Trump strides through Michigan, where Clinton falters
By J.A. | WASHINGTON, DC
HEADING into the primary votes in Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii on March 8th, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton appeared to be headed in opposite directions—and so it turned out. Mr Trump pulled off his second super Tuesday in a fortnight; he won the two biggest states, Mississippi and Michigan by big margins, thereby completing a near sweep of the South and opening a new front for his populist campaign in the Midwest. Mrs Clinton had a more mixed experience; she won easily in Mississippi but lost narrowly to Bernie Sanders in Michigan, where polls had put her more than 20 percentage points ahead.
Yet this was the opposite of the divergence expected of the Republican and Democratic front-runners. Going into the primaries, Mr Trump had had maybe his worst week of the campaign. He had talked up the size of his penis in a television debate and whipped up a crowd in Orlando to pledge allegiance to him while making a gesture that looked far too close for decency like a Nazi salute. He had been castigated by Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012, as “a phony, a fraud,” who was “playing members of the American public for suckers”. On March 7th Mr Trump was trounced by Ted Cruz in Kansas and Maine, both of which he had been predicted to win; he won Louisiana and Kentucky by narrower-than-expected margins. It really seemed as if he might at last have been rumbled—that Peak Trump was past. Fat chance of that.
To keep on course to win the Republican ticket, by one calculation, Mr Trump needed to win 59 delegates on March 8th. He won precisely that number in Mississippi, Michigan and Idaho, where he came second to Mr Cruz, before votes had come in from Hawaii. He also saw two of his likeliest obstacles to his winning the nomination, Florida and Ohio, where a total of 165 delegates are up for grabs on March 15th, shrivel with the fortunes of Marco Rubio and John Kasich.
Mr Rubio, a senator from Florida, is trying to overhaul a big lead by Mr Trump in his home state; a dismal humiliation on March 9th has now made that harder. In the three mainland states, Mr Rubio failed to cross the 15% threshold required to win a single delegate. That leaves him, the main hope of the Republican establishment, with two poxy wins, in Puerto Rico and Minnesota, from a possible 24. Mr Trump has won 15; Mr Cruz seven. It is increasingly hard to think Mr Rubio can win Florida or stay in the race for long after it. Mr Kasich, the governor of Ohio, has already said that he will quit if he fails to win his state; his third-place finish in neighbouring Michigan, where he had campaigned hard, was yet another blow to that ambition.
If Mr Trump’s latest strong showing has probably made it considerably likelier that he will indeed bag the Republican ticket, Mrs Clinton’s defeat makes it scarcely less likely that she will win the Democratic one. She has a lead over Mr Sanders of more than 200 delegates which, given the proportional way they are divvied up in the Democratic contest, he looks unable to rein in. Thanks to her crushing win in Mississippi, where she won 83% of the vote, she in fact increased her delegate lead, despite her stumble in Michigan. Yet Mr Sanders’s slim victory there, where he won 50% of the vote, has made it likelier that the Democratic contest will be drawn out, into May and perhaps beyond, which could be damaging to Mrs Clinton’s general-election prospects. It will delay her expected pivot back towards the centre, from the left-wing arguments Mr Sanders—a self-declared socialist—has forced her into making. It will also advertise the many weaknesses in her candidacy that Mr Sanders has highlighted.
Most of Mrs Clinton’s dozen wins have been based on huge support from African-Americans—exit polls in Mississippi suggested she had won 89% of the black vote there. Elsewhere, she has found the going harder, with Mr Sanders’s excoriations of Wall Street, free trade and elite politics winning him big majorities with younger and white voters in most states outside the South. He managed that in Michigan, a state that has lost many thousands of factory jobs in recent decades. Exit polls suggested he had won 81% of younger voters in the state; he also cut Mrs Clinton’s lead among blacks to around 65%. He won clear majorities of those who felt that international trade had cost American jobs and who worried about the current state of the economy. This suggested he has, at the least, a fighting chance of winning one or two more in a looming series of Midwestern rust-bucket states, including Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin. Given that all those states voted Democrat in recent general elections, and that Mr Trump would campaign hard in them on a similarly protectionist platform to Mr Sanders’s, it presents Mrs Clinton with a considerable problem. She must not only keep on fighting Mr Sanders, but also find a better answer to the economic discontentment he is drawing on. She must be tempted to sound a shriller, more populist note herself, which would certainly be off-putting to the centrists Mr Trump, a politician even more disliked than Mrs Clinton, is bound to alienate.
Indeed, perhaps nothing could reunite the splintered Republican coalition—in disdain—so effectively as the sight of Mrs Clinton in left-wing campaigning mode. Mr Trump, however, gave little thought to such delicious things in the bizarre, or mad, victory speech he gave at one of his golf clubs in Florida to celebrate his primary wins.
Stung by recent criticisms of his business history, which includes several high-profile failures, he used the speech as an opportunity to showcase some of the many products he has hawked over the years: Trump wine, Trump vodka, Trump water and Trump steaks. Mr Trump has often been accused of throwing red meat to his angry supporters; as the assembled cameras fixed on piles of meat, that seemed to be literally the case. “Trump steaks. Where are the steaks? Do we have steak? We have Trump steak,” rambled Mr Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, sounding very much like a cable-television shopping-channel presenter.
His steak business, as it happens, seems to have been non-functioning since 2007. So if the meat he had brought to his rally was his own, it cannot be fit for consumption. The steaks, for Mr Trump and America, have perhaps never been higher.
