Our Primary Might Matter. Maybe.
This morning as New Yorkers were headed to the polls to vote in their primary I started thinking, hey, maybe our primary in California will actually mean something this year. It's unusual enough for New York's to be hotly contested in both parties this late in the process, but California's June 7 primary date has, for the past several presidential election cycles, put us past the point where the nominations have been secured.
With all the wags in the press talking for the past few weeks about how Donald Trump may not get the 1,237 delegates required to win nomination on the first vote and then may fall to the Cruz campaign's better inside game on the second vote, I thought California might have a say in who the Republican candidate is. And with Bernie Sanders' string of recent victories in smaller western states it seemed his campaign might gain momentum to broaden his appeal enough to overcome Hillary Clinton's superdelegate advantage, it looked like the Democrat nomination might come down to the wire, giving California- home to approximately one-eighth the entire country's population- a decisive opportunity to tip that race either way, too.
Alas, the results coming in in New York do not bode well for California's relevance in the 2016 presidential primary. Both frontrunners, Clinton and Trump, are leading by substantial margins. Given the various rules used in the state for each primary, Clinton will take a majority of the pledged delegates and presumably all of the unpledged "superdelegates", and Trump will take virtually all of his party's delegates. [Example sources: The Green Papers - NY Democratic, The Green Papers - NY Republican.] So both candidates resume their marches towards securing the nomination before Californians even go to the polls.
With all the wags in the press talking for the past few weeks about how Donald Trump may not get the 1,237 delegates required to win nomination on the first vote and then may fall to the Cruz campaign's better inside game on the second vote, I thought California might have a say in who the Republican candidate is. And with Bernie Sanders' string of recent victories in smaller western states it seemed his campaign might gain momentum to broaden his appeal enough to overcome Hillary Clinton's superdelegate advantage, it looked like the Democrat nomination might come down to the wire, giving California- home to approximately one-eighth the entire country's population- a decisive opportunity to tip that race either way, too.
Alas, the results coming in in New York do not bode well for California's relevance in the 2016 presidential primary. Both frontrunners, Clinton and Trump, are leading by substantial margins. Given the various rules used in the state for each primary, Clinton will take a majority of the pledged delegates and presumably all of the unpledged "superdelegates", and Trump will take virtually all of his party's delegates. [Example sources: The Green Papers - NY Democratic, The Green Papers - NY Republican.] So both candidates resume their marches towards securing the nomination before Californians even go to the polls.