Wisconsin's GOP Primary Revealed a Great Deal Last Night
Dang. The final RealClearPolitics average of the polls in Wisconsin had Ted Cruz ahead of Donald Trump, 39 percent to 35 percent -- influenced, in part, by a late American Research Group poll putting Trump well ahead, 42 percent to 32 percent. Actual results? Cruz 48 percent, Trump 35 percent. "ARG!" indeed. It looks like a 36 to 6 delegate split in favor of Cruz. Our Tim Alberta calculates that Trump now needs to win roughly 60 percent of all remaining delegates to hit 1,237 on June 7, the final day of primary voting. Pollster John Couvillon notices, "The Trump percentage (35 percent) was less than his showing in neighboring Illinois (39 percent) and Michigan (37 percent). This suggests that his support has reached a ceiling -- and that ceiling is less than 50 percent . . . Speaking of 'viable competitor', John Kasich only won 14 percent of the Wisconsin vote. Which was a noticeable downtick from his support in previously conducted contests in next door Illinois and Michigan -- he got 24 percent of the vote in both states." For anti-Trump folks, Kasich may be useful to keep around if he can keep Trump's proportion of the vote lower in places like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and so on. But let's note that Marco Rubio suspended his campaign March 15; since then Arizona, Utah, and Wisconsin have voted . . . and Rubio is still a half-million votes ahead of Kasich. (Marco Rubio got more than 10,000 votes in Wisconsin last night.) Trump responded to the defeat in his trademark manner: not appearing before the cameras, and insisting that Cruz's victory doesn't really count because his opponents lie and that it's not fair that the popular Republican governor endorsed his chief rival. "Donald J. Trump withstood the onslaught of the establishment yet again," according to the statement. "Lyin' Ted Cruz had the Governor of Wisconsin, many conservative talk radio show hosts, and the entire party apparatus behind him. Not only was he propelled by the anti-Trump Super PAC's spending countless millions of dollars on false advertising against Mr. Trump, but he was coordinating with his own Super PAC's (which is illegal) who totally control him. Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet -- he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump." (Yeah. Because when you think "establishment," you think Ted Cruz.) By the way, how low are we setting the bar for "withstood the onslaught"? If it's down to "Trump didn't quit the race," then yes, he did that. You'll notice Trump accuses Cruz of a crime -- again -- but offers no evidence. You may recall he accused Cruz of coordinating on the infamous ad featuring a photo of Melania Trump put out by an independent Super PAC. Trump also contended that the Iowa Caucus results should be "nullified" because of Cruz's "fraud." But then again, he insisted that the guy who rushed the stage in Dayton, Ohio had "ties to ISIS." And he suggested former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields could have had a "pen bomb." He claimed his infamous interview with Chris Matthews wasn't "run on television [in its entirety] because it was too long" and that the network "cut out" his answers. The judge in his Trump University case -- who Trump emphasizes to audiences is Hispanic -- "has treated me very, very unfairly." If someone keeps insisting he sees terrible crimes around him all the time, and accusing people of these crimes without evidence . . . at what point can that person be diagnosed with paranoid delusional disorder? Hillary's Campaign: We'll Unite Our Party Later Republican problems are doing a thorough job of obscuring the fact that the Democrats are a hot mess. The party's allegedly-inevitable nominee has now lost six straight contests to Bernie Sanders. Last night he won solidly, 56 percent to 43 percent. He's probably going to win Wyoming's caucuses on Saturday, too. Our John Fund notices . . . Not only did she lose to Bernie Sanders by a double-digit margin, but exit polls showed she even narrowly lost female voters to him. A majority of Democrats cited either income inequality (30 percent) or health care (22 percent) as their most important issue. Clinton lost those focused on inequality by 2 to 1 and also lost voters who were most interested in health care, once considered her signature issue. What's her team's answer? Go negative! The Hillary Clinton campaign has "lost patience" and will start going after Sen. Bernard Sanders much harder and hoping to destroy his campaign, CNN reported Tuesday night. In a report after Mrs. Clinton's latest defeat at the hands of the Vermont socialist, reporter Jeff Zeleny said the Clinton campaign has decided that party unity can come later. In the meantime, she will go after Mr. Sanders hard on issues such as gun control in the next two weeks before the New York primary, Mr. Zeleny said. Her first swing this morning: Sanders had just told an interviewer that he was iffy about