There’s a classic scene in First Blood where John Rambo declares, “Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don’t turn it off!”
So let’s go with that for a moment. You’ll get no shortage of Trump-is-the-nominee talk today. At worst, he’s in a very strong position. At best, he’s the presumptive nominee. But even though I’m a born-pessimist, I’m not quite sure that I’m convinced by the best-case (for Trump) argument. So for the sake of argument, let’s lay out the case for why Super Tuesday was not actually a campaign ender.
Everyone fixates on the number of states that Trump won tonight—and don’t get me wrong, it’s wildly impressive. Even more so when you consider how little money he’s spent on the race.
But on the other hand, these victories should have been priced into Trump’s stock. If you were looking at these races carefully 96 hours ago, you would have expected Trump to win nine, ten, or eleven states tonight. And the median-variant scenario for Trump probably had him coming away with somewhere between 280 and 300 delegates.
So Trump came close to covering the spread on states won—losing Texas, Oklahoma, and Minnesota and being very close in Vermont and Virginia. But he came in very short on the delegate count.
We won’t know the exact numbers until Wednesday, but it looks as though Trump will, by some estimates, finish with somewhere in the neighborhood of 245 delegates. A week ago, that would have been a worst-case scenario for his Super Tuesday. It gets worse: Cruz won resounding victories in Texas and Oklahoma. He trails Trump in the delegate haul for the night by only about 60 delegates. And when you put together the not-Trump share, Rubio and Cruz (and Kasich) will top out around 320 delegates to Trump’s 245 (or so). He’s still falling way short of half the delegates.
There’s more evidence of Trump weakness if you look closely: Why did he lose Oklahoma? Because it’s the only state where the vote was restricted to actual Republicans. Which further bolsters the case that Trump is not leading a revolt from within the party, but staging a hostile takeover of it.
What happened in Virginia? Trump looked to be 14 points up just a few days ago. Rubio closed very strongly.
And remember back when everyone said Trump had a ceiling of support around 35 percent? That was before he won three contests and got his first mainstream endorsements, from Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Jeff Sessions. There was that garbage poll from CNN on Monday claiming Trump was at 49 percent nationally. His total take of the popular vote on Super Tuesday was about . . . 36 percent. Which is enough to win, but shows that he hasn’t grown his coalition, even with his frontrunner status having been “normalized.”
But wait, there’s more! The single most shocking number from Super Tuesday might have been this poll showing voter awareness about various aspects of Trump: Only 27 percent had heard about his reluctance to denounce David Duke and the KKK; 20 percent about Trump University and the fraud lawsuit; 13 percent about the failure of Trump Mortgage.
At some point, those numbers will all be at 90 percent because someone will spend a lot of money putting ads about them all over television in battleground states. The only question is whether it will be conservatives or Hillary Clinton who expose voters to this information. Either way, it suggests that Trump still has the potential for downward mobility if conservative donors are serious about stopping him.
Of course, you can spend your life flyspecking trend lines. And Trump could continue to lose momentum over the next four weeks and still grind his way to the nomination. Winning is what matters.
But if you believe that stopping Trump matters too, then Super Tuesday offered evidence this goal is achievable.
We opened with Sly Stallone but we’ll close with Arnold and a great line from Predator: “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” That’s true of Trumpism. Maybe Trump will be the nominee. That’s where you’d put your money if forced to bet on it. But it’s not a foregone conclusion. And if anything, Super Tuesday proved both Trump’s strength and his vulnerability.
Given a little more time, some smartly-spent money, and some aggressive campaigning, you can see how Trump can be stopped.
