You can thank my tablet.
Yep, the wife and I are headed down to Sanibel next week, daughter’s family might join us in a little condo on the beach. It’ll be tight, but staying home isn’t an option. We just can’t get enough of Florkda.
Oh, he’ll hang in there until Florkda. 
Or maybe not - one way to avoid the ignominy of getting trounced in his home state would be to beat a very brave retreat and throw in the towel now, rather than waiting until March 16.
And certainly the Kentucky and Louisiana results give some fuel to Cruz’ argument that Rubio should drop out so that Cruz can beat Trump one-on-one.
Hell, even Kasich can start making that argument: a new ARG poll, taken Friday and Saturday, shows Kasich up by 2 in Michigan. ARG isn’t the best of pollsters, but it’s the only one taken since Thursday night’s debate, and if it’s even close to right, Kasich’s chances of winning Michigan would go way up if Rubio dropped out.
And Kasich really needs to start picking up delegates before Ohio to be viable: after March 15, even if he wins Ohio, he’ll only have ~100 delegates with half of them already allocated, if he doesn’t win some other delegates before and on March 15.
Of course, now that Trump’s joined in with the demanding that Rubio should drop out so that Trump and Cruz can duke it out, one-on-one, Rubio’s gonna look awfully bad if he does so. He almost has to stay in now, because this race has become all about manhood and stuff.
I agree that, as for Rubio’s candidacy bid, time to put a flork in it. He’s done.
The establishment will want Rubio to stick around, if only to drain support for the Trumpster. Anything to make him lose the first ballot of the convention.
I think draining support to a candidate with that little support might actually help Trump in some states. If Rubio gets 17% and the threshold for delegates is 20%, that’s a good thing for Trump.
Yeah, but I have to wonder if Rubio is actually doing that. Seems to me that most of Rubio’s votes would go to Cruz and Kasich. If Rubio could win Florida, then he’d have a case for staying in, but it’s not looking good for him.
Here’s the counts from last night, per AP via Google, in Trump-Cruz-Rubio-Kasich order:
Kansas: 9-24-6-1
Kentucky: 16-14-7-6
Louisiana: 15-14-0-0
Maine: 9-12-0-2
Total: 49-64-13-9.
FWIW, Green Papers differs slightly on Kentucky and Louisiana, showing the following:
Kentucky: 17-15-7-7
Louisiana: 18-17-0-0, with 5 uncommitted delegates, and 6 Congressional district delegates TBD.
Anyhow: A very good night for Cruz, because he showed he can win primaries beyond the South. While I don’t think his Maine win points towards anything in particular, having won Oklahoma and Kansas suggests that he should do well in the rest of the Plains states, and probably in much of the mountain West.
A kind of so-so night for Trump, but one he can live with if he does well on Tuesday.
A pathetic night for Rubio. It’s really Florkda or bust for him, and even if he wins there, he needs to prove he can win states other than his home state and the states Mondale won in 1984.
And a signs-of-life night for Kasich, but that really has more to do with that ARG poll of Michigan than anything else. As with Rubio in Florida, Ohio by itself won’t be enough. Michigan is proportional among those who clear 15%, and at 50% it turns into WTA.
If Kasich can win Michigan, he’s the Establishment lane anti-Trump until Rubio does some winning of his own. (And DC next weekend, completing the sweep of Mondale states, doesn’t count. Nor does Puerto Rico today.) There’s a path for Kasich to win several hundred delegates once Rubio drops out, IF he starts winning on Tuesday.
Except in Kansas, Trump’s numbers stayed consistent around the 35% mark. The other times Trump went below 30%, it was in other caucus states like Kansas.
This means that Cruz is cutting into Rubio supporters. Rubio’s plan of mocking Trump probably backfired against him. While Rubio was playing his childish games, Cruz and Kasich were talking about their policies. Kasich came across as the moderate choice and Cruz as the hardcore conservative choice.
