About Last Week...

Into the Woods

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Contrary to the title, we’ll start this About Last Week… with something happening this coming week: the New Hampshire primary.

On the Democratic side, President Biden is a write-in candidate because he decided to move the first primary to South Carolina just in case anyone got any smart ideas about running against him.  A hundred years of tradition, tossed aside on the whim of a demented Delawarean.

There are a couple people on the actual ballot – guru Marianne Williamson, hard pass, and Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota.  Phillips is actually not a bad guy and is hoping to pull a Eugene McCarthy stunner Tuesday.

The chances of that happening are exceedingly small, but the state Democrats have opened the door just a crack for the possibility by encouraging New Hampshire independents – who can vote in either party primary – to flood the Republican side with votes for Nikki Haley.

Either way, both primaries do not seem to be about winning but about meeting expectations.  Biden will win, even as a write-in, but by how much?  If he is somehow kept below 60%, chins and tongues and tails will wag Wednesday.

Trump will almost certainly win as well – a loss is possible and would upend the race…for a bit.  If, for example, Haley pulls off the upset she becomes absolutely completely the only viable non-Trump candidate – DeSantis’ ventilator/defibrillator/morphine drip/duct tape supported remnants of a campaign is put out of its misery immediately.

UPDATE - Speaking of immediately, DeSantis has just - Sunday afternoon - suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. It was excruciating while it lasted, Ron.

If Haley doesn’t finish in a clearly respectable second, she, too, is insta-toast but will not drop out until she loses in her home state next month – might as well.

But all of this is in the end meaningless, a contest about who gets to be the candidate decimated by Trump in March.  And that’s true even if Haley wins on Tuesday – the state of the race in the rest of the country puts the nomination out of reach for anyone with normal colored hair.

California, for example, has Trump at 66% GOP primary support.  A year ago, DeSantis led the state kinda comfortably and a victory with more than 50% of the vote means Trump gets all of the state’s delegates, about 14% of all the delegates he needs (it’s 169 out of the 1,215 needed for the nomination.)

True, it does appear that California has as many delegates as it has Republicans and Trump has no hope of winning the state in November, but it is an example of the adamantine math facing HaleeSantis - UPDATE: Now Just Haley…

Speaking of adamantine, it seems there are two such rules in the Eurocrime shows that pepper the streaming services:  the woods are scary and property developers are evil.

Now the Eurofear of the woods goes quite far back – there be Germans there, worried the Romans, and the tales of the Brothers Grimm were not set in downtown Heidelberg.  The woods can be intimidating, true, but it is interesting that while Americrime shows tend to be about urban landscapes, Eurocrime shows involve far more country settings than presumably proportional.