Republicans Answer the Question, “‘Hoosier’ Nominee?”
Donald J. Trump effectively became the Republican nominee for President of the United States by winning the Indiana primary, last night. Gathering more than 53% of the Republican votes cast in the Hoosier State, and at least fifty-one of the state’s fifty-seven delegates, Trump swept all but a few counties in Indiana. Despite the last-minute machinations of his principal rival, Ted Cruz, who struck a dubious deal with John Kasich to cease his own campaign in the state, and who named his would-be running mate, Carly Fiorina, a week before the balloting, Cruz’s campaign came to a bitter conclusion following the results in Indiana.
In winning the state, Trump’s delegate total now stands at 1047, compared to Cruz’s 565, Marco Rubio’s 171 and John Kasich’s 153. Faced with the mathematical certainty that there is no way for Ted Cruz to win the requisite 1237 delegates, the Texas senator suspended his campaign prior to Trump’s post-primary address. In that address, Trump acknowledged the senator’s tenacity, intelligence and competitiveness in waging the challenge to his own primacy in the Republican race. While Cruz fell short, far short, in supporting the inevitable Republican ticket, his suspension of his campaign cemented “the Donald’s” efficacy in winning the race to the Republican nomination. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, confirmed this in a tweet indicating for the first time, that Trump will be the GOP’s presumptive nominee and the need for the party to unite and focus on defeating Hillary Clinton in the general election this fall.
Such a plea for unity fell on deaf ears to some of the establishment Republicans, such as National Review Editor Rich Lowry and one of his contributors, Katie Pavlich, who joined together in unleashing their utter contempt for Trump on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News post-election coverage. No doubt they will be joined by Arizona Senator John McCain, 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, Washington Post columnist George Will and other so-called conservatives in effectively supporting Hillary Clinton, by continuing their diatribe against Trump.
Meanwhile, Ohio Governor John Kasich is determined to continue his hapless campaign to secure a nomination in a contested convention that will not happen, come July. Through his surrogates, Kasich indicated that he “won’t quit until someone has 1,237 bound delegates…,” and promised to continue his run through the California primary on June 7th. In winning only his home state, and having won even fewer delegates than either Cruz or Rubio, Kasich will ultimately manage to achieve nothing more than a besmirched ending to his own political career, by remaining in a race that has already been won.
Trump’s presumptive rival in the fall campaign, Hillary Clinton, lost her bid in Indiana with a surprise win by her own Democrat challenger, Bernie Sanders, who outpolled the former Secretary of State by a full five percentage points. With merely 282 pledged delegates separating the two Democrat candidates, Clinton’s inevitability to win her party’s nomination is only ensured by her supremacy in garnering 1,682 “super delegates” to Sander’s 39. Such is the reality of a Democrat race that was already fixed before it began. She’ll face further challenges in West Virginia and Kentucky, where her stated opposition to coal mining has alienated voters in those two states whose primary elections are slated for May 10th and May 17th, respectively.
No one ever dreamed that in 2016, the Republicans would sew up their nomination prior to the Democrats, nor did anyone imagine that the first-time candidate, businessman Donald Trump, would eventually prevail to be that nominee. While all of the pundits will spend the next six months in trying to convince Americans that there is no way Trump can win the fall election, it is well worth remembering that these same pundits were the very same ones who cast such doubts on Trump’s chances to win the nomination, in the first place.
-Drew Nickell, 3 May 2016
© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.