Can Donald Trump win the nomination next week?
Primary season is about to kick into high gear, with three caucuses and primaries this weekend, another on Monday and then Super Tuesday, when primaries in 15 states will cast their ballots.
Polls show that former President Donald Trump is very likely to win most, if not all, of these contests. If these projections hold, Trump will have almost clinched the Republican nomination – but not quite.
I spoke with Nate Cohn, The New York Times’ chief political analyst, about when Trump’s nomination could become a lock. (On the Democratic side, neither of Biden’s main opponents — Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson — has won a single delegate or appears poised to do so, so there’s no real math to do there.)
Nate, what are the basics of delegation math?
The basics are simple: A candidate must win a majority of the 2,429 delegates to the Republican National Convention to become the party’s nominee. These delegates are usually awarded on a state-by-state basis, based on the results of the primaries and caucus.
The complicated part is that Republican rules allow states to decide how to reward their delegates, and they take very different approaches — from awarding them proportionately based on a candidate’s share of votes to allowing one candidate each delegate receives if he wins statewide.
Could Trump clinch the nomination on Super Tuesday?
It’s close, but the answer is no! By the end of Super Tuesday, just under half of the Republican convention delegates will have been awarded, so it’s not technically possible for any candidate to win a majority by then. For the record, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis won enough delegates in Iowa, New Hampshire and other early states to prevent Trump from winning even if he won every Super Tuesday state.
What are the possible scenarios coming out of Super Tuesday?
If the polls are right, there is really only one scenario: Trump is within striking distance of the nomination.
Right now, national polls show him with almost 80 percent of the vote, which would give him the most delegates regardless of the exact state-by-state rules. Better yet for him, many states — including California — award all their delegates to the winner if that person gets more than 50 percent of the vote, as Trump is expected to do. There are a few Super Tuesday states that award their delegates proportionately, but he would still win almost all the delegates if he does as well as the polls suggest.
Add that up and Trump could easily win more than 90 percent of the available delegates on Super Tuesday.
How quickly could he secure the nomination, and what would need to be done?
Mathematically, the soonest possible date is March 12, when Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi and Washington will vote.
That would be difficult to achieve, but given how well he’s doing in the polls, it’s hard to rule out without a very detailed analysis. If Haley fails to get 20 percent of the vote, she might not even receive delegates in states where the rules make it relatively easy for her to do so.
If he doesn’t succeed, when will he?
More realistically, Trump would emerge victorious on March 19, when Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas and Ohio cast their votes.
You can track the delegate counts here as the race unfolds.
Trump says little about Gaza
In the nearly five months since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, Donald Trump has said remarkably little on the subject.
He criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel before quickly retreating to more standard expressions of support for the country. And he has blatantly claimed that the invasion would never have happened if he had been president. But his overall approach was laissez-faire.
“So there’s a war going on, and you’re probably going to have to let it play out. You’re probably going to have to let it happen because a lot of people are dying,” Trump said in a speech interview with Univision a month after the attack. His main advice to Netanyahu and the Israelis, he said at the time, was to do a better job at “public relations,” because the Palestinians “beat them at public relations.”
Trump’s hands-off approach to the bloody conflict in the Middle East reflects the profound anti-interventionist shift he has brought about within the Republican Party over the past eight years and is colored by his feelings about Netanyahu, who he may never forgive for congratulating President Biden on his 2020 victory.
Trump’s initial instinct in the days immediately following the greatest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust was to use Israel’s national trauma to settle his score with Netanyahu.
On October 11, Trump publicly attributed Hamas’s invasion to Netanyahu’s lack of preparation, praising the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as “very smart.”
Trump has not made any substantive criticism of Biden’s response to Hamas’ invasion and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza. Instead, he has placed the blame for the entire crisis on Biden’s “weakness,” as he often does when there is violence or tragedy.
“You would never have had the problem you just had, the terrible problem of Israel on October 7, where Israel was so terribly attacked,” the former president told a crowd in Rock Hill, S.C., on February 23.
It is unimaginable that in a pre-Trump Republican Party, the standard-bearer would have had so little say in a major terrorist attack on Israel and a widening regional conflict in the middle of a presidential campaign.
“This is one of America’s closest allies under attack. And it’s mind-boggling that you’ve heard so little from Trump in such circumstances,” said John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump who became a sharp critic of his and who has long been aggressive in his support of Israel.
Yet people close to Trump, who leads Biden in the polls, sense little or no urgency for him to put forward more detailed foreign policy plans — on Israel or any other issue.
Trump has also enthusiastically consumed news about young progressives turning against Biden over Israel. And his campaign and his allies plan to exploit those divisions to their advantage.
One idea being discussed among Trump allies as a way to drive the Palestinian wedge deeper into the Democratic Party is to place ads in heavily Muslim areas of Michigan that would thank Biden for “supporting Israel,” according to two people informed about the plans who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
—Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman And Michael Gold
Read the full story here.