By Eddie Zipperer, originally published in The Hill
The complete idiot's guide to being right about Donald Trump
If you operate under the assumption that helium is heavier than the air around you, you're going to lose your balloon. If you're smart, you won't lose many balloons before you change your assumption. If you don't change your assumption, you're going to keep losing balloons and start to look pretty stupid in the process.
Rubio wants to use his supposed foreign policy experience to give him a boost against his rivals:
“The fact of the matter is Jeb has no foreign policy experience,” Rubio said. “He has no foreign policy experience and was governor a long time ago. The world has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Foreign policy has changed a lot in the last five years. No one on that stage has more experience or has shown better judgment or has shown a better understanding of national security threats than I have.”
It would be exceptionally foolish for me, the man who said Donald Trump could very well run the table, to predict the next twist and turn of this campaign with any confidence. It feels like this thing is now Trump’s to lose, since he will run better in South Carolina than Cruz will in Michigan, and the establishment is in deep disarray. It feels like Clinton needs a win to right her campaign, but that one is fairly assured her in South Carolina for demographic reasons.
Contrary to wishful thinking, the results of Iowa and New Hampshire only confirm the same stark reality that has haunted the Republican nomination process from the beginning: Party rules are a tragic accident waiting to happen.
Trump and Sanders both won as expected, and they won by large enough margins that the networks called it for both of them very early in the evening. Sanders is on track to win by a larger margin than expected. With 53% of the vote counted, Sanders leads by 20 points. The final result may be a little closer than that, but there’s no question that Clinton was badly defeated and embarrassed by a candidate that no one considered a serious threat to her when he started.