raising money for down-ballot Democrats, so I asked Clinton the obvious question: Did she think Sanders is a real Democrat? "Well, I can't answer that," she said with a smile. Then she proceeded to answer the question. "He's a relatively new Democrat, and, in fact, I'm not even sure he is one. He's running as one. So I don't know quite how to characterize him." Sure, there's always time to unite the party later . . . until the day there isn't. Don't Bring a Media-Focused Campaign to a Party-Convention Delegate Fight A point or two to add to yesterday's article on the claim Ted Cruz is "stealing" delegates that belong to Donald Trump . . . The rules for each state's delegation are set by each state's party, and clear enough if you bother to look them up. In Trump's defense, the rules can vary a lot from state to state. The key is the difference between the delegates that are won (through the primary results) and the delegates that are selected, usually through party meetings at the county, district, or state level. Sometimes a campaign gets to pick the delegates themselves, like in California. Under the rules, California delegates are bound on the first two ballots or until the candidate releases them. This means a campaign can appoint their most die-hard loyalists and know they'll be sticking with the candidate, no matter how many ballots the convention decision reaches. In states where the delegates are elected through local caucuses and at the state convention, it may not be the case. For example, in Iowa, Republicans in each county met March 12 to select representatives to congressional district meetings; this Saturday those representatives meet to select delegates to the state convention. At the state convention May 31, the representatives select the 30 delegates who will go to the national convention in Cleveland. No matter who gets selected to attend, on the first ballot in Cleveland, the Iowa delegation must give 8 votes to Ted Cruz, 7 votes to Donald Trump, 7 votes to Marco Rubio, 3 votes to Ben Carson, and one each to Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich and Mike Huckabee. On the first ballot, a delegate could end up casting a vote for a candidate he can't stand. But after that first ballot, under Iowa state GOP rules, those 30 delegates can vote any way they want. If they want to keep voting for the guy they voted for in the first round, they can do that. The candidates can urge them to support another candidate, but they're not obligated to follow the candidate's instructions. Pennsylvania's system may be the most bizarre, because 54 delegates will be selected from the state's 18 congressional districts and they will all be officially unbound -- meaning they can vote however they want on the first ballot in Cleveland. So does the primary mean anything? Sort of. Sixty-one of the 162 candidates for convention delegate told the Pittsburgh Tribune Review that they would cast at least their first convention ballot for the presidential hopeful who wins statewide or in their respective congressional districts. But 32 said they are committed to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, John Kasich or Marco Rubio, who has dropped out, and the others didn't respond to the newspaper. There's one more wrinkle. In each state and territory, the national committeeman, the national committee woman, and the state party chairman all automatically go to the convention as delegates. Out of the 168 party officials who will be delegates, so far only one of them openly supports Trump. Yes, it's complicated, with a lot of moving parts, and it's probably not reasonable to expect Trump, the candidate, to be familiar with the ins and outs of all of these state Republican-party-delegate-selection rules. But somebody on his campaign must keep track of the rules and keep an eye on these delegate-selection processes. The Trump argument will be that after those first one or two ballots, these delegates aren't following the will of the voters. But other rules "ignore" the will of the voters to Trump's advantage. In "winner take all" states like Florida and Arizona, Trump won less than half the vote and walked away with all of the delegates. Kasich did the same in Ohio. If every state allocated its delegates proportionally, the race would look different -- Trump would have a smaller lead and Rubio and Kasich would run closer. According to the Associated Press, the current totals of bound delegates are Trump with 737, Cruz with 475, and Kasich with 143. (Rubio, who suspended his campaign, still is in third place with 171; Ben Carson is fifth with 8 delegates.) If you allocated all of the delegates proportionally to the total votes cast in the primaries so far, the ranking would be Trump 575, Cruz 419, Rubio 248, Kasich 201, and Carson doesn't look like so much of an afterthought with 47 delegates. ADDENDA: The good people at Patriot Post turned one of my comments into a vividly illustrated meme: 
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