Dear Commons Community,
The New Hampshire primary claimed two casualties, Chris Christie and Carley Fiorina, both of whom suspended their candidacies yesterday for the Republican presidential nomination. This was not surprising. Christie had too much baggage (hugging President Obama after Hurricane Sandy, Bridgegate) for Republicans. He will be remembered during this campaign for his brutal attack on Marco Rubio during the last Republican primary debate.
Carly Fiorina never caught on and many questioned her credentials. She was a mediocre CEO at Hewlitt-Packard, however, there was a feistiness to her especially in her attacks of Hillary Clinton.
The six remaining candidates (Trump, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Bush, and Carson) will continue to duke it out. Carson is likely to be the next candidate to drop out. Trump has the lead and others will try to knock him off his game.
The Huffington Post is characterizing the current primary situation as a nightmare:
Donald Trump won New Hampshire with 35 percent of the vote on Tuesday, solidifying his place as the front-runner for the Republican 2016 presidential nomination when the party meets for its national convention in Ohio this summer.
But Cleveland, we have a problem. Hitting 35 percent is terrific, in baseball. In politics, it’a still 16 points shy of a victory, and neither Trump nor any other Republican has shown any signs of doing any better than 40 percent in any individual contest.
If the pattern continues — Trump is polling in the mid-30s in the next two nominating states, Nevada and South Carolina — The Grand Old Party could wind up with Trump as the top choice at its convention without the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination.
It’s the sort of implausible scenario journalists like to speculate about every four years, but there hasn’t actually been a so-called “brokered convention” since 1952, when Adlai Stevenson got the Democratic nod on the third ballot…
It all adds up to something of a nightmare for the Republican Party. In order to topple Trump, they need one candidate to rally around. Iowa and New Hampshire have left them with at least three, none of whom has a reason to drop out before March 15, when the contests start getting much larger and more mainstream.
“Two things are very real,” said GOP consultant and Fox News commentator Ed Rollins. “Donald Trump is not going away — you’re not going to knock him out early. And there’s not going to an establishment candidate who can move quickly.”
Tony
