Hey! I know it's the weekend but it's time for a rundown of what happened in primaryland over the past week. Since I believe we began with the GOP last week, let's start with the Democratic party this go around.
As you know primaries were held in Mississippi and Michigan a few days back (last Tuesday). As expected, Hillary Clinton won Mississippi pretty easily. However, Michigan would turn out to be a surprise as Bernie Sanders won the state 50-48 against Clinton. While a case can be made that it's a virtual tie, this would be newsworthy for another reason.
Clinton was expected in the last round of polls before the primary to beat Sanders by 18 points. Because he ended up winning by two reportedly makes this the biggest upset in primary election history here in the States. It also caused a lot of people to re-examine the polls and the methods they used. While Sanders is still down 214 in the actual delegate count, his win proves that the primary race is still competitive as well as showing that calls (or maybe wishful thinking in the Clinton camp) that Sanders would be toast by now and drop out of the race before a lot of states have a chance to vote in their caucuses/primaries may be a little premature.
As for the GOP, Trump won three of the four states holding primaries last Tuesday (Hawaii, Michigan, Mississippi) while Ted Cruz won Idaho. The only big news here was that John Kasich actually won 17 delegates in Michigan. As for Marco Rubio, he got 1 delegate in Hawaii. Tonight, there are primaries in Wyoming and Washington, DC. While recent events involving Donald Drumpf may hurt him down the road n the general, he probably will win these. Whether he should or whether him getting the nomination would be good for the Republican Party is another issue altogether.
As for Clinton and Sanders, Tuesday is a big day with primaries in five states (Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri). While Clinton is projected to win in several of these states, Sanders' win in Michigan has given the race a push that may benefit him in a couple days with some voters, including some who may not have known much about him but checked him out after Michigan. Granted this is conjecture and it's easy to armchair quarterback (for lack of a better term) but if turnout is higher than expected (and, sadly, that my be an if due to voter suppression laws in some of these areas as well as reports that the primaries in some places are the same time as Spring Break) there may be a shakeup in delegate count (as usual we're leaving superdelegates out of this since they can change their pledge at any time between now and the Convention).
I know this is very brief and skims over a lot but this is where things stand now. Time will tell what goes down in a couple of days.
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