Ted Cruz is fading fast. Donald Trump is heading into Indiana with a head of steam, and Republican officials are publicly resigning themselves to a Trump nomination. Even Cruz’s under-the-radar strategy of wooing delegates is faltering, since they, too, are feeling the inescapable allure of siding with the candidate who is actually winning. It looks like there will be no contested convention in Cleveland in July.
The Democrats are a different story. Despite the fact that Bernie Sanders’s path to the nomination has been all but closed off, he is now insisting there will be a “contested convention” for the party’s superdelegates. Sanders told reporters in Washington, D.C., yesterday that those superdelegates should be in play if Clinton cannot win the nomination with an outright majority of normal pledged delegates.
Is Sanders serious? There are hundreds of superdelegates, which means it is actually quite difficult to get to the magic number of 2,383 without them. Sanders himself seemed to suggest that his campaign’s goal is merely to win a majority of pledged delegates, which is what Clinton is in the process of doing (and quite handily). She is also beating him in the popular vote by some three million votes.
Paul Krugman says the Sanders campaign has devolved into “an epic descent into whining.” But perhaps of greater cause for concern is that Sanders is setting up Clinton’s nomination as illegitimate, which is not only false, but potentially dangerous when you consider the system-is-rigged beliefs of his most ardent supporters. Even Ted Cruz is prepared to admit that Trump is beating him fair and square.