Where does that leave Rubio? The only argument he seems to have going is that he can do well against Clinton and he’s slightly more conservative than Kasich, but not really conservative. He’s sort of in a nebulous policy area between Kasich and Cruz that no one really cares about. His numbers are dropping sharply and his voters are going to Cruz (and maybe Kasich).
This is what concerns me. The media has been freaking out about Trump so much, their coverage of Cruz, Rubio and Kasich has painted them as moderates. If that image were to carry over into a general election that would be a very bad thing for the Democrats.
I don’t think they’ve painted Cruz as a moderate, nor do I think they would be able to convince themselves to even try to do so if he were the nominee. But they’ve painted Rubio and Kasich as Reasonable Republicans, and Kasich as a moderate, from the get-go, and would have continued to do so whether or not Trump ever jumped in.
I can feel the sun setting on Rubio’s campaign. Even if he wins in Florida on 3/15, he still needs to have some nontrivial wins somewhere else. He won Minnesota on Super Tuesday, and next weekend he’s likely to win D.C., winning everything Mondale won in 1984. 
Plus he’s expected to win Puerto Rico today, and for all I know he might win Hawaii on Tuesday.
And I just don’t see where he’s going to win going forward. My guess is that Cruz will dominate the Plains states and the mountain West, and depending on what happens with Kasich over the next nine days, either Trump and Kasich will split most of the Northeast and Midwest, or Trump will dominate that part of the country. And after March 15, the South will have all voted. Maybe he can win on the West Coast, but they’re a long way off - Oregon’s 5/17, Washington’s 5/24, and California is 6/7.
I really think Kasich is the GOP’s only hope to derail Trump, and in the next 9 days, we’ll see if he can do that. Michigan this Tuesday will be the first telltale.
Delegate update (Dem only):
Before yesterday, Clinton had 596 and Sanders 407 (189) margin. Clinton needed 47% of all remaining pledged delegates to clinch, and Sanders needed 53%.
After, Clinton has 651, Sanders 456 (195 margin.) Clinton still needs 47% of all remaining pledged delegates to clinch, and Sanders needs 53%. So the status is largely unchanged. Clinton slightly increased her margin, which means if Sanders wins Maine as expected he probably will at best only reduce it down to where it was before 3/5.
Mississippi and Michigan vote Tuesday, and Clinton will win Mississippi similarly to how she’s won Louisiana or other Deep South states with high black population. Michigan has been insanely heavily targeted by the Sanders campaign, but there were three polls done last week and they had Clinton +17, Clinton +11 and Clinton +24. The FiveThirtyEight projection using its polls-plus model is 60-37.5 for Clinton, or 58.5-38.9 using its polls-only model.
The reality is the numerate have correctly said Sanders is forked since Super Tuesday, but Michigan would be a bad “perception” loss for him, especially if he loses by double digits. It hits directly at his claimed strategy of taking it to Hillary outside of the South (i.e., being able to reverse her wins there with big wins in Northern/Western states), and also questions how much personal campaigning by Sanders can move the needle in some of the larger states. The Sanders campaign doesn’t even contest most of the States where he knows he will lose badly (which game theory wise makes no sense in a delegate contest, gaining margin in Georgia or Texas is just as important as focusing on states you might win), and if he’s not building margin in all of the states he does contest even the most die hard Sanders fans will have to admit he is done.
Broadly it does seem, like the Clinton campaign criticized Sanders for after Super Tuesday, that they’re running a state campaign, not a delegate campaign. And you can’t win that way.
Nope. It’s way too late. It’s over, and the party’s only hope now is to work out an accommodation with Trump, adopting him as their candidate in return for some presidentializing of his image.
Kasich is only in the conversation today because he hasn’t dropped out yet. He’s done nothing so far and has no resources to do anything, other than whatever good will he’s built up in Ohio.
