the party’s traditional ideas for a fast-changing country came crashing down when he ended his campaign.
The Republican race is down to three, two of whom still make party leaders queasy. John Kasich seems like the only non-appalling option the Republicans have. But, ...the delegate math is, well, impossible for him. He would have to win more than 100 percent of the remaining available delegates to get to the 1,237 delegates he needs to be the party's nominee. Kasich now seems likely to hang around at the periphery of the Trump-Cruz race for the next few months, hoping to collect delegates and lead a revivifying of the GOP establishment in the event the convention deadlocks and he emerges as a consensus candidate. "We are going to go all the way to Cleveland," Kasich promised.
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Sen. Ted Cruz, won no primaries all night.He reiterated a message he's been hammering home over the last few weeks: that he's the only remaining Republican candidate who has a chance of preventing Donald Trump from winning the nomination.
VOX
Another reason Clinton may be encouraged by the results from Illinois: they're a sign we may be ready to trust state polling again.
The results from Michigan — which Sanders won after trailing by more than 20 points — had unsettled some experts. It suddenly seemed foolhardy to put too much stock in the other polls — like ones from New York, where Clinton leads by 21 points.
While the polling from Illinois had gotten closer over the last few days, Clinton's win may shore up faith that her polling leads in other states are meaningful. (Real Clear Politics' average of the Illinois polls had Clinton up by 3 points.) And that should be reassuring for a Clinton campaign that would otherwise be looking at a much more unpredictable primary fight than anyone had expected.
WASHINGTON POST
Coming into Tuesday night, observers wondered if Hillary Clinton would suffer the same fate in Ohio as she did last week in neighboring Michigan. In Michigan, you'll remember, Clinton was far ahead in the polls but ended up losing to Bernie Sanders narrowly. Would Ohio, a Rust Belt state with broadly similar demographics, be another loss?
It would not. Shortly after polls closed, the Associated Press called Ohio for Clinton; as of writing, she leads by a wide margin. What was the difference?
White voters.
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.
In other words, the old calculus -- more black voters means a Clinton win -- was back in effect, because she wasn't hammered by whites.
In the five states that voted on Tuesday, preliminary exit poll data shows that in the three which were called early, Clinton did reasonably well with white voters and very well with non-white voters. In the two where news outlets couldn't call the race as easily, Clinton is getting beaten badly among white voters.