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US 2016: Indiana primary seals fate of Cruz, Kasich, Republican Party – and maybe the country

US 2016: Indiana primary seals fate of Cruz, Kasich, Republican Party – and maybe the country

This 2016 American election has already had more potholes, unexpected bumps, twists, turns and blind curves than an unmaintained mountain trail, and the latest events have virtually guaranteed Donald Trump will face Hillary Clinton for the US presidency this year. A rather flabbergasted J. BROOKS SPECTOR reviews the events since voting began in the Indiana primary election.

The first half of America’s extended quadrennial electoral moment to choose its next president has now drawn to a close – with something of a snarl. With the choices made by the voters in the Midwestern state of Indiana primary, it has become an almost inevitable certainty – once the July national party nominating conventions officially confirm this – that former Secretary of State, former Senator, and former First Lady Hillary Clinton will face the iconoclastic (and bombastic, wild and crazy) property developer/reality television personality Donald Trump to see who becomes the next American president.

While the Democratic half of this equation had been assumed to be as much of a lock as anything could be in politics for more than a year, Hillary Clinton has actually been dragged into a gruelling race against an unexpected opponent, independent Democratic-Socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. In fact, Sanders, rather than just being an amusing but ultimately quixotic old codger of a challenger, has managed to be a canny, adroit competitor who has fired up the imagination of the leftward reaches of the Democratic Party.

In this latest primary, in Indiana, he again gained a majority of the votes cast, casting an awkward pall over the Clinton march towards the nomination. The result this time is that pledged Indiana delegates will be split almost half and half between the two candidates, although from that result, Clinton still moves that much closer to holding a majority of the total delegates.

Still, this Indiana victory reinforced the Sanders campaign’s belief there was still life in their champion’s situation – as the last month of primaries come into view. The primary elections end with the major delegate hauls from California and New Jersey up for grabs, as well as those of North and South Dakota, Montana, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia on 7 June, as well as somewhat lesser numbers in Kentucky, Oregon, West Virginia, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, available between now and 5 June.

On the Democratic side, a candidate is assured of a first ballot victory if he or she has assembled 2,383 pledged delegates from among all the primary and caucus races, as well as from the super-delegates – largely elected officials and party office-holders. Following the Indiana results, Clinton now holds 2,220 delegates (including 520 super-delegates), versus Sanders’ total of 1,449 (including 39 super-delegates). For the purpose of the convention ballot, super-delegates would only be counted if a candidate failed to cross the finish line on the basis of elected delegates.

Accordingly, Clinton now needs fewer than 200 delegates from among all of the remaining primaries to be assured of a convention nomination – assuming all super-delegates supporting her stay with her, of course. Still, Sanders insists he remains in it till the end, and the Clinton campaign still has a tough road ahead to consolidate the full range of Democratic voters behind her, given the fervour that so many young people have felt for the unexpectedly successful candidacy of Bernie Sanders – as well as the potency of his economic ideals, even if not the practicality or economic detail and reality of the plans he has offered in support of those ideals.

On the Republican side of things, meanwhile, with 1,237 delegates needed to clinch their nomination, Donald Trump, by virtue of his clean sweep of the Indiana delegate total, now holds 1,048 delegates selected from primaries and caucuses, along with 41 super-delegates, after winning all of the 51 Indiana delegates. As a result, he, too, is close to the goal of officially clinching the nomination with the GOP.

Until Wednesday’s surprises, Senator Ted Cruz was holding 566 pledged delegates and 20 Republican super-delegates; Ohio Governor John Kasich had 153; and the already inactive candidate, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, still had 173 delegates. Rubio had earlier dropped out of the nomination hunt. Following his disastrous showing in Indiana, Cruz announced he too was putting his campaign on hold – a polite way of saying he had surrendered to the inevitability of a Trump nomination. And by midday, Kasich had followed suit as well, making the final run of primary votes a mere formality among Republicans since there was effectively only one candidate left.

The collapse of both the Cruz and Kasich candidacies and the evident meltdown of their semi-alliance for each to refrain from contesting in the remaining states where the other had a chance, in order to hold off an outright win by Trump, also signalled an end to any real strength in the old Republican establishment – with their stately “wait your turn” style that had largely defined GOP presidential politics for many elections.

The Trump ascendency also marks the demise – at least for this electoral cycle – of any real sense that “red meat conservative” politics with its messages of cutting taxes and government spending, as well as old-style internationalist Republicanism, will have pride of place in the GOP’s approach to voters. In place of either of these more traditional ideological positions among Republicans, this time around there is the jumble of ideas being propounded by Trump. His grab bag of policies includes his “America first” unpredictability in international affairs, his aggressiveness towards China on trade questions, and a visceral hostility towards Muslims and Mexicans, together with expanding Social Security and other social services – but cutting taxes.

As discussed previously in this space, Trump’s unanticipated success appears to have derived from a combination of appeals not made to American voters for many years – perhaps not since the populism of William Jennings Bryan in the late 19th century and early 20th. Many potential supporters warmed to his message as an assertive challenge to the seemingly inevitable demographic shifts in America that appears to be moving towards creation of a nation where the traditional white majority profile comes under challenge. Others seemed reassured by his stance that he would fight back against the globalisation shifting jobs abroad (or abolishing them outright from a new wave of automation).

