Republicans now have a presumptive nominee — one who is headed to a clear majority of delegates with no observable opposition — faster than Democrats. It’s another way this year’s presidential race has defied expectations and ignored precedent.
Donald Trump will now have 10 months to hold a convention in Cleveland, while Hillary Clinton must spend the next four weeks campaigning against Bernie Sanders in 10 primaries and the North Dakota primary.
Clinton will then be the presumptive Democratic nominee. But if the Democrats had followed the Republican delegate allocation rules, she would have been the nominee two months ago.
Trump, despite his complaints about a “rigged” nominating process, actually used the process to his advantage. His celebrity and $2 billion in media coverage allowed him to win the early elections in a 17-candidate field with minorities.
The same 36 percent that gave Trump victory in Michigan left him far behind just one competitor in nearby Ohio. Overall, Trump won just 38 percent of the popular vote in February and March, but winner-take-all and similar rules he later criticized gave him 47 percent of the delegates.
There is an uncanny similarity between the patterns of support for the two parties’ candidates. Both Trump and Clinton received their fundamental support from the most downtrodden (and in the general election, the most true) voters of their parties.
Blacks, especially Southern blacks, produced almost all of Clinton’s popular vote advantage over Bernie Sanders. Whites without a college degree produced the highest percentage of the vote for Trump. “I love the uneducated!” he exclaimed after winning in uneducated Nevada.
Trump and Clinton also appeared to fare worst among groups high in what scholars Robert Putnam and Charles Murray call social connectedness, or social capital. Trump was particularly frail among Mormons and German Americans with social connections, and sturdy in areas with high opioid addiction. Both fared worse in primaries that favor social connectedness than in primaries.
After Ted Cruz defeated Trump in Wisconsin on April 5, it seemed that Trump might not win a majority of 1,237 delegates. At that point, he repeatedly charged that the process was unfair. The candidate with the “most” votes, regardless of whether it was a majority, should be nominated, he said; exit polls showed most Republicans agreeing. As for the Cruz campaign’s efforts to pick favorable delegates and the Cruz-Kasich partnership to split states — unfair!
Attitudes have clearly changed. Voters preferred the clarity of Trump’s nomination to the uncertainty of a contentious convention. Before mid-April, Trump had never received 50 percent. He hasn’t received less since. On April 19 and 26, he outperformed his poll numbers for the first time in six Northeastern states in the primaries. But that can be ignored; like Clinton, he did best in the Northeast and the South.
Indiana was a different story this week. Trump won 53 percent there, 12 to 18 points more than in other Midwestern primaries; by comparison, Indiana Democrats gave Bernie Sanders his sixth Midwestern victory. Republican opinion has clearly shifted toward Trump. Ted Cruz, who was counting on winning Indiana, and John Kasich, who won only seven counties outside his home state of Ohio, both dropped out of the race.
Trump’s success in improving his standing with Republicans over the past six weeks raises the question of whether he can do the same with general election voters over the next six months.
There’s certainly plenty of room for improvement. Current polling averages show him trailing Clinton 47 percent to 41 percent, and the latest poll shows him trailing 54 percent to 41 percent. About two-thirds of voters have negative feelings about him, including larger shares of women and millennials.
The standard analysis says these are losing numbers, and that a high-profile candidate will have a tough time turning them around. That’s likely. But Hillary Clinton also has high (around 55 percent) unfavorable numbers and even lower numbers on integrity. The results of several recent polls in target states look like the tight partisan divide that has dominated for two decades, not a Democratic landslide.
Much may depend on turnout. Contrary to popular belief, Democratic turnout has been withering during the Obama presidency, and unlike in 2008, turnout this year has been higher in Republican primaries than in Democratic primaries. In almost every election, Clinton has received fewer votes than she (or Obama) did in 2008. Sanders has swept up votes from youthful voters, suggesting that many of them may not show up to vote in the fall.
Clinton is still the favorite. But Trump has shown he can disrupt political systems, and he will try to do so again.
