Tuesday’s
elections, with more than 14 million votes cast in five states, marked
the more-than-halfway point in both parties’ presidential primary
campaigns.
Democrats
and Republicans can now confidently predict which candidates will have
the most delegates at their conventions in July: Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton
each hold large and growing delegate leads. It would take an upset of
staggering proportions for a rival to pull ahead of either one by the
time the primaries end in June.
But
the two front-runners are not on equal footing. Mrs. Clinton has
assembled a formidable majority coalition within the Democratic Party
that has resisted Senator Bernie Sanders’s appeals.
Mr.
Trump has achieved something less than that. He has locked down a large
plurality of voters on the right, but not enough to guarantee that he
will win a majority of Republican convention delegates. And his position
appears to be weakening.
These are some of our most important takeaways from Tuesday’s voting:
Trump is bleeding
When
presidential candidates get closer to their party’s nomination, they
often gain stature and appear more formidable as they approach the
general election. For Mr. Trump, the opposite may be happening.
He
is winning, but at a terrible price. The intensifying attacks on his
personal character and business record, and the scenes of violence at
his rallies, appear to be taking a toll, exit polls show. In no state
did a majority of Republican primary voters say they believed he was
honest and trustworthy. In every state that voted on Tuesday except for
Florida, about two in five Republicans said they would consider voting
for a third-party candidate over Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton in November.
Clinton is in command
With
landslide wins in Florida and Ohio, Mrs. Clinton re-established herself
as the prohibitive favorite in the Democratic race. Taking Ohio by
double digits, she eased fears that Mr. Sanders might become a breakaway
favorite across the Midwest after his upset victory in Michigan last
week.
There were no cracks in her base of support with black and Latino voters, or with older Democrats in general.
And
voters appear sympathetic to her criticism of Mr. Sanders as a
candidate making fantastical promises: In every state on Tuesday, about
three-quarters of Democratic primary voters said they considered Mrs.
Clinton’s policy proposals realistic, putting her ahead of Mr. Sanders
in that category by double digits in every state but Illinois.
Kasich isn’t the Midwestern favorite
Gov.
John Kasich of Ohio did something unprecedented for him on Tuesday
night: He won a state. To be sure, it was the state that elected him to
nine terms in Congress and two as governor — but still, it was a
breakthrough of a kind.
Winning
Ohio, however, is valuable only if it helps spur a larger shift toward
Mr. Kasich across the industrial Midwest. So far, he has little to show
for all the attention he has lavished on the region. He finished third
in Michigan last week and a distant third in Missouri on Tuesday. His
best performance outside Ohio was pulling a fifth of the vote in
Illinois — and again finishing third.
That’s not a regional campaign. It is a one-state candidacy. The pressure is on Mr. Kasich to show he can do better.
Sanders has a ceiling
Mr.
Sanders has a strong and durable political coalition, just not one that
ultimately adds up to victory in a Democratic primary. Young people
continue to support him — he won among voters under 45 in every state
but Florida on Tuesday — as do white voters in most states. But Mr.
Sanders would have needed to make deep inroads with nonwhites by now to
have a strong shot at the nomination, and he has not.
The
calendar, however, is his friend: While the odds are powerfully against
him, the next few rounds of voting will take place in states like Utah
and Wisconsin, which resemble contests Mr. Sanders has won in the past.
Republicans are divided by class
The
most important dividing lines in the Republican coalition are income
and education levels. Mr. Trump has consistently scored better with
less-educated voters, and the elections on Tuesday were no exception:
Even as he lost Ohio by 11 points, Mr. Trump won pluralities there of
white voters who lack college degrees, and of Ohioans who earn less than
$50,000 per year.
In
three states with close races — Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina —
Mr. Trump won nearly half of voters without college degrees. But the
best he managed with college graduates was a tie with Senator Ted Cruz
in Illinois.
If
Mr. Trump became the nominee, Republicans might risk a large-scale
defection by upscale whites who voted willingly for Mitt Romney four
years ago.
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