Republicans now have a presumptive nominee — one headed to a clear delegate majority without visible opposition — sooner than the Democrats. It’s another way in which this year’s presidential race has defied expectations and ignored precedent.
Donald Trump will now have two months to stage-manage his Cleveland convention, whereas Hillary Clinton must spend the next four weeks going through the motions of campaigning against Bernie Sanders in 10 primaries and the North Dakota caucus.
Clinton will then be the presumptive Democratic nominee. If Democrats used Republicans’ delegate allocation rules, she would been that two months ago.
Trump, despite his complaints about a “rigged” nomination process, actually used that process to great advantage. His celebrity and $2 billion worth of free media coverage enabled him to win early contests in a 17-candidate field with plurality votes.
The same 36 percent of the vote that gave Trump a win in Michigan left him far behind a single competitor in nearby Ohio. Overall, in February and March, Trump won just 38 percent of popular votes, but the winner-take-all and similar rules he later decried gave him 47 percent of delegates.
There is an eerie similarity between the patterns of support of the two parties’ nominees. Both Trump and Clinton got their bedrock support from their parties’ most downscale (and in general elections most faithful) constituencies.
Blacks, especially Southern blacks, produced just about all of Clinton’s popular vote margin over Bernie Sanders. Non-college-educated whites produced the highest percentages for Trump. “I love the poorly educated!” he exclaimed after winning in low-education Nevada.
It also appears that Trump and Clinton ran worst among groups with high degrees of what scholars Robert Putnam and Charles Murray call social connectedness or social capital. Trump was especially weak among socially connected Mormons and German-Americans and strong in areas with high opioid addiction. Both were weaker in caucuses, which favor the socially connected, than primaries.
After Ted Cruz beat Trump in Wisconsin April 5 it appeared that Trump could fall short of the 1,237-delegate majority. At that point, he charged repeatedly that the process was unfair. The candidate with “most” votes, though not a majority, should be nominated, he said; and exit polls showed most Republicans agreed. As for the Cruz campaign’s moves to choose sympathetic delegates, and the Cruz-Kasich deal divvying up states—unfair!
Attitudes evidently changed. Voters preferred the clarity of a Trump nomination to the uncertainty of a contested convention. Up through mid-April Trump never got 50 percent. He hasn’t gotten less since. On April 19 and April 26, for the first time, he outperformed his poll numbers in primaries in six Northeast states.
But that could be discounted; like Clinton, he’s run best in the Northeast and the South. But Indiana this week was another story. Trump got 53 percent there, 12 to 18 points better than in other Midwestern primaries; in contrast, Indiana Democrats gave Bernie Sanders his sixth Midwestern victory. Republican opinion has clearly swung toward Trump, and Ted Cruz, who hoped for an Indiana victory, and John Kasich, who carried just seven counties outside his home state of Ohio, both left the race.
Trump’s success in improving his standing among Republicans in the past six weeks raises the question of whether he can do so among general election voters in the next six months.
There’s certainly plenty of room for improvement. Current polling averages show him trailing Clinton 47 to 41 percent, and the latest poll has him behind by a more substantial 54 to 41. About two-thirds of voters have unfavorable feelings toward him, including larger proportions of women and millennials.
Standard analysis says these are losing numbers and that a candidate universally known will have a hard time turning them around. That’s plausible. But Hillary Clinton also has high (circa 55 percent) unfavorable numbers and even lower numbers on honesty. Results in a few recent target state polls look like the close partisan division that’s prevailed for two decades, not a Democratic blowout.
Much could depend on turnout. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Democratic turnout has been declining during the Obama presidency and, in contrast to 2008, turnout this year has been higher in Republican than Democratic primaries. In nearly all contests Clinton has received fewer votes than she (or Obama) got in 2008. Sanders has swept young voters, suggesting many may not turn out this fall.
Clinton’s still the favorite. But Trump, who has shown his capacity to disrupt political alignments, will be trying to do so again.
