The overnight news was decidedly downcast, with first London mayor Boris Johnson voicing his support for Brexit leading to a collapse in the pound, validating our Saturday warning and then some, resulting in the biggest drop in cable in over a year over fears that the EU will lose one of its most critical members...
Donald Trump appears to have won all 50 delegates in Saturday’s South Carolina Republican primary, but this hasn’t stopped certain pundits from proclaiming Marco Rubio the real story. Rubio took second place with just .02 percent more of the vote than Ted Cruz received. While Cruz was supposed to have an advantage given the state’s large evangelical vote, Rubio had the endorsements of key figures in the state’s political establishment, notably Governor Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott.
Michael Brendan Dougherty considers Rubio’s chances after South Carolina:
The Florida senator will have a chance to put together the anti-Trump coalition. Many powerful people in the conservative movement and the Republican establishment desperately want him as their nominee [bold mine-DL]. That counts for a lot.
Chris Cillizza asks why Trump isn’t being covered as the presumptive favorite for the nomination at this point (via Dreher):
Why isn’t Trump being covered as the overwhelming favorite to be the Republican nominee?
Substitute any other Republican in the race into Trump’s current position. There is a 100 percent chance that that person would be touted as the prohibitive favorite or the odds-on nominee
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.