Virtually everyone thinks that Donald Trump is going to win today in a landslide and that this will effectively end the Republican nomination.  It would have been wiser for them to wait for actual results, because so far, in every election, Trump has underperformed in the actual election and both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have over-performed.  Contrary to what you hear on Fox News, Cruz has actually done better than Rubio.  For example in South Carolina the pre-election polls had Rubio at 18.8 and Cruz at 18.5.  The actual results were Rubio 22.5 and Cruz 22.3.  So both outperformed the polls by a significant margin and Cruz actually did slightly better than Rubio. So even if voting follows prior trends, it will be much closer than what is being reported.  In addition Trump has been hit hard over the last few days.  That may help him do even better, but it could also hurt him.  We won’t know until tonight.

But even if Trump has a huge day today, this race is far from over.  The problem is that Trump was hit with a bombshell today.  The New York State Appeals Court not only upheld some class action civil cases against Trump University, it upheld a fraud clase filed by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.  Schneiderman is a Democrat closely associated with Governor Cuomo, but this is a far cry from the Travis County grand jury indictments against Tom Delay and Rick Perry.  Regardless of the political motivation, this case has the ugly odor of truth.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-university-idUSKCN0W357N

Perhaps Ted Cruz nailed it when he said this:

“I want you to think about, if this man is the nominee, having the Republican nominee on the stand in court, being cross-examined about whether he committed fraud,” Cruz said during the debate. “You don’t think the mainstream media will go crazy on that?”

Sounds about right.  As Yogi Bera said, the opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings.  In this case, contrary to what is being reported in the media, she hasn’t even started to warm up yet.

TDM