The final returns from most states are not quite in as I write, and the delegate count is not established, but here are some initial observations.
1. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has a clear flight path to the Democratic nomination. She won everywhere except in Bernie Sanders’s Vermont, in Oklahoma with its low black population (and its large number of conservative registered Democrats), and in the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses.
When you look at the demographics of all the contests, you see that she carried white voters by only 50 to 48 percent over Sanders, similar to her 53 to 47 percent margin in South Carolina, but won black voters 83 to 15 percent. She also won Hispanics, a very small percentage except in Texas, by 63 to 36 percent, a bit below her 2008 margins against Barack Obama but very good.
In other words, she’s winning the nomination largely because of near-unanimous support among black voters. Compared to 2008, she is still weak in caucuses and does worse among white non-college voters, and she does very poorly with millennials, losing them 63 to 36 percent.
Her biggest problem, from a general election perspective, may be turnout. Donald Trump accurately pointed out a fact I have blogged about, which is that Democratic turnout is far lower than in 2008, and that seems to have been true in every Super Tuesday contest, including the caucuses.
In February contests, the falloff was almost entirely among voters who called themselves moderates or (a very few) conservatives and, in South Carolina, among whites. I haven’t crunched the numbers yet, but I suspect that was the case in all or almost all Super Tuesday contests as well. That’s not a good omen for Democrats in the general election.
2. Donald Trump won, but not quite as big as he might have liked. He lost Oklahoma as well as Texas to Ted Cruz, he came within 2 or 3 points of losing Virginia to Marco Rubio, he ran third in the (announced late in the evening) Minnesota caucuses which Rubio won. His best percentages were in the very different states of Alabama, with its populist tradition, and Massachusetts, with its very low number of registered Republicans. Elsewhere he got between 21 and 39 percent — good numbers, but well below 50 percent.
His delegate haul apparently was under the 300 mark that network analysts pegged as his desired amount. He has a far clearer path to the nomination than any other Republicans, but still faces some obstructions.
Trump spoke as if he was confident of winning the nomination, and made an argument that he has expanded the Republican electorate — an interesting and arguable point, which I intend to address more fully in later writings.
General election polling doesn’t support his conclusion that he would run stronger than his Republican opponents against Hillary Clinton, but it’s also undeniably true that the number of Republican voters in February contests (presaged by the number of Republican debate television viewers) has increased markedly over 2008 and 2012, and that appears to have been true in every Super Tuesday contest as well.
3. Ted Cruz, with his solid win in Texas (but well below the 50 percent he needed for all 155 delegates), paired with Oklahoma (Oklahomans I know refer to Texas as Baja Oklahoma), could state accurately that he has beaten Trump three times and no one else has beaten him once (he spoke before it was clear Marco Rubio had beaten Cruz and Trump in the Minnesota caucuses). In the 10 days since the South Carolina primary of Feb. 20, Cruz has been in the tenuous position of seeming weaker as an alternative to Trump than Marco Rubio. He made the most of his victories to argue, soberly and not at the intolerable length of his previous victory speeches, that someone else — an unnamed Marco Rubio — is now the one in the more tenuous position.
Cruz, however, chalked no more second places (Alabama, Arkansas, Minnesota) than Rubio (Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia). Rubio did better, marginally in the first two and significantly in the third, because of his strength in high-income, high-education suburbs — a demographic in which Cruz has performed weakly and which will be more important in the March 15 Michigan primary and the March 15 primaries in Florida, Ohio and Illinois.
His opponents pointed out that his initial strategy was to sweep Super Tuesday, which he failed to do.
4. Marco Rubio was said on Fox News, and I presume on other outlets, to have had a bad night, and his less than smooth evening speech reflected that — more of his criticism of Trump as a “con artist” and less of the uplift that he can do better than any of his rivals.
He fell just short of the votes he wanted and needed in Virginia, where if he had gotten just half of John Kasich’s votes he would have won, and he appears to have fallen just short of the 20 percent threshold he needed in Texas to get statewide delegates (he will presumably get some in some of the state’s 36 congressional districts, however).
This deprives him of an argument that he must have hoped he could make, that being ahead of Cruz in delegates meant he was the only viable alternative to Trump, but doesn’t deprive him of another argument, which is that he has demonstrated he can get the demographic support which makes him more viable than Cruz to put himself in that position.
Rubio is now in the tenuous position of being arguably weaker than Cruz as an alternative to Trump in the two weeks to the March 15 winner-take-all primary in Florida, which he obviously has to win to keep his candidacy viable. It’s his home state, but it has a high percentage of elderly voters, among whom Trump has run well elsewhere.
5. As I write, Kasich leads Rubio by less than 1,000 votes for second place in Massachusetts, far behind Trump, where he gets 18 percent of the votes (2 percent better than he did in New Hampshire Feb. 9) and he is finishing a close second place to Trump in Vermont, the second most Democratic state in the nation these days, where to judge from current returns less than 1 percent of the total of Super Tuesday Republican votes were cast.
I guess this gives him a pass to continue to the March 15 winner-take-all primary in his home state of Ohio, and to the March 8 primary in demographically similar Michigan on the way. And I guess you could construct a scenario in which Cruz and Rubio for various reasons both drop by the wayside, leaving Kasich as the only alternative to an increasingly appalling Donald Trump and therefore somehow amassing the 1,237 votes needed for the Republican nomination.
But I gather that the betting markets are pricing this scenario at less than 1 percent. Am I missing something?
6. Like the New Hampshire and the South Carolina primaries, the Super Tuesday results leave Donald Trump in the luxury position of having divided opposition, with several opponents having an incentive to stay in the race and direct at least some of their fire, at least inferentially, at one or more of their non-Trump opponents. Yet Trump still faces spirited and principled opposition and was able in only one state, Massachusetts, to top the percentage he won in Nevada. (Fascinating how very different states produce similar results.) The demographics in future contests may not be as favorable to win as those in the six Super Tuesday states he won. This nomination race is not over.
