For Trump and Clinton, winning isn’t enough
NEW YORK - Donald Trump owns New York. So does Hillary Clinton.
And strong showings in Tuesday’s Empire State primary by the Republican and Democratic front-runners could go a long way in helping them close the sale on the nominations of their respective parties.
But simply winning won’t be enough for either of them.
Clinton, who can’t seem to shake Bernie Sanders even as she inches closer to becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, could deliver an emphatic message if she wins by a decisive enough margin - 8 to 10 points should be enough after a string of recent defeats.
“There’s this perception that the people want Sanders but the party wants Clinton,” said David Birdsell, dean of the Baruch College School of Public Affairs in Manhattan. “If she wins by a margin of six figures, high five figures in New York, you have a significant rebuttal to that. That’s an important argument for her and allows her to go into the subsequent states, and she’ll go into those places with more confidence and projecting beyond the convention that doesn’t seem merely dismissive of the Sanders candidacy.”
Trump, with the GOP primary now a war of attrition with Ted Cruz for every single delegate, is hoping to take no fewer than 85 of the 95 delegates at play. If he comes close to that, Cruz will likely be mathematically eliminated from being able to clinch the nomination outright.
But because Trump must take 50 percent of the vote in every congressional district in order to sweep the three delegates that are up for grabs in each, he, too, has little margin for error as he fights to reach the 1,237-delegate threshold to deliver him the nomination on the first ballot. Trump has spent much of the week leading up to Tuesday’s primary attempting to harden his support in the few regions where it is relatively soft, namely in central New York around Syracuse, where he rallied supporters Saturday.
“Donald Trump is not going to get over 50 percent,” said Sam Nunberg, who worked as Trump’s political director until last summer, when he was fired, and now supports Cruz. “He’s not going to win all 95 delegates. The net amount is going to be very small, and it’s going to further the fact that he won’t be the nominee. I have the utmost respect for [newly hired Trump strategist] Paul Manafort, but it’s too little, too late. The Titanic isn’t sinking, it’s already sunk.”
Trump’s campaign, which has been caught flat-footed by the delegate process playing out at state assemblies in recent weeks, is brushing off such concerns. During the two weeks between Trump’s double-digit defeat in Wisconsin and Tuesday’s primary in New York, that rare state in which he has a robust organization in place, Manafort has hired several experienced operatives in an effort to steady the campaign as it sails into deeper waters. And he is looking to turn the page on a rough patch with a big win in New York that will give him added momentum heading into five contests a week later in states up and down the Acela corridor in which he already holds double-digit leads.
“This whole discussion of how many delegates Donald Trump has is without value. If we get 1,090 or 1,150 or whatever by the end of this, we’re going to find the other 100 or 150 [delegates] we need,” said a strategist inside Trump’s operation. “We’ll go pickpocket them. At the end of all of this, Donald Trump is going to come into Cleveland with 1,237 and the party is just going to have to deal with it.”
While New York hasn’t seen a competitive GOP primary in 40 years, the hard-fought Democratic contest is also unusual. It’s been 24 years since the New York primary mattered in the Democratic race - back when Bill Clinton needed a win over Paul Tsongas to help lock up the nomination.
Now the state has turned into a high-stakes battle between two New Yorkers - one a native Brooklynite, the other a former New York senator - with deep, personal ties to the state.
The stakes are potentially higher for Sanders, whose rationale for carrying on with his campaign will shrink if he loses to Clinton here by a wide, double-digit margin. His increasing personal attacks against Clinton in recent weeks indicate how much is on the line for him - and how hard he is willing to fight to keep going.
For Clinton, a single-digit victory in the state that elected her twice to the Senate, and where she beat Barack Obama by 17 points in 2008, would signal vulnerabilities.
“Bernie Sanders needs to continue momentum from the various caucuses that he’s won,” said veteran New York Democratic strategist George Arzt, who served as press secretary under Mayor Ed Koch. “He needs to get under 10 points - he could claim victory if he’s in single digits.”
Even a moral victory, however, could suffer from a problem of too little, too late. “When you’re in the seventh inning and you’re behind, and you’re claiming a moral victory, it’s rather tough,” said Arzt. “You only got two innings to go and you’ve got to do well. But this is her adopted state, so she’s got to do better than winning by 10 points - it would show a vulnerability, that her campaign doesn’t have the fervor of Bernie’s.”
Part of the high-stakes battle here has to do with the heightened media scrutiny - it’s a homecoming not only for Sanders and Clinton but also for a large number of media representatives who have followed the candidates across the country and are based here.
“The national media based in New York turn local concerns into national news,” said Democratic consultant Stu Loeser, who worked as press secretary for former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “It makes a primary here take on outsize importance, more than a primary in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or California.”
For example, Sanders’ 27,000-person rally in Washington Square Park “wouldn’t resonate the same way if he filled up Rittenhouse Square [in Philadelphia],” Loeser said. “This is not just the candidate’s hometown, it’s almost all of the national media’s hometown.”
That rally underscored Sanders’ deep populist appeal - and the lack of similar enthusiasm for Clinton. And yet Clinton is still standing and likely on her way to winning her party’s nomination.
On the Republican side, Tuesday’s results in New York - and those in every contest remaining on the calendar - will serve notice that the GOP establishment’s preferred standard-bearers, those who might have been most competitive come fall, are long gone.
“Whichever one wins, Cruz or Trump, it’s not a good outcome either way,” said Curt Anderson, a Republican strategist in Washington. “If Trump goes into Cleveland a little short and doesn’t make it and Cruz is the nominee, Cruz is not a popular person with the general electorate and you’ll have an infuriated group of voters who feel like Trump got screwed. And if Trump’s the nominee, we know what his numbers are. So I’m just not sure how much any of it matters.
“The thing that’s really maddening about it is that Hillary isn’t that hard to beat,” Anderson continued. “She’s just hard to beat with our guys. That’s just galling. She’s going to go into the general election underwater 10-15 points and she’s going to be the favorite.”
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