In the days leading up to Super Tuesday’s primary elections, the writer’s daughter – a musician, composer and close observer of contemporary popular culture – finally helped explain the secret of Donald Trump’s success in a way that has rarely made it into normal media commentaries that have focused on Trump’s wild and crazy policy prescriptions. In this interpretation, Trump is simply translating his obviously superb skills on reality television onto the political arena. In this, he is giving the illusion of his speaking some heretofore hidden truth to his audiences (even if most of his performances have been virtually divorced from any actual discussion about real, concrete public policy issues, choices or challenges). And in fact, in that way, his presumed electoral popularity is really his success so far in translating building the equivalent of TV audience share onto the political show.

And so now we are on the cusp of discovering whether that entertaining but frightening act of transference by The Donald from television to the real world has durable staying power as voters in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia hold contests for both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans in Alaska will hold caucuses and Democrats in Colorado will hold their caucuses as well. Finally, Democrats in American Samoa are also holding their nominating contest.

As Politico described it, “ ‘Generally, “Super Tuesday” is the unofficial name for a Tuesday during the presidential primary election when the largest number of states hold their nominating contests.” On Super Tuesday, 661 Republican delegates will be allocated, based on Super Tuesday, and 865 delegates for Democrats. Politico went on to explain, “Under party rules, no state holding its primary before March 15 can do a winner-take-all allocation of delegates, meaning that all Super Tuesday states will divide up their delegates in some way. In some states, that’s close to directly proportional to voter results, whereas others have a ‘winner-take-most’ allocation structure or minimum vote thresholds for scoring delegates.”

The states are spread across the country – from Texas to Georgia, and from Minnesota to Vermont. However, many are clustered in the South and Southeast, giving rise to its nickname as the SEC primary – in honour of a university sports league, the Southeast Conference. Then, in the next two weeks, voters in two additional groups of states will also cast their ballots, giving the remaining candidates in both parties a chance to capture close to half the potential delegates for their respective nominating conventions in the period from the 1^st to the 15^th of March.

In state contests through 15 March, delegate counts will be apportioned according various formulae applying to the percentages of votes collected by the candidates in the participating states. Thereafter, many – but not all – of the remaining primaries will deliver their delegate counts in a winner-takes-all manner, a trajectory largely designed to consolidate the lead of a frontrunner who had begun to show a growing sense of inevitability in pursuing the nomination.

But events in this 2016 race for the presidency, so far at least, are truly different from the script that had been thought to be the final draft of this story by all the politicians, campaign analysts and strategists, commentators and journalists paying attention to the race, or by many voters, for that matter. As had become globally common currency, courtesy of international broadcast, print and online media, Hillary Clinton, presumed to be on her way to a putative “coronation” as the Democratic Party’s candidate, is facing a stiff challenge from the self-described democratic socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

An unlikely challenger to this heir apparent, Sanders – a septuagenarian with an unruly shock of white hair, a gravelly voice, a distinctive Brooklyn accent, and a serious passion about economic inequality, those perfidious banks and an evil Wall Street, and his calls for what he has termed a political revolution – has managed to tap into a vein of deep unease and estrangement over the state (or the future) of the economy, and a profound disquiet over Clinton’s demonstrated preference for incrementalism as a public policy choice. This has been sufficient to generate large, enthusiastic crowds and a victory in New Hampshire and near misses in Nevada and Iowa.

But South Carolina proved to be a different story. Clinton’s long-time close relationship with the African American community (a major, even majority component of current Democratic Party voters in states clear across the South) proved to be the place where Clinton made what seems to have been a breakthrough victory via that state’s primary.

As a result, South Carolina gave new encouragement to the Clinton camp that the candidate will haul in a majority of the delegate count from her so-called “Southern firewall” on 1 March. And then, similarly, the next two multi-state primary election days will virtually lock up the nomination for her, well before the party convention in late July takes place. And maybe it will.

