2016 April 21^st

We’re baaaack! Now is anybody there? Lots have happened, particularly on Tuesday in New York. As everybody knows by now Donald Trump won the Republican primary getting 60 percent of the vote and completely shutting out Lyin’ Ted Cruz. But Lyin’ Ted is very temporarily to be called Senator Cruz because Trump’s new handlers want him to be more Presidential, even if only sporadically. I doubt that Trump’s self-control can last beyond the next heckler’s interruption.

For Democrats, Hillary Clinton did much better than expected; she beat Bernie Sanders by a 58 to 42 percent margin. Bernie has flown home to Vermont to think it over.

Percentages conceal the raw data very nicely. Although Trump managed to get 60 percent of the Republican vote and Clinton only 58 percent of the Democratic vote, the raw numbers tell a very different story. Trump got just 518,601 Republican votes to over a million Democratic votes for Senator Clinton.  There are about 2.75 million registered Republican voters in all of New York State. Trump got about 518 thousand of those votes; that comes to about 19 percent of registered Republicans. Since when is getting 19 percent of registered Republican voters a resounding victory? It is by comparison with the popularity of the other Republican candidates. All of the Republican candidates put together were able to get just 32 percent of the vote of registered Republicans; the other 68 percent of Republicans really didn’t care enough to come out to vote…or maybe they were not happy about the choices they had.

But before we on the other political side start to crow about these data consider: The combined vote for Clinton and Sanders is about 1.8 million and that is also just 31 percent of New York State’s registered Democrats. Perhaps neither party is pulled to the polls by their eagerness to vote for the available candidates.

In the White House Rose Garden, in 1971, Miss Tricia Nixon married a Harvard Law student named Edward Cox. Miss Tricia’s sister, Julie Nixon, had one-upped Tricia by marrying David Eisenhower, the grandson of former President Dwight Eisenhower. Tricia’s chance to get even came when she had a date with George W. Bush the son of the former Vice President, but that didn’t go well at all. George spilled his wine and then, to compound this gaucherie he lit a cigarette; that ended the evening. Now that Harvard Law student, husband of Tricia, has risen(?) to become the chairperson of the New York Republican party.

Mr. Cox tells us that the Republican Party is surging as evidence by the fact that it controls many state Governorships and many state legislatures. Of course they do. Generally speaking, small rural states will lean Republican and there are more small rural states than large urban states. Party membership tells quite a different story; there are about two million more registered Democrats in this country than registered Republicans. As the urbanization of the country continues the Republican Party will become still less relevant until their only hope is to block Democrat’s access to the polls. And that they are working on.