Some newscasts are calling today Super Tuesday, and your memory isn’t playing tricks on you if you’re thinking, Didn’t we just have one of those?
Today, when voters go to the polls in five big states — Florida,
Illinois, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina — marks the second crucial,
all-important, potentially decisive primary day in two weeks. But this
time, one, or potentially both, nominations could be all but sealed by
the end of the night.
As
usual, all eyes will be on Donald Trump, because, really, who can look
away? The edgy rage and sporadic violence that has characterized his
rallies over the past week won’t be in evidence when he takes the podium
tonight at his Palm Beach resort club, Mar-a-Lago. The audiences at his
victory parties-cum-press conferences are limited to supporters and the
media, and the events typically find the candidate on his best
behavior. But by the end of the evening, if he wins all five states —
and polls say it’s possible — he will have put away two of his three
remaining rivals, and substantially widened his lead over the one left
standing.
On
the Democratic side, the nomination is, and almost surely will still be
tomorrow, Hillary Clinton’s to lose. But following her startling defeat
in Michigan last week, Clinton could, in fact, lose. Today’s voting
should give an indication of whether Sanders is strong enough to win.
Here are some things to watch for as the results come in:
Photos: APTHE REPUBLICANS
The
question is into whose hands the tattered banner of Not-Trump will
fall. Marco Rubio, who until a few weeks ago was widely considered
Trump’s most plausible challenger, is now fighting for his life in his
home state of Florida, where Trump has led in every poll taken since
last July — most recently by around 20 points. (Rubio has won just three
contests, including, on Saturday, the Washington, D.C., Republican
caucus, virtually the definition of a Pyrrhic victory.)
Polls,
of course, can be wrong — as they were, spectacularly, in Michigan,
where Sanders eked out a 1.5 percent margin after surveys taken just
days before the vote showed him trailing by as much as 27 points. More
promisingly, in Virginia, Rubio managed in two days to come from 15
points down in the polling to within three points of Trump. But Virginia
and Michigan were seeing those candidates for the first time; Rubio has
been in Florida politics since the late 1990s and is certainly a known
quantity to Florida voters.
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