2016 elections - because it's never too early

[OttoVonBismarck]

According to FiveThirtyEight he needed to lose by 20% or less to  still be "in it", so this is a genuine setback.

With All Eyes On Trump, Clinton Is Winning The Democratic Nomination
South Carolina may be the beginning of the end for Sanders.

In South Carolina today, Hillary Clinton scored her biggest victory yet in the Democratic presidential primary. She beat Bernie Sanders by what looks to be at least 30 percentage points, according to exit polls, thanks to overwhelming support from African-Americans. As the race heads into Super Tuesday, Clinton has clear momentum: She has big leads in many of the 12 contests that will take place, according to the polls.

According to the South Carolina exit poll, Sanders lost black voters 16 percent to 84 percent. That doomed him in a contest in which 62 percent of voters were black. If white voters were more supportive of his candidacy, Sanders might have been able to keep the race closer. But they split 58 percent for Sanders to 42 percent for Clinton. That's simply not good enough to overcome Clinton's advantage among black voters. It also makes the result among white voters in New Hampshire look more like an outlier compared to South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada. Maybe the Vermont senator had more of a next-door-neighbor advantage in New Hampshire than we initially thought.

Perhaps the most worrisome sign for Sanders is that the momentum he had heading into the first three contests seems to have been halted in South Carolina. Sanders was down 25 percentage points in the FiveThirtyEight South Carolina polling average a month ago, and it looks like he's going to do even worse than that tonight.

Sanders needs something to change because frankly he's losing.

Indeed, South Carolina is even more of a setback for Sanders than it appears at first glance because it reverses the progress he had been making. If you look at my colleague Nate Silver's estimates of how Sanders would do in each caucus or primary if the race were tied nationally (Sanders needs to beat these targets to have a shot at the nomination), we see that Sanders did 19 percentage points worse than the benchmark in Iowa, 10 percentage points worse in New Hampshire and 5 percentage points worse in Nevada. That is, Sanders did not hit the target in any of those contests, but he got closer to it as time went on. In South Carolina, it looks like Sanders will run at least 10 percentage points worse than we would expect given a tie nationally, suggesting that the race has stabilized or moved in Clinton's direction since Nevada.

Sanders's loss of momentum couldn't have come at a worse time for his campaign. There are six Super Tuesday states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia) where black voters made up a larger share of the electorate in 2008 than they did in Iowa, New Hampshire or Nevada this year. That Sanders couldn't break through with black voters in either Nevada or South Carolina, despite a heavy investment, makes it difficult to believe he will have any more success in these six states, where his campaign hasn't put in the same effort.

What's worse for Sanders — of the 865 delegates up for grabs Tuesday, 66 percent come from these six states. An average of polls in each state1 gives Clinton at least a 23 percentage point lead in all of them. These include the two biggest prizes of Super Tuesday: Georgia (102 delegates) where Clinton is up by 39 percentage points and Texas (222 delegates) where Clinton is up by 29 percentage points. If the delegates from these states broke perfectly proportionally based on the polling average, Clinton would end up with a 369 to 202 delegate lead.

In the other six Super Tuesday contests, Sanders has a clear lead in only Vermont, and the candidates are likely to split the delegates in the other five contests fairly evenly. That means that on Super Tuesday, Clinton is likely to win around 508 delegates and Sanders 357.

It's difficult to oversell how big that lead is. Not only will media be filled with "Clinton Wins Big" headlines, but the way that delegates are awarded in Democratic primaries (proportionally) makes it a tall task to come back from a 100+ delegate deficit. You can't just win; you have to win big. No one knows this better than Clinton herself; she barely touched Barack Obama's delegate lead in March and April 2008, even after winning in big states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. So even if Sanders were to win in states like Wisconsin by a few percentage points, it wouldn't be enough.

The fact is that South Carolina may spell the beginning of the end of Sanders's having any real chance of winning more pledged delegates than Clinton. He needs a game-changer between now and Tuesday, or it'll become a monumental task to catch Clinton in the delegate count.

[derspiess]

What do you expect from a state whose main university has a chicken for a mascot?

[Monoriu]

Clinton Projected to Beat Sanders by 35 Percentage Points in South Carolina

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/south-carolina-primary.html

[alfred russel]

So the socialist insurgency dies in Ideologue's South Carolina. Isn't it ironic.

[Lettow77]

 Trump has secured the strongest endorsement of all- he has just received the praise of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/donald-trump-jean-marie-le-pen-endorsement-219896

[Valmy]

Trump just secured the votes of all those FN members with American citizenship. There must be a couple.

[Martinus]

It's like Trump is the ultimate super villain and all the lesser super villains are coming out to endorse him.

[Tonitrus]

It's like Trump is the ultimate super villain and all the lesser super villains are coming out to endorse him.

But Trump isn't bald...

[jimmy olsen]

I find it ironic that Trump dismisses Rubio as a joker when his own campaign is centered on the joke that he'll make Mexico pay for his wall.

He made the media pay for his campaign didn't he?

More seriously, I think he means to pay for it with tariffs that he plans to enact once he rips up NAFTA. Not that that would get through congress, but I think that's what he means when he says he'll make them pay for it.

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like Trump is gonna crush all comers in Virginia. If Rubio can't be competitive there, I question whether he'll win any states at all.

http://www.roanoke.edu/about/news/rc_poll_feb_2016_va_primary_elections

Cruz might win Texas but Trump's probably going to sweep everything else.

[Legbiter]

Super Trump day. 

[Martinus]

Trump vs. Clinton is going to be the ultimate America's infantilisation therapy - who do you love more - your megalomaniac Daddy or your suffocating Mommy.

[Syt]

I loved Super Trump as a kid.






I had tanks, fighter planes, trucks, ships, warships, cars, Rolls Royce cars,

[Tonitrus]

My lame predictions:

- Rubio will ultimately bow out and support Cruz for the anti-Trump ticket (votes probably break 90/10 against Trump)
- Kasich will eventually withdraw and endorse no one. (those votes probably break 70/30 against Trump)
- Carson: He might linger on forever...or even just fall asleep and forget to formally withdraw.

[alfred russel]

I've seen signs going up giving directions to the voting locations: which makes sense because we vote on Tuesday. But what hit me as really odd is those are some of the first campaign signs I've seen. Normally there are way more. A lady I work with did tell me someone has put up a trump sign in her neighborhood--complete with an illuminating light for nightime. Apparently it disappears every few days and then reappears--it must be the sign is getting stolen and they have a dozen replacements. 

I have seen a few bumper stickers on cars. A handful for Hillary and Sanders (probably about the same number for each), I think I've seen 2 for Carson, maybe 3 or 4 for Rubio, none for Cruz or Kasich, and a couple for Trump.

But this is probably the most under the radar primary I remember. I have two theories (that are not mutually exclusive): there are a lot of trump supporters embarrassed to show support (he is leading in the polls), or none of the remaining candidates are really exciting people.