With the New York primary over with, we’ve officially reached halftime in this election cycle. With over 3 months until each party’s conventions begin, realities of who we will be voting for in November are beginning to set in. For this week’s election update, the spotlight is on the city that never sleeps.
Hillary Clinton is on the way toward Democratic nomination
Hillary Clinton fulfilled her duty of winning New York by a large, double-digit margin. In the state both Clinton and Bernie Sanders call home, voters sent their support to the former secretary of state. Winning by 16 points, Clinton won a majority of New York’s 245 delegates.
Clinton is clearly winning the pledged delegates battle, and she’s leading in polls in many of the states that are left.
If you didn’t watch her victory speech, you missed arguably Clinton’s best speech of her entire campaign. Clinton is finally coming to a point where she knows what issues are actually important to her.
She scored major political points when she took a moment to talk about the daughter of the Sandy Hook elementary principal who died defending her to engage in a conversation about gun violence. She gave the kind of speech only candidates in the general election give, because she barely even mentioned Bernie Sanders at all.
For Sanders supporters, Tuesday was not a good day. Clinton was expected to win, but the margin of victory is what dealt the biggest blow.
After his loss in New York, Sanders returned to his state of Vermont, where he likely is regrouping and planning for what he needs to do next. The probability of him dropping out in the next month or so is larger now.
At this point, the math is not on his side and all he can do is steer the conversation. He is also at risk of endangering her inevitable nomination, where any attacks he makes on her at this point just damage the Democratic nominee for president.
Trump’s victory in New York gives him the boost he needed
Donald Trump unsurprisingly won New York by a landslide. Ted Cruz did just as bad as people predicted he would, and Cruz’s only hope at this point is a contested convention, with his knowledge of the election system being his best weapon for stopping Trump.
Trump is on the way to becoming the nominee, but he’s still at risk of not reaching that 1,237 threshold needed to securing his spot. He will likely come close, but if there is a contested convention, Cruz may come in with delegates who aren’t pledged to Trump switching candidates.
Either way, the Republican Convention this year is looking to have the potential for pandemonium. It could even turn out to get violent, as some pundits are suggesting. This election is proving that people are genuinely angry about how the political establishment has been running the country, and voters, especially Republican ones, are craving to blow the system into oblivion.
Opinion editor Anthony Torres is a political science junior and may be reached at [email protected]
