Sometimes the most important headline is the one that doesn’t happen. Last night the Drudge Report, which has morphed into a Donald Trump campaign media outlet, was boasting about Trumps big win in Arizona and saying Utah results were coming. Then the Utah results did come in and now Drudge is reporting on the terrorist attack in Brussels. Drudge is no longer crowing about the election yesterday.
There is a reason for this. Trump did win big in Arizona, but people who were paying attention noticed something important. Donald Trump under performed in Arizona by a big margin. A lot of pundits were predicting that Trump would finally break the 50% barrier. They knew he had a huge lead in the early voting. A significant percentage of the votes in Arizona were cast long before last night. For example, Marco Rubio got 13.4% of the vote and he withdrew from the race on March 15th. Odds are almost all of those votes were cast before Rubio dropped out of the race. This means Trump had a good election result, but he did not necessarily have a good result among those who voted last night. If a candidate doesn’t start getting over 50% at some point, they are doomed to lose. Trump has yet to break that barrier. His best chance was last night and he came up short.
In addition pundits were saying that if Ted Cruz did not get 50% of the vote in Utah that he would have to drop out. They were shocked to see that Cruz got close to 70% of the vote and Trump came in third. You are going to hear more about Ted Cruz in the next two weeks than you have heard in the last six months.
It is no coincidence that Jeb Bush endorsed Cruz this morning. There is a lot of pressure from the Republican establishment demanding Kasich get out of the race. It is obvious that Kasich has zero chance of winning, but he could possibly give the nomination to Donald Trump. The Republican establishment despises Ted Cruz, but it is brutally clear that the only choice is between Cruz and Trump. Lindsey Graham said choosing between Trump and Cruz was like choosing between being shot or poisoned. The Republican establishment chose poison. They may hate Cruz, even more than they hate Trump, but they realize Cruz is up to the job. They do not think that Trump has the character or maturity to be President of the United States.
Every time Kasich or one of his surrogates is interviewed by any media outlet, the first question is whether or not Kasich is going to withdraw. The money is already disappearing. When a candidate has to explain why he is still in the hunt, he isn’t.
TDM