What a difference a day makes!!!
President Obama was waiting to keep his Supreme Court nomination out of the delegate rich Super Tuesday II (or 3 as CNN calls it. No wonder we can’t all get along.) He did nominate the most qualified justice Judge Garland, who is also a centrist. Justice Garland has been vetted by Congress before and received strong support. President Obama did this just before the Congress goes home for two weeks to hear from their constituents, who, by a 2/3 majority, want President Obama’s choice to be voted on.
As we said before, Gov. Kasich winner-took-all in his home state of Ohio, keeping those 66 delegates out of Donald Trump’s basket. El Magnifico Trump winner-took-all of Florida’s 100 delegates while beating out favorite son Sen. Marco Rubio, who then had to suspend his campaign. Florida is also the second home of Donald Trump, who owns the $300 million Mar-a-Lago Club there. Voters for other candidates are effectively disenfranchised of delegates by the winner-take-all format. The only slight balm is that Trump and Kasich were near getting a majority, which in a national election would have given them all of a state’s electoral votes.
Trump has pulled out of one of those annoyingly challenging Fox News debates (in Salt Lake City), so he can’t be challenged by competitors or questioners.
The current progress of the remaining three Republican candidates toward the 1,273 needed to receive the nomination are Trump with 673, Cruz with 411, and Kasich with 143. 1,061 delegates are still to be decided on. So Trump needs another 600, and Cruz and Kasich only need an indecisive first ballot in the convention. My trusty iPhone calculator app says that Trump would need to get 57% of the remaining delegates to achieve a first ballot majority, but he typically has gotten less than 50% everywhere.
Trump has tried to kill the campaign against him by predicting that not giving him the nomination, even if he is 20 or 100 short, would lead to riots. 100 short may be generous, since that means he would still have to get 500 votes out of 1061, or 47%, his previous maximum range.
The Missouri Republican party voted that of Missouri’s 52 delegates, with Trump at 40.8% and Cruz at 40.6%, Trump has received 37 delegates, and Cruz 15. This means that Trump won the 9 at large WTA delegates plus the 3 party delegates. He then won 5 districts with 5 each, and Cruz won 3 districts with 5 each. (What a great system where a 0.2% lead can give you a factor of 2.5 in delegates. That’s a leveraging factor of over 1200.)
