The Republican presidential race has been in overdrive since the Iowa caucuses on February 1; there have been more than 30 contests in the 51 days since then. And next Tuesday, there will be…nothing.
For the first time since voting began, there will be a two-week gap between Tuesday’s votes, in Arizona and Utah, and the next contest in Wisconsin on April 5. (And Wisconsin will be the only primary that day.) After that, there will be another two-week gap before the New York primary on April 19 — again, the only primary of the day.
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It’s now easy to see the results of the Republican National Committee’s decision to dramatically compress the early primary schedule in 2016. Compared to today’s lineup — 30-plus in those first 51 days — in 2012, there were only ten contests in the first 56 days of voting.
After Republican voters resisted Mitt Romney in 2012 and the race stretched beyond the early states, the RNC wanted to identify a nominee early and avoid a bruising contest in 2016. So they came up with this year’s packed schedule. As Jimmy Carter famously said after the 1980 Iran hostage rescue disaster, the results have been an incomplete success.
Tuesday’s winner was again Donald Trump, who took Arizona with 47 percent of the vote, and, since Arizona is a winner-take-all state, walked away with all 58 delegates. Ted Cruz won the Utah caucuses, with well over 50 percent of the vote, and thus took all of the state’s 40 delegates. The bottom line is that Trump inched a bit farther ahead of Cruz in the delegate race.
Arizona was a four-way contest, with Trump at 47 percent, Cruz at 24 percent, Marco Rubio at 14 percent, and John Kasich at 10 percent. Marco Rubio? Yes, him. Early voting started in Arizona on February 24, nearly three weeks before Rubio dropped out of the race. With 85 percent of the vote counted, Rubio had more than 70,000 votes — votes wasted because of Arizona’s misbegotten early-voting system.
Since Arizona is a border state and a battleground over immigration, the results said something about Republican voters and immigration. A few days before the primary, I spoke to Cruz Arizona state director Constantin Querard, who stressed that immigration is about much more than immigration.
“It’s such an important part of every issue,” Querard told me. “If your issue is education or school overcrowding, a lot of that has to do with illegal immigration. If your issue is health care and emergency room overcrowding, a lot of that has to do with illegal immigration. It’s hard to get away from here.” And out of the state’s mix of GOP views on immigration, Trump emerged a solid winner.
Utah, on the other hand, was a going-away win for Cruz, confirming all the pre-election talk that Mormons really don’t like Trump. Endorsing Cruz on Monday, Republican Gov. Gary Herbert wouldn’t even say whether he would vote for Trump in a general election, if it came to that. “Let’s hope that doesn’t have to be my decision,” Herbert told reporters.
Still, as far as the Republican primaries are concerned, Utah might not predict much. The three states with the highest percentages of Mormons — Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming — have already voted. (Trump lost them all to Cruz.) The state with the fourth-highest percentage of Mormons is Arizona, now in the Trump column. The next two states, Alaska and Nevada, went for Cruz and Trump, respectively. In any event, the Mormon vote is not likely to be a huge factor in the remaining Republican contests.
So next is Wisconsin. With 42 delegates, it is a smaller prize than Arizona, but it is winner-take-most, and, perhaps more importantly, a state in which Republican #NeverTrump forces have promised to make a strong stand against their party’s frontrunner. (Wisconsin is also an open primary, a format which has been good for Trump in earlier contests.) At the moment, there’s no polling to go by. The most recent survey is one from Marquette University that finished on February 21 with the now-useless result of Trump leading Rubio by ten points.
After Wisconsin, the race, and the expected long battle between Trump and Cruz, stretches into early summer, with California, New Jersey, and a few other states finishing things up on June 7. Will there be some different dynamic at work in a slower race, compared to the breakneck speed of the early primaries and caucuses? We’re about to find out.
