Super Tuesday wrap up.

GOP results here.
Democrat results here.


Welp, pretty much as anticipated, with Trump and Hillary winning the majority of the states, I'll go party by party with my thoughts:

Democrats

Bernie took four states, all of them northern states, and Hillary won everything else, there were only a couple close contests, Hillary barely won in Massachusetts, and the gap was fairly narrow in Colorado in Bernie's favor there. I am not surprised she won so much, but I am surprised by the amount she won by in the southern states, they were not even remotely close, although he did mostly get enough votes to come away with some delegates at least. Hillary Clinton had two big advantages in the south that made it a tough hill to climb for Sanders though: The first is politically she is a lot more conservative, the American South really doesn't like liberals much outside of a few enclaves and even the Democrats there tend to be a lot less open minded, especially with the word "Socialist" being thrown around.
The second is Hillary Clinton is extraordinarily popular with the African American community in the south. She gets a lot of it from her husband, as Bill was very popular himself, coming from the area and very comfortable with the community there, she and her surrogates have done very well in securing that perception and of painting Sanders as an out of touch white dude who talks about economics and not the problems facing the black community. I don't know if that strategy will hold up as well in the more liberal northern states, but for now it has given her an advantage over him.
Sanders actually does have some pretty decent positions regarding race, and worked very hard after he launched his campaign to develop a platform that addresses those issues. But he is running on economics at heart, and his challenge is to show that the economy is a racial issue, and racism is partially an economic one as well. He hasn't gotten that across very well in poor communities, and really to the population at large as it is a nuanced position and those don't turn into sound bites easily.

I think Bernie Sanders did keep it close enough that he has a shot, but he will have to perform extremely well to overcome the advantage Superdelegates give to Hillary Clinton, but his presence pulls her to the left and even if he loses he is performing a vital service showing that real progressive policies have actual support.

Republicans

Trump Trump Trump. He won all but three states.

Actually I was kind of surprised by how close some of the races were, Ted Cruz won two states, Texas and Oklahoma, Texas he won quite solidly and outperformed the latest polling there, Oklahoma was much narrower, but still a fairly comfortable lead. Meanwhile Marco Rubio fairly safely took Minnesota and... nothing else. In fact, he only managed a second place finish in one state, Georgia.
Kasich came in second in Vermont, a close second, his best performance of the night.

Over the last week money and endorsements have been lining up behind Rubio. News outlets and his campaign have been trying to force a narrative that he is the second place choice, despite not polling there at all, the voting population is not buying it and I was really surprised by the turnout for Cruz, the establishment has lost any control over their constituency and they have to make a choice now whether to line up behind Donald Trump, who just may destroy their party, or to throw all support behind Ted fucking Cruz, who no one likes but if he runs and loses it will hurt them less than if Trump does.

As of now though, we may be on track for a very interesting convention, let's see what the remaining states do, but Cruz and Co. just might keep it close enough for some shenanigans if Trump keeps under-performing like this, and make no mistake, he did under-perform, possibly due to the less focused nature of Super Tuesday preventing him from personally drumming up support in each state. His support didn't turn out in the numbers his polls predicted and he still has less than half of the total delegates in play at the moment. Meaning a contested convention is still a possibility, perhaps not a great one, but it's on the table at least.

Which is great.