And then too, Trump demonstrated an absolute mastery of gaining hours and hours of free airtime from the media that flocked to him like moths to a lit candle in the evening. This was a talent that underscored media skills gleaned from years hosting a popular reality TV show. With these taken together, he thoroughly shook up the old GOP cocktail, keeping all challengers off balance – until none remained.

Still, it is possible to make too much of his appeal reaching deeply into a frightened, angry, job-losing underclass. Looking at exit poll survey data brought together by Nate Silver at his 538 website, his latest analysis noted, “the definition of ‘working class’ and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump’s voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.”

Perhaps, then, it is better to say Trump’s appeal resonated with those who felt threatened, even if they had not yet actually been in the crosshairs of those changes – but where they believed they were next in line.

Meanwhile, just before the voting took place in Indiana, Donald Trump had already managed to send the level of the campaign discourse to what must surely have been a new, all-time low. In a truly astonishing moment, Trump embraced a story from that notorious supermarket checkout counter scandal sheet, The National Enquirer, which purported to identify a man in an old photograph as Ted Cruz’s father, walking in tandem with Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated President Kennedy on 22 November 1963. Up until that moment, there is apparently no record of that publication ever having been quoted by a presidential candidate on the campaign trail. Ever.

Previously, Trump had been active in assigning derogatory sobriquets to his opponents that seemed to define them, as with “Lyin’ Ted”, “Little Marco” (Rubio) and “Low Energy” Jeb Bush. Now, in his more recent speeches, he has begun extending this pattern to the presumed Democratic candidate, calling her “Crooked Hillary”. But this National Enquirer headline grab is something altogether new and appalling for the democratic process – even beyond the work of media Svengalis like Lee Atwater or Karl Rove. Angry and nonplussed, after that attack, Cruz held a just-before-the-voting media conference where he railed about Trump’s antics, snarling in a joke that fell rather flat that now he would be forced to confess to having killed Kennedy and burying Jimmy Hoffa. But none of this seems to have mattered to an Indiana electorate. They went with Trump, regardless.

In explaining Cruz’s defeat in Indiana, Brookings Institution scholar Elaine Kamarck wrote on Wednesday, “In his speech after his defeat in Indiana, Cruz harkened back repeatedly to the last contested Republican convention. That took place 40 years ago. Ronald Reagan, darling of the conservative movement, fought for the nomination all the way to the convention. In the end he lost to incumbent President Gerald Ford. His withdrawal was gracious and classy and four years later he won the nomination and the general election. No doubt Cruz was thinking something like that might happen to him too. There are serious doubts about Donald Trump’s ability to win a general election. And Cruz, as he almost tearfully quoted Reagan, was no doubt thinking that his future in 2020 could be like Reagan’s was in 1980.

But there are three problems with that hope. First, as my colleague Bill Galston wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, it’s not at all clear that today’s Republican Party will be the party of Reagan. And it’s certainly not at all clear that the 2020 Republican Party will be the party of Cruz. In fact the big demographic changes sweeping the country mean that America in 2020 is certain to be a very different place than it was 40 years before.

Second, the tactic of naming Carly Fiorina as his vice-presidential running mate will have to go down as one of the most bone-headed decisions since, well, Ronald Reagan announced he would put the Republican liberal, Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, on the ticket as his running mate. The move backfired on Reagan since his hardcore supporters were appalled at the choice of a liberal. And for Cruz, the idea that putting a woman on the ticket to make him more palatable against a probable Hillary Clinton candidacy was just ridiculous.… Giving up the VP card before Cleveland constitutes a major case of political malpractice.

Finally, the Cruz campaign understood that the nomination isn’t over until the delegates voted and in many states they played a very savvy delegate game. But to really get delegates to vote against the voters in the primaries, a candidate needs to be liked, if not loved, by the other leaders of the party. That was not one of Ted Cruz’s strengths, to say the least. In fact just this week the former speaker of the House, John Boehner, called Cruz ‘Lucifer’, stating, ‘I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.’ Ted Cruz’s strategy of working hard to be disliked inside the Beltway in order to be liked outside the Beltway was a costly strategy for someone seeking a presidential nomination the old-fashioned way.”

Now, with the deck cleared among Republicans – and seemingly almost at that same point among Democrats – Trump and Clinton are already well into thinking about how they will carry their respective struggles over from being intra-party ones to becoming one between the two of them instead. Given Trump’s rhetorical track record so far this year, analysts and commentators are already predicting this race will be one of the most mean-spirited, vicious, personal attack-mode campaigns in modern history – and it will play out in speeches, debates, via social media and broadcast advertising by the respective campaigns and surrogate superPACs to the tune of well over a billion dollars, each.

Ultimately, given what has been seen already, this may mean that much of what comes next will need to carry “PG” parental guidance labels, making American television unsafe for sensitive viewers and younger children until 9 November. Parents may want to hold onto the TV remote rather tightly for the next six and half months, just in case. DM

Photo: Businessman and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures as he speaks at a campaign rally at the Century Center in South Bend, Indiana, USA, 02 May 2016. EPA/TANNEN MAURY

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