Trump continues to sweep up delegates

Donald Trump continues his delegate “sweep-stakes” as Super Tuesday approaches. Yesterday he made an almost clean sweep of three closed contests. These results leave him with twenty percent of the delegates he will need to win the nomination.

The Trump sweep

Election Central maintains a schedule of primaries, caucuses, and conventions for both Parties. In addition, the site 270 to Win has this running delegate spreadsheet for Republican candidates.

The Trump Sweep began in Missouri, where he won all votes cast in its caucuses. According to The Gateway Pundit, the Associated Press called the race around noon Eastern Time. Missouri will send 54 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in mid-July. Three will be uncommitted, per the rules. The Party awarded eleven delegates at-large and five from each of eight Congressional districts. As seems to be a default rule, any candidate winning fifty percent or more of the vote in any contest gets all the delegates. Trump won all fifty-one delegates at stake in Missouri’s caucuses – a broad-based victory across all Congressional districts.

Michigan held a primary last Tuesday (February 27). Republicans offered sixteen delegates in that primary, and Trump won them all, with 68 percent of the popular vote. Yesterday Michigan held caucuses to award the remaining thirty-nine delegates. TGP had two reports from Michigan, one in the afternoon and the other in the evening. The final results showed Trump with fifty-one delegates and Nikki Haley with four.

The Team Trump account announced at 7:08 p.m. EST that Trump had swept Idaho as well.

Idaho will send 32 delegates to the Convention. As with the other States, Donald Trump won them all. Laura Loomer posted the results:

Nikki Haley refuses to quit

Nikki Haley spent her time campaigning in the Super Tuesday States. She campaigned in Richmond, Virginia on Friday (March 1), and in North Carolina and Massachusetts yesterday. But she had the bad sense to post video from her Raleigh, North Carolina rally. That was a mistake, because that rally was very poorly attended.

Trump’s rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, provided a sharp contrast – in his favor.

Furthermore, as of this moment, Trump has 244 delegates, Haley 24, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), 9, and Vivek Ramaswamy 3. DeSantis and Ramaswamy have both suspended their campaigns. They picked up all their delegates in Iowa.

Any other candidate would probably quit when the situation became mathematically impossible. But not Nikki Haley. Even after Trump made her Not The Favorite Daughter of South Carolina, she made her position insultingly clear.

The latest New York Times/Siena College poll has her earning only 20% of the vote, to Trump’s 77%. Furthermore, nearly half her supporters are Democrat crossovers.

She also refuses to commit to supporting the eventual nominee, if she’s not it.

And her excuse is that the Republican National Committee has changed, after Ronna McDanial resigned.

What are the Democrats saying?

The Democrats are talking half trash, half crazy, suggesting that a second Trump term frightens them badly. Mike LaChance at TGP quotes MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch as lamenting that rank-and-file voters aren’t as frightened as he.

One voter says the Democrats’ problem is that they inspire fear – of themselves.

Given that, Nikki Haley’s crossover campaign is likely to lose more votes than she gains.

In Richmond, Virginia, the Mayor – the same Mayor who erased Monument Avenue – cut a video saying, “Trump, you’re not welcome!”

But when a Nikki Haley billboard truck drove past a line of people waiting to get into Trump’s rally, the people in line cried, “Boo!”

All this illustrates Nikki Haley’s problem. Republican rank-and-file have adopted Trump’s battle cry: “Make America Great Again!” But she, having drunk too much of the tap water at Turtle Bay when she served as our Ambassador there, wants to make the United Nations great. And to do that, she needs Democrats – the same Democrats who are behaving like schoolyard bullies. Nor would they vote for her in the general election, anyway.

Super Tuesday – with its dizzying variety of ways to allocate delegates – will tell the tale. 865 delegates will be on the line in 15 State. Trump will need another 971 delegates to win, so he cannot “clinch” the nomination mathematically on Super Tuesday. But he might be able to do so on March 12, with 160 delegates at stake.