Six questions a rancorous Super Tuesday helped clarify

Share

David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

The Super Tuesday contests across the United States were intended to give clarity to the 2016 presidential election and they performed their function well. Weary and groggy, Americans and their remaining White House candidates awakened this morning to the clear message that one of the party struggles was virtually over – and that the other one was nearly so.

With clear victories in a majority of the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and billionaire Donald J. Trump moved closer to their parties' nominations. But those very triumphs raised important questions for both parties – urgent questions that the bitterly divided Republicans must address in the coming weeks and unsettling challenges that the increasingly united Democrats must resolve in the coming months.

In the meantime, here are the questions that were clarified in the most raucous and rancorous Super Tuesday in modern American history:

Is there a hidden message coming out of Tuesday?

Often an important insight is buried in American primary results – a hint of candidate vulnerability, perhaps, or signs of shifts in voter sentiment. Not this time. Ms. Clinton and Mr. Trump won large victories in disparate states and left little room for their rivals to interpret the results to their own advantage, though Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tried mightily to do so. There is no ambiguity remaining in the presidential race. Ms. Clinton and Mr. Trump are the clear front-runners and, baring dramatic changes in the public mood and political momentum, will face off in the fall.

What does the Trump victory Tuesday mean for the Republican Party?

It signals a fundamental shift in the character of the party, a significant change in the goals of the party, and a profound transformation of the profile of the party. By embracing Mr. Trump – a self-proclaimed deal maker with little regard for the Edmund Burke values of history and hierarchy that are the cornerstone of classic conservatism and with none of the filters that are the trademark of the classic politician in his rhetoric – the Republican Party may be on the verge of the biggest transformation any American political party has experienced since 1932, when the Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt became a progressive party that gave a warm embrace to immigrants.

What happened to the Republican establishment?

On the surface this may be the greatest mystery of Campaign 2016, but the truth is that since the GOP takeover of the House of Representatives in 1995 – reversing four full decades of Democratic rule – the Republicans have been insurrectionists, wary of established customs and belligerent toward traditional GOP interests.

For a while – as the party delivered its presidential nomination to former Senator Bob Dole in 1996 and to Governor Mitt Romney in 2012, for example – establishment-oriented Republicans with ties to big business (and, in Mr. Dole's case, powerful agribusiness interests) managed to prevail. But the new Republicans have been girding to upend the American political system for two decades. Now that process is nearly complete. As a result this much now is clear amid the confusion and, in many quarters, panic: There basically is no Republican establishment, the rump of the old power structure has few remaining members, the establishment has no forum to meet, it has no methods to prevail.

Can Mr. Trump be stopped?

Tuesday night, Mr. Cruz, who added far-flung victories in Oklahoma, Alaska and his home state of Texas to his Iowa win earlier this month, argued that he was the only contender who has beaten Mr. Trump – and the only one who can beat him. (Later that evening, Senator Marco Rubio won Minnesota, giving him his first win and diluting the power of the Cruz appeal.) Calling on his rivals to unite behind him, he argued he was the only vehicle to avoid what he called "a disaster for Republicans, for conservatives, and for the nation."

So far his plea has fallen on deaf ears. Mr. Rubio, who last night said "I will not give up this fight" to save the party from what he describes as "a con artist," intends to remain in the race as it turns to his state of Florida March 15. Governor John Kasich harbours hopes of winning his state of Ohio plus neighbouring Michigan – and took comfort from his performance in Vermont, where he came within 1,372 votes of defeating Mr. Trump, splitting the state's dozen electoral votes evenly. But all of these men know that as long as they remain in the race they will diffuse the opposition to Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Cruz derided in a combative speech as "a Washington deal maker, profane and vulgar."

How about the Democrats?

Senator Bernie Sanders won his state of Vermont plus the unlikely redoubt of Oklahoma (which no Democrat can conceivably carry in November), the swing state of Colorado and the onetime liberal haven of Minnesota, but failed to keep pace with Ms. Clinton.

And yet Mr. Sanders prevailed in one vital area. Ms. Clinton's victory speech was largely a reprise of her earlier remarks, some of which replicated her South Carolina comments word-for-word, but in the remainder of that speech there were unmistakable bows to the themes of the Sanders campaign, especially her criticisms of businesses that "rip off the taxpayers" and her statement that "this country belongs to all of us, not just to those responsible at the top." If the goal of Mr. Sanders was to change the terms of debate in the Democratic Party, he can claim a victory Tuesday as well.

What would a general-election contest between Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton look like?

In the centenary year of the battles of the Somme and Verdun, military metaphors might be cruelly appropriate: trench warfare (unbridled dislike between combatants dug in on their positions); horrific casualties (in terms of civility and thoughtful discourse); wild propaganda (frightful excesses in rhetoric as each party derides the other in intemperate language bordering on untruths).

In a remarkable press conference before all the results were in, Mr. Trump, presumably in a reference to Ms. Clinton's controversial e-mails, accused her of "a criminal act" and raised questions about whether she would be able to continue her campaign, saying that if she moved on to the general election it would be "a sad day for this country." That was a dramatic contrast from Ms. Clinton's remarks, who said, "What we need in America is more love and kindness." That may have been an unconscious echo of the "kinder and gentler" rhetoric of George H. W. Bush in 1989. But it is an unlikely refrain to describe a general-election campaign that, from all indications coming out of Super Tuesday, will be nasty, brutal – but not short.