Bye Bye Ben

He briefly topped the polls in November 2015, but since then things haven’t been going well for Ben Carson. His standing has nosedived and yesterday, March 1st, the Doctor seemed to signal the end of his campaign. The retired neurosurgeon was once a popular figure in the black community, he captivated many from the beginning of his campaign but soon his unpredictability became his undoing.

He called Obamacare “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery” and suggested progressivism was acting in the U.S. in much the way Nazism did in Germany. Later, he likened ISIS to the Founding Fathers and blamed the Holocaust on gun control. At other times, he advocated for national control of the school system, anathema to conservatives.

The mood shifted in the US, support waned for the bizarre doctor, thus creating a vacuum that only Trump seems able to fill. The real estate mogul did enjoy a Super Tuesday and now it seems that he is heading for Republican glory.

Trump Keeps Coming

Donald Trump won GOP primaries in seven states and Sen. Ted Cruz took three in a Super Tuesday rebound, sparking renewed calls from some Republicans to unify around a single Trump rival as the billionaire tightened his hold on front-runner status.
The contests in 11 states showcased Trump’s dominance over a crowded GOP field. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) was the winner in one state: Minnesota, his first victory of the 2016 primary season.

Trump won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia, according to Edison Media Research. In several states, his lead was in double digits, and his share of the GOP vote neared 50 percent. With those wins, Trump has more than doubled his victory total in this GOP primary season.

But even as Trump basked in his Super Tuesday romp, a well-funded super PAC was ramping up its effort to discredit the New York businessman with a new television advertisement that portrays him as a predatory huckster who scammed working- and middle-class Americans.

Can Bernie Bounce Back?

On the other side of the race, The political machine that is the Clinton’s reaffirmed her status as the front-runner ahead of Bernie Sanders.

Hillary Clinton won seven states each seeing her pick up a boatload of delegates , buoyed by a wave of support from female voters, voters over 45, and voters of color.
Yet Clinton lost the youth vote to rival Bernie Sanders in every single state that held a caucus or primary this week.

After also losing the millennial vote by wide margins in Iowa and New Hampshire, the results reveal a persistent weakness for Clinton. In 2012, young Americans cast the deciding votes to sweep Barack Obama to victory over Mitt Romney, even though only half of eligible voters under 29 actually turned out to vote.

Millennials could have an even bigger impact this fall, when they will make up, for the first time, as big a percentage of the electorate as baby boomers.
Though Clinton won Virginia, where she held last-minute get-out-the-vote rallies on Monday, she lost voters ages 18-29-years-old by 39 points and lost first-time voters by 8 points.

At Clinton’s rally at George Mason University on Monday, a few hundred students and community members packed into a room in George Mason’s student “hub” to hear Clinton’s pitch. The event drew a much smaller crowd than Sanders’ appearance at the school back in October, and many of the students at Clinton’s rally told ThinkProgress they are either undecided or supporters of Bernie Sanders.

Some students, including George Mason University senior Maaz Ahmad, even said they may refuse to vote for Clinton if she wins the Democratic primary. “I wouldn’t mind going third party,” he said. “I just can't really get with her. Pretty much, out of everyone, there’s only one that I have a positive outlook on, and that’s Bernie.”

A growing online movement called “Bernie or Bust” has been urging Sanders supporters to write in his name or vote for the Green Party if Clinton advances to this fall’s general election. The threat of a splintered Democratic Party scares young voters like sophomore Criminology major William Johnson, who told ThinkProgress the Left needs to “coalesce and not fracture, no matter who wins.”

Extracts taken from ThinkProgress and The Washington Post.