Trump and the Ultimate Sweep
There are sweeps, and then again, there are sweeps.
In 1966, the Baltimore Orioles swept the World Series, winning four games against the heavily-favored Los Angeles Dodgers to surprise the baseball-watching experts who had predicted otherwise. Imagine for a moment that the Orioles had done so, while shutting out the Dodgers, to boot. In such a case, baseball pundits would still be talking about such a series, fifty years later.
Such is the magnitude of Donald Trump’s sweep of the five-state primary election held yesterday. Not only did “the Donald” sweep all five contests, in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, but he also ran the table in all of the one hundred seven counties that comprise these five states…an amazing feat, indeed.
In at least two of the states, Trump managed to exceed 60% of the Republican votes cast- this in a three-way race between Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich. To win 60% in a two-man race is sufficiently difficult to do, at best. To do so in a three-way race is nothing short of absolute annihilation.
Considering the fact that the mainstream media, both of the Democrats still running, the other two remaining Republican contestants and much of the establishment Republicans, have joined together in sharpening their knives against the Republican front-runner, Trump’s astonishing victory under such unified opposition is all-the-more incredible considering the deck thus stacked against him.
This result came within forty-eight hours of an announcement by the Cruz and Kasich campaigns that they would cooperate with one another to stop Trump short of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination, prior to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, later this summer. Essentially under the pact, Kasich would cease campaign operations in Indiana, while Cruz would cease campaigning in New Mexico and Oregon, all in an effort to consolidate the anti-Trump vote in those three states. Considering the fact that Cruz and Kasich couldn’t be further apart, philosophically speaking, each candidate essentially struck a deal with their respective devils, in a desperate attempt to thwart the will of the voters whose intentions were made quite clear in the most recent results.
Dealing with the devil has a way of eventually biting one’s infernal regions, and both Kasich and Cruz felt the bite in a big way, last night. If Cruz fails to beat Trump in Indiana next Tuesday, then Trump has an exceedingly good chance to gain the requisite delegates prior to the convention, and the pipe dream that is Kasich’s (and now, Cruz’s) for a contested convention goes up in smoke.
What’s the media to do, faced with such un-deniability? Look for their talking heads to spend the next five months trying to convince the American voters that there is no way that Donald Trump can defeat Hillary Clinton, and all of the pollsters will be in cahoots with this premise to try to validate this as fact. The funny thing is that these same pollsters and pundits once predicted that Trump’s support among Republican voters would never, never top 35%…that is, until Trump managed to do so in more states than Ted Cruz and John Kasich have actually won.
That “Trump Train” just keeps chugging along, much to the dismay of those who dream in vain, otherwise. Call Trump the “Little Choo-Choo That Could.”
-Drew Nickell, 27 April 2016
© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.