MAY 25, 2016
Tuesday night is Primary Night in the heat of the 2016 campaign, but this Tuesday in Washington was a low-impact affair with only the Republican side conducting a delegate-rich primary. In that, Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, ran away with the contest, garnering 76% of the vote and 40 more delegates, bringing him very close to the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the Republican nomination.
On the Democratic side, Washington delegates were distributed at a state party convention in March, where Bernie Sanders prevailed, winning 73% of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 27%. Tuesday’s primary was merely a “beauty pageant” (a political term used to describe a primary where no delegates are actually at stake), but interestingly, the results of the people’s vote were very different from the state convention with Clinton winning 54% of the vote to Sanders’ 46%. Nonetheless, Sanders will win the lions’ share of the delegates from Washington State.
Despite the primary news, however, cable news was dominated on Tuesday night with footage of anti-Trump protestors in a violent confrontation with police after a Trump rally in Albuquerque. As Trump moves his campaign to California, whose crucial primary will be held on June 7, police in Anaheim and other cities in which Trump rallies will be held are on high alert for the threat of protest violence in those venues.
Trump also continued his attacks on Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who called Trump “a small, insecure money-grabber.” Them’s fighting words in Trump World, and Trump has begun to refer to Warren, who has claimed that she is part Native-American, as “Pocahontas,” an attack line that may drive Warren, who is no fan of Hillary, firmly into the Clinton camp.
Trump’s attackees also included NM Gov. Susana Martinez, the nation’s only Latina governor, who in the past has been critical of Trump’s plans to build The Wall. (Isn’t it interesting that all of Trump’s political targets now happen to be women?) Martinez is a rising star in the GOP establishment, and Trump’s declaration that he should run for NM governor against her is just another wedge between the presumptive Republican nominee and the GOP establishment.
Despite her beauty contest win in Washington on Tuesday, Clinton’s Wednesday was not fun as the State Dept.’s Inspector General found, in a stinging report, that Clinton did indeed break the department’s rules in using her private e-mail server for business purposes and should have surrendered all of those e-mails to the State Dept. before leaving government service. The IG’s finding will probably do little to derail Clinton’s path to becoming the party’s nominee, but it does give Trump extra ammunition to attack her trustworthiness, a major vulnerability for Clinton among independent voters.
It’s two weeks until the critical California primary, which should push both front-runners over the top, but as 14 days is an eternity in a primary, anything can happen in a campaign as crazy as this one has been.
For all of you delegate fans, let’s run the numbers after Tuesday’s primary:
THE DELEGATE COUNT
REPUBLICANS (1,237 needed to win)
Donald Trump 1,171 (plus 40 delegates won last night) = 1,211
The Ghost of Ted Cruz 567
The Ghost of Marco Rubio 167
The Ghost of John Kasich 160