That makes sense with Kasich. Lots of people want him to quit because they believe him dropping out will stop Trump, but they forget he’s not playing a game called “stop Trump” he’s playing a game called “Win the Presidency”. Dropping out does nothing to help him win that game.
His plan, and only real shot, is to win Ohio, hopefully some otherget to the convention and have a brokered convention. One of the great ironies is that while Donald Trump is the only one of the four running(except maybe Cruz) that can win the first ballot, he is also the only one of the four who can’t win after the first ballot. Every other one can make a case why the delegates go for them whereas anyone not going for Trump now isn’t going for him later on.
His only shot is to get all the candidates and leaders and say “Look, you guys don’t want Ted because the establishment doesn’t like him almost as much as they’re scared of Donald and Hillary can demonize him. Marco, ok he jumped on a grenade for everyone and made Donald look bad, but he damaged his brand and that will hurt him in the general and beyond that, words alone can’t describe how much Donald hates him. Donald doesn’t like getting humiliated and if Marco is given the nomination, Donald will throw a temper tantrum and immediately run as a third party candidate just to give us and Marco the finger. As for me, well I do well in the polls against Hillary, I’m seen as the adult, I have the best reputation in the media and will be the hardest to demonize. Oh, and in case you’ve forgotten, every winning President has won Ohio except Kennedy. Guess what state I’m the governor of!”
Marco, if he wins Florida, will also be in it for the long haul for similar reasons.
Do you think he wants to win? He’s 75 years old. I think he got into this to do exactly what he’s been successful doing - bring the party a little left, raise some issues to importance that a Clinton cakewalk would have pushed aside.
I suspect he thinks “if this were eight years ago and I was 68, I’d make a push - this is going better than I expected, and I’m winning hearts and getting young people involved - but I’m not up to being President for the next four years.”
Rubio made a huge tactical error: He went after Trump in the most juvenile way, which played into the narrative that he’s too young and inexperienced to be President. He’s actually not that young, but he looks and acts younger than he is. His spats with Trump made him look like a college kid, and that just destroyed whatever gravitas he had been trying to build.
Cruz, on the other hand, went after Trump more intellectually on policy and using debate tactics like getting his opponent to set himself up for a zinger to be delivered later. That played into his brand, and made him look better while knocking Trump down a peg or two.
We’ll see. Maybe the ARG poll showing Kasich up by 2 in Michigan is way off base. (I admit my faith in ARG isn’t very strong. They could be right this time, but I wouldn’t bet serious money on an ARG poll.) If that’s the case, then you’re right.
But if ARG has caught a major shift in Michiganders’ sentiments in the wake of Thursday night’s debate (the poll was taken Friday and Saturday), and Kasich wins Michigan, then it’s game on. Because if that happens, he’ll surely win Ohio next week, and will have an excellent chance to pick up Illinois at the same time. After that, his billionaire backer will have plenty of time to help him pull together a campaign before the serious action resumes with the New York primary on April 19.
A large proportion of Sanders supporters are very strongly anti-Hillary. I don’t think they can turn around and vote for her in the general. Though I will. But not till November.
If that’s true, then the GOP’s top priority should be to suppress Sanders supporters turnout by nominating someone as unthreatening as possible who will cause Democratic voters to default to their normal apathetic state.
Nominate Cruz and I think Sanders voters come out big for Clinton.
*Current Affairs *editor Nathan Robinson wrote a well reasoned, well informed essay about specifically why Hillary’s political weaknesses make her especially vulnerable to Trump’s political strengths. He argues that this makes Bernie Sanders a more effective candidate against Trump (but not, say, Cruz or Rubio).
I think he makes some good points. I said so to my uncle (who had sent me the essay) – and he said that Sanders would be “less corrupt(ible) than Hillary – or Obama.” That’s where I stopped agreeing with him.
So, two points: 1. Read the essay – it’s good food for thought; 2. My uncle’s last statement is an example of just the over-the-top anti-Hillaryness among many Sanders supporters that Rick Kitchen was talking about.