Amid confusion over the cancellation (due to more security concerns) of today's rally in Ohio - since denied by Trump campaign officials - the finger of blame for last night's violent protests is wending its way through the mainstream media.
Republican leaders have given Donald Trump a ferocious pounding over the past week, and have come away with very little to show for their efforts. The Republican front-runner matched or outperformed his polling in the states voting last night, while establishment favorite Marco Rubio saw his support collapse. As anxious anti-Trump eyes turn towards the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the RNC’s rules are turning against them.
If 2012 was the presidential election in which data-driven journalism really came into its own, the 2016 Republican nomination contest has been the one in the conventional wisdom has continually been shattered.
Donald Trump has been the bane of everyone from data geeks like Nate Silver and the New York Times’s Nate Cohn to more old school analysts like Ron Brownstein of National Journal. The former television star’s unorthodox background and brash demeanor has upended the conventional wisdom about how American political parties’ nominations are determined.
Frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will both face fresh tests on Tuesday, in their respective quests for their party’s presidential nomination.
Trump put on a respectable, if less spectacular performance on Saturday, prevailing in Louisiana and Kentucky but falling to Ted Cruz in Kansas and Maine. As Bloomberg writes, “Trump’s victories also were narrower than polling had indicated, suggesting that attacks on his crude language and ill-defined policies from 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and others could be having an impact.”
Maybe.
Covering politics in Jacksonville, the largest city in the country led by a GOP mayor, I’ve had a unique perspective on presidential politics in the Sunshine State this cycle.
Mayor Lenny Curry was elected for many reasons, but one of them was that in early 2015, he was able to trumpet endorsements from Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
This was in the pre-Trump era, when Bush was considered the presumptive frontrunner, and Rubio was in the conversation.