Meanwhile, over among the squabbling children in the Republican sandbox, the outsized ego that is Donald Trump has continued to defy expectations the air would inevitably escape from his balloon, well before real electoral choices presented themselves. As the daughter explained it, instead of being forced to engage in reasonable, adult public debate, Trump’s campaign, so far at least – beyond all those hair-raising comments about Mexicans, Chinese trade, an enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin, xenophobia toward Islam and its adherents, that nasty First Amendment, and so forth – has managed to be a generally content-free state of mind, stream of consciousness verbal ramble profiling his vast ego – and id.

Trump is, in fact, an engrossing, outsized caricature of a man who claims to really “tell it like it is” – in insouciant defiance of everyone else’s slavish adherence to those boring norms, conventions (and the inevitable lies) of usual political discourse. However, such is the unease felt by many Republican voters – especially those who used to be termed Reagan Democrats or Southern white Democrats, and most particularly the less educated, lower-earning, most threatened by demographic change and the effects of economic globalization – over the state of the nation, that a billionaire property developer, a fly-by-night/bait-and-switch investment seminar operator like Donald Trump can flim-flam his way to representing the hopes and aspirations of such people. And, of course, he effectively gives voice to all their frustrations and fears as well.

His remaining real challengers, the generally unlikeable Texas Senator Ted Cruz, the relatively untested, seemingly callow Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and the charismatically challenged Ohio Governor John Kasich, have all collectively been reduced to chasing the ever-changing chimera of Donald Trump over the campaign trail. Rubio’s most recent foray into the queasy undergrowth, discussing Trump’s spray on tan and the possibility he had wet his trousers with fear in the candidate debates were all less than compelling rhetorical adventures, and probably did little to enhance his status as a likely presidential candidate with any real gravitas.

Cruz’ best (and perhaps, only) hope to stay in there is to win in his home state of Texas. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio may hope to pluck wins in Minnesota or Vermont. Realistically, however, he will probably be happy to obtain some strong second-place finishes throughout the Super Tuesday contests (and thus the delegate counts that go with that) and then to hang on for a reviving win in his home state of Florida later in March. And as for John Kasich, while he has no realistic expectations for any Super Tuesday wins, he, too, hopes to make some strong challenges in several of them, and then, similarly, to hang on till the circus moves to Ohio where he will seize a win away from Trump – importantly, in a state where the results will generate a winner-take-all delegate delivery.

Well, maybe. Or perhaps, by Wednesday morning, we will all wake up to learn Donald Trump has won convincingly across the country in all those primaries – including Texas – and that word is already leaking out that Ted Cruz is about to suspend his campaign. At that point, the growing cries of fear from such conservative and influential commentators as George Will, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Michael Gerson, as well as an entire issue of The National Review, will become a positive din. These writers, plus others will insist that for the sake of their party (and especially all those thousands of candidates down the line for Senate seats, governorships, state legislative seats, mayors, and so forth), funders, organizers, supporters and operatives must close ranks around Marco Rubio to ensure he can stay close to Trump until the convention. With enough unity, he can finally win the nomination there – even if it takes a bit of manoeuvring in the end. And back over in among the Democrats, perhaps we will learn that Hillary Clinton has rolled up a growing delegate count in states favourable to her on Super Tuesday.

Then, with other victories over the next two weeks, and added to her success in already roping in pledges from several hundred super-delegates (mostly incumbent elected office holders at all three levels of government with automatic delegate seats), she would be positioned to wrap things up by the time primaries in big states like New York, Illinois and California come around. Unless, of course, lightning strikes yet again and Bernie Sanders has surprised the odds-makers on Tuesday by sneaking past her in states such as Massachusetts, Minnesota and Virginia. If that has happened after all the ballots are cast and counted from March 1st, Hillary Clinton may, along with TS Eliot, have discovered that “April is the cruellest month”, but also May, June, and July – right through to November 2016. DM

Photo: US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures as he talks to members of the media in the spin room after the CNN Republican Presidential Primary Debate at the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music Opera House in Houston, Texas, USA, 25 February 2016. This is the final debate before the Super Tuesday elections across the country. EPA/LARRY W. SMITH.