On Friday, Hillary Clinton sat down with Matt Lauer for a wide ranging interview. A number of topics came up, from Bernie Sanders, to Donald Trump, to walking a fictional tree lined street in Brooklyn.
Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders had as good a Tuesday as could have been expected.
Is there really an establishment, anti-Trump “lane” of any consequence in the GOP race? I’ve been asking that question for some time, for one simple reason: since Trump’s rise, there have been no strong, center-right establishment candidates in the race.
Trump, Cruz and Carson (and Rand Paul) have been generally understood as anti-establishment candidates whom the political class would be unhappy with. The candidates typically classed as “establishment” or “mainstream” from the beginning were: Bush, Christie, Kasich, Walker, Perry – and Rubio.
Yesterday the GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini sent out 19 successive tweets sharing his assessment of the Republican race so far. I hope someone will Storify them so you can all easily read them, but until then, follow the link above. His basic argument is that the GOP race is settling into a pattern. Trump has a hard core of supporters nationally, but he can’t seem to grow beyond it. They are, however, unshakable in their support of him: