2016 May 1^st

Today we look at Senator Ted Cruz’ performance on Chuck Todd’s “Meet the Press” program. Any time you give a politician free airtime you can be sure you’ll get multiple variations of his stump speech, and that’s just what Chuck Todd got from Ted Cruz. Late night comics have mocked Cruz’ halting delivery; he pauses, sometimes after every phrase, looking left or right before continuing, apparently believing this to be a successful rhetorical style. It isn’t, but it’s wonderful ammunition for late night comics. He didn’t stoop to that shtick on “Meet the Press” because it would have allowed Todd to slip in a question and Cruz wanted no interruptions to his non-stop talking points.

Much of Cruz harangue was aimed at the disaster Donald Trump’s election would be for the country. This theme was reiterated over and over again. Todd was obviously trying to break into Cruz’ monologue to ask a question and finally he was successful, “Senator Cruz, will you vote for Donald Trump if he is the nominee of your party?” Cruz answered that Trump would not be the party’s nominee. Todd persisted, reminding Cruz that he had said what a disaster Trump would be for the country and asking again if Cruz would vote for him. Cruz dodged the question again. Todd asked the question, altogether, seven times and each time he got evasive answers until, finally, he gave up. Then Cruz said, “You’re just trying to get me to say I support Donald Trump.” In what alternate universe does Senator Cruz live?

Maybe it’s time to look again at this wonderful Trump success in the Pennsylvania primary. Donald Trump won that primary with about 57 percent of the Republican vote. To be specific Trump got 893,716 votes. Trump’s opponents got 666,349 votes. His two principle opponents Ted Cruz and John Kasich got the great bulk of those non-Trump votes. It happens that there are about 3 million registered Republicans in Pennsylvania. If we total all of the primary votes we get about 1.5 million Republican primary votes. This means that about half of the registered Republicans just stayed home and weren’t interested in voting for any of the above.

On the Democratic side things are not all that different. Pennsylvania has about 4 million registered Democrats. Clinton got 918,689 votes and Sanders 710,955 so Clinton clearly beat Sanders. With 4 million registered Democrats in Pennsylvania and only 163,864 of them turning out to vote, that’s about 41 percent; so nearly 60 percent of registered Democrats didn’t care enough about the outcome to bother voting.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats are very excited about their potential candidates and after watching the President hosting the Correspondent’s Dinner I can see why.