Election Season Merry-Go-Round

Our General Election process so far looks like it will have all the fire and fanfare of a cheap who dunnit novel.  Do we really not know who the players are going to be?

None of the so-called pundits thought Donald Trump would end up being the presumptive nominee, but to me it was pretty apparent from early on.  He would complain about the numbers of people involved in the process, I think they started with 17, and grumble that the size of the group stunted his ability to drag in more support.

But to some extent, the numbers may have been helpful, too. After all, as they said, Trump has his 30-35 percent support group that is pretty reliable.  Not so for the others, and the number of choices other than Trump, split the remaining 65 percent up enough to make his portion supreme.

At least, that was the argument until the potential nominees started to drop out.  Again, the pundits announced Trump’s undoing.  Surely, now with only five candidates running, someone can garner enough support to dump Trump.  But it didn’t happen.  And it didn’t happen because all of the “new found” voters didn’t coalesce to one or the other candidate and leave Trump behind.

They call it the winnowing process, and winnow it did.  It winnowed right down to two candidates and a cling on.  The contest, at the point following Wisconsin, truly appeared to be a two-horse race with an old nag running as a pace setter.

For a week after Wisconsin it appeared as if Ted Cruz might actually have a chance to upset Trump.  That is until New York.  Trump, as the papers said, romped in his home state.  Cruz said something to the effect of, well it was his home state.  But the size of the beating was a harbinger of what was to come in the ensuing week, when Trump blasted through the ACELA primary winning Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware by more than 50 percent, and taking every voting district along the way.  Cruz made his last stand in Indiana, but the writing was already on the wall and despite his pulling all stops he lost in catastrophic fashion ending his campaign and John Kasich’s campaign as well.  Thus we end up with the presumptive GOP nominee Donald J. Trump.

On the other hand we have Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee.  The ironic thing here is that her competition, Bernie Sanders, was supposed to be disposed of long ago.  But it now looks like he will stick around to the convention.

Make no mistake about this, Hillary will likely win because the Democrats have about 500 Super Delegates, who actually get to decide who the presumptive nominee is going to be.  All things being equal, those 500 delegates provide more than enough swing to change the vote.  They are pretty much all lined up behind Hillary, which gives her a hard to overcome lead.  But if they lined up instead behind Bernie, guess who would be in the lead?

There are other reasons that Bernie should stay in the process.  While it may be a forgone conclusion that Hillary is the chosen one, there are still a few players out there who might make it a touch more difficult for her.  No matter what you say, Bernie is popular.  He has pulled in a bunch of votes and has touched home with the younger voters.

But Hillary has other issues that may end up determining the nominee, despite garnering more delegates.  There is that FBI investigation into her server and the specter of the whole Benghazi mess continues to linger.  Her extraneous baggage can have a huge effective on electability in the long run.  If she can find some way to drop it or get around it she would likely be a lock for the presidency in the upcoming election.

Either way, I think we can expect to see Hillary vs Donald in November.  And, judging by the primaries, it ought to be one entertaining election.  In the end, as the Merry-Go-Round churns who knows who will end up with the gold ring?

Certainly it won’t be the political pundits.