presidential primary

Damon Linker’s latest column on the travails of the Republican Party at the hands of Donald Trump hits on a tremendously important truth. Linker says that if Trump wins tonight in South Carolina, it

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

A week after the New Hampshire Presidential Primaries, what lessons, if any, can we take from the dramatic victories of two outsider candidates? Former New Hampshire resident and occasional Automatic Earth contributor Nelson Lebo weighs in.

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.