With nearly all the ballots now counted, Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by 16 points in the New York primary. Donald Trump won with more than 60 percent, securing at least 89 of the 95 delegates available from his home stage. John Kasich finished second with 25 percent, but it looks like he’ll emerge with just three delegates.
The returns are a significant setback for both the Stop Trump movement and for the Brooklyn-born Sanders.
After a few rough weeks for both front-runners, the calendar now turns to more favorable terrain for both Trump and Clinton. The primaries are in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
-- Hillary really still whipped Bernie. Post pollster Scott Clement highlights some key indicators from the preliminary network exit polls:
- She swept every racial and gender bloc in New York, except for white men. She won black voters by a 3-to-1 margin, according to preliminary exit polls reported by CNN.
- She offset Bernie’s advantage with young voters by crushing it with older voters. He won about six in 10 voters under 45. She won those older than 45 by a wider margin.
- Her advantage was fueled by women. They made up nearly 3 in 5 primary voters. Clinton won women by a roughly 20-point margin over Sanders, whereas Sanders won narrowly among men.
- Hispanics made up 14 percent of the New York Democratic primary electorate, up slightly from 10 percent in 2008, and they again proved a strong source of support for Clinton. Clinton led Sanders among Hispanic voters by 26 points (63-37).
- Two-thirds of exit poll respondents said they believe Clinton has the “better chance to defeat Trump.”
- The closed primary definitely helped Clinton. Clinton won self-identified Democrats by a 61 to 39 percent margin. Sanders won nearly three-quarters of independents, but they accounted for only 14 percent of the electorate.
“Sanders won huge in the Mountain West and northern New England, and nearly all of the states in those regions have voted,” writes Josh Barro of Business Insider. “Saying Sanders can catch up means saying he can win California by 18 and Rhode Island by 33, after losing Arizona, Nevada, and Massachusetts. That's not going to happen … Technically, the Democratic presidential contest is not yet over. But let's be real. It's over.”
Key liberal commentators are beginning to attack Sanders as a sore loser. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait argues that Sanders knows he’s losing and it is making him a little crazy: “The Sanders campaign … is decrying the system as rigged in various ways: the sequencing of states is unfair, the voting power of the ‘conservative’ South — but in reality, heavily Democratic and African-American — is unfair, closed primaries are wrong.Sanders’s denunciations of the primary system as rigged have merged with his descriptions of the economy and the political system as rigged. In combination with his attacks on Clinton for succoring Wall Street — which are exaggerated but not entirely imagined — Sanders has conjoined Clinton and the Democratic Party apparatus to the shadow nexus of villains that he and his revolution are pledged to overthrow.”
Dan Balz and John Wagner analyze what Sanders wants politically. The long-term answer to the question of what Bernie Sanders wants "will have a direct bearing on how united Democrats will be heading into the fall campaign — and whether Sanders will be able to leverage his success this year into lasting power and influence,"
"His campaign for the Democratic nomination has been more successful than almost anyone had predicted. ... But as Clinton extends her lead in pledged delegates, Sanders must now confront the reality that he has almost no chance of becoming the Democratic nominee. Instead he must decide what he will do with what he has built — starting with how he conducts his campaign over the next two months, how he navigates the party’s national convention in July, what role he plays in the general election and, perhaps most importantly, what happens after the November results have been tallied.
The former secretary of state just keeps winning where she needs to keep winning. While a narrow loss in New York would have done next to nothing to puncture her clear delegate lead, it would have been a massive symbolic blow to her efforts to unite the party behind her. Knowing that, the candidate and the campaign focused relentlessly on the Empire State even while weathering a series of losses to Bernie Sanders in smaller, less delegate-rich states. Mission accomplished.Victory is in sight," Clinton said in her victory speech Tuesday night. She's right.
Dan Balz and John Wagner analyze what Sanders wants politically. The long-term answer to the question of what Bernie Sanders wants "will have a direct bearing on how united Democrats will be heading into the fall campaign — and whether Sanders will be able to leverage his success this year into lasting power and influence,"
"His campaign for the Democratic nomination has been more successful than almost anyone had predicted. ... But as Clinton extends her lead in pledged delegates, Sanders must now confront the reality that he has almost no chance of becoming the Democratic nominee. Instead he must decide what he will do with what he has built — starting with how he conducts his campaign over the next two months, how he navigates the party’s national convention in July, what role he plays in the general election and, perhaps most importantly, what happens after the November results have been tallied.
The former secretary of state just keeps winning where she needs to keep winning. While a narrow loss in New York would have done next to nothing to puncture her clear delegate lead, it would have been a massive symbolic blow to her efforts to unite the party behind her. Knowing that, the candidate and the campaign focused relentlessly on the Empire State even while weathering a series of losses to Bernie Sanders in smaller, less delegate-rich states. Mission accomplished.Victory is in sight," Clinton said in her victory speech Tuesday night. She's right.
