ELIZABETH DREW, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS
In an election year in which almost nothing has been anticipated, at least the contests in the first half of March did their job of providing the turning point in this year’s nominating process. On one side it hasn’t turned out as the party leaders hoped and now they’re desperately trying to figure out what to do. On the other side, though it would take something exogenous and cataclysmic to prevent the formidable front-runner from winning the nomination, her opponent is determined to keep going to the end. The mid-March outcomes also underscored the serious splits within both parties that have been developing since the campaigns got underway.
Despite Donald Trump’s victories in four of the five states that voted on March 15—Florida, North Carolina, Illinois, and Missouri—we still don’t know who the Republican nominee will be, or even how he’ll be chosen. With his resounding loss to John Kasich in Ohio, Trump may well arrive at the convention in Cleveland short of the 1,237 delegates needed to put him safely past a challenge. To be certain to avoid a challenge, Trump needs to win 54 percent of the delegates chosen between now and the end of the contests. This isn’t impossible, and a lot rides on the successes of his remaining opponents: Ted Cruz, who won nowhere on Tuesday; and Kasich, the popular two-term governor of Ohio who is clearly the most qualified Republican candidate, substantively and temperamentally, and whose campaign maintains he can win more states. Kasich’s strategy for a long time has been to win his home state, which he did, and to be presented at the convention as the most plausible alternative. But in order for this to happen, first Trump would have to be stopped and then delegates would have to decide that Kasich is their most promising candidate for November.
Hillary Clinton’s solid victories in Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina on Tuesday all but assured her of having enough delegates to win the nomination. While the races were much tighter in Illinois and Missouri—in each case Clinton beat Sanders by only two points—Sanders simply couldn’t replicate his victory in Michigan on March 8. The surprisingly large turnout of young voters for Sanders in Michigan just didn’t materialize in the next industrial states. But Sanders will continue to challenge Clinton—and he clearly wants a prominent part at the convention: thrillingly for him and unexpected by just about everyone else, he has started a movement. Following Sanders’s upset of her in Michigan, Clinton amped up her talk about trade and protections needed for workers. Clinton didn’t do particularly well with independents in the March 15 contests, and this is a subject of worry within her campaign.
Clinton’s victory speech that night displayed her strengths and her weaknesses as a candidate. Obviously very well informed, she has so many things to say that she still lacks a message. One could hear her trying out this one and that one, but they competed with each other so that no underlying theme came through. Not long before the March 15 primaries, in a moment of candor, Clinton confessed that she’d been advised to stop yelling her speeches; the yelling is new or at least far more prominent in this campaign than before, and despite some of her aides’ attempts to label criticism of it as sexist, in my experience women are at least as bothered by it as men are.
In her Tuesday night speech, miming Sanders—she needs his supporters in November—Clinton said her campaign was dependent on small donations and she asked for more of them; and after months of berating Sanders for being unrealistic by calling for free tuition to public colleges, she said that she hoped that future generations would be able to go to college “without borrowing a dime for tuition.” Obviously aching to take on Trump, she also said, “Our commander in chief has to be able to defend our country, not embarrass it.”
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