-- This was Trump’s best performance in any state yet. He out-performed the polls, despite it being the kind of closed primary he has struggled with elsewhere. “He seems to have heeded advice from his wife and daughters to tone down his rhetoric,” Jenna reports in a broader piece on Trump being at “an inflection point” in his campaign. “He is tweeting less, skipping the news shows where pointed questions have recently tripped him up, reading from notes at rallies and refocusing on the economic issues that first brought him success early in the campaign. There are plans for him to soon give a series of policy speeches, perhaps with the assistance of a teleprompter — a device that to him once symbolized the bloodless establishment.”
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island will vote next Tuesday in what many are dubbing the 'Acela primary,' putting Clinton and Trump on terrain well-tailored to their campaigns. For Clinton, it’s a chance to effectively end Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s long-shot hopes in the Democratic race.
"For Trump, the contests are an opportunity to further pad his delegate lead over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and send him tumbling into the final six weeks of the campaign. That crucial period will determine whether the mogul will clinch the GOP nomination outright or if the race will head to a contested convention."
"Many of the remaining Republican contests are winner-take-all or winner-take-most (as was New York)," notes Bump. "Meaning that Trump has a much better shot at outperforming his target of 63 percent. In most states, his delegate haul has outperformed his actual vote percentage by a decent margin."
(To reach that 1,400 mark before Cleveland, he'd have to win more than 80 percent of the remaining delegates.)
The magnitude of Trump’s victory last night makes it practically impossible for Ted Cruz, who finished a distant third with just 14.5 percent, to secure the GOP nomination on the first ballot. The calendar -- or at least the rest of April -- looks bad for Cruz as a series of Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states are set to vote.
His only hope now is a contested convention in Cleveland,according to calculations by Philip Bump.
It may turn out that the 2016 general-election campaign began in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday night.
New York's got 99 problems, and disenfranchising its people is one. Widespread irregularities were reported at the polls all day long. "Voters reported to local media and city officials just about every voting issue imaginable -- closed polling locations, sites running out of ballots, people told they're not on the voter list, broken machines and even instances of blue pens to mark a black-pen-only ballot," per Amber Phillips.
- Brooklyn was the epicenter of this drama. Officials said some 125,000 voters had been purged from the voting rolls.
- Mayor Bill de Blasio alleged that entire city blocks and buildings of voters were inexplicably purged from the lists. "Major reforms will be needed to the Board of Election and in the state law governing it," the mayor said.
- The city's comptroller announced he's going to audit the Board of Elections.
- -------------------------------------------------------------
- Going Forward, The next three months will be awful for Republicans — and good for Democrats:
- PAUL WALDMAN, WASHINGTON POST:
At this point in the campaign, both parties have a straightforward, though by no means easy, set of tasks. They each want to get their nomination settled, unify and motivate their own voters, and start making their case to the broader electorate that will vote in the general election. Democrats will have an easier time on all counts.
The possibility that Trump won’t win 1,237 delegates, triggering a contested convention with multiple votes, is consuming the Republican Party (and the media) right now. That means that all of the discussion on the Republican side is about the process, with Trump complaining about unfairness,...And what are the consequences of that discussion? The first is that it prevents Republicans from talking about issues. This came up earlier this week when Ted Cruz was being interviewed by Sean Hannity, who asked Cruz about his efforts to persuade delegates to shift their votes on a second or third ballot. Cruz responded: “Sean, with all respect, that’s not what people are concerned about,” and tried to shift the discussion back to issues. Hannity was having none of it: “I’m asking you more than a process question, it’s an integrity of the election question, and everybody is asking me this question.” That’s a microcosm of the entire Republican race at this point.
That’s not to mention the fact that the process argument serves to divide Republicans, stoking longstanding resentments and making Trump supporters dislike Cruz and Cruz supporters dislike Trump. The debate on the Democratic side, even if it highlights some differences between Clinton and Sanders, still reminds Democratic voters of what they all have in common and what differentiates them from Republicans, while the debate on the Republican side only deepens their internal divisions.
Don’t be surprised if in the coming days you hear Hillary Clinton talking much more like a general election candidate, reaching out to all voters and contrasting herself with Donald Trump.... So while Trump is complaining about being treated unfairly and predicting chaos in Cleveland, Clinton can talk to voters about raising the minimum wage, supporting clean energy, reforming immigration, and a whole range of other issues where the Democratic position is more popular than the Republican one.
And she’ll have help: Priorities USA, the most well-funded Democratic super PAC, is planning on spending $90 million on broadcast ads and another $35 million on online ads promoting Clinton in swing states over the summer. My guess is that they’ll spend a lot of that money reinforcing people’s negative opinions of Trump, to make it harder for him to pivot away from everything he’s said in the primaries in order to present a friendlier face for the general election.
----
Nothing is guaranteed, of course. Trump could do better than he’s currently projected to and secure the nomination before the convention, and everyone in the GOP might quickly rally around him. There could be some unexpected event, in the world or on the campaign trail, that changes the race’s agenda in the Republicans’ favor. But from the perspective of today, it looks like the next few months are going to be a rough period for the Republicans, in ways that make winning the general election even harder than it already was.