Unless something catastrophic happens, Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination for president. But you may not be able to tell this if you turned on the television after any of the last few presidential primaries. Oftentimes, political pundits and partisans on the right side of the aisle have confusingly declared victory for candidates who, in fact, lost. If any other candidate in any other election cycle had come in second, first and then first again in the opening three primaries of the presidential election cycle, those in the Republican Party would be talking of him or her as though they were a lock to win the nomination.
Yet that is not the case. Those in the party of Reagan continue to be convinced that any one of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or, to a lesser extent, John Kasich will be the nominee. It can’t be Trump, they say. It can’t be. Unfortunately, they are fooling themselves. It will be.
In just under one week from today, Super Tuesday will take place. For the politically uninitiated or uninvolved, all you need to know about Super Tuesday is that it is everything. It’s the entire race in a single day. On March 1, an assignment of twelve different states will hold their primaries, a haul that represents nearly a fourth of all remaining delegates. In current polling, Donald Trump holds a lead in nearly every single one of them, even in Ohio, where Kasich, the popular governor of Ohio, appears on the same ballot. If he does what he is expected to do and wins a majority of these states, that’s game over.
As a Democrat, this makes me almost giddy. With Trump as the Republican nominee for president, a victory for the Democrats in November is all but assured, regardless of who our nominee ends up being. The electoral math simply makes it impossible for a candidate like Trump to win. The White House will be blue for at least another four years, and — who knows — the Democratic Party might even take back some seats in the House and the Senate.
Yet I am not a Democrat first. I am an American first. I am an American with a wide array of foreign friends on every single continent who is uniquely aware of how the world views our wonderfully strange nation. And, as an American, the thought of Trump as the Republican nominee makes me unbearably sad.
If he wins the nomination, as he is now almost guaranteed to do, he will be the representative voice for nearly half of our nation. He will speak for the Republican Party as its standard-bearer. If this happens, our nation we be deprived of a presidential race of actual substance, a race where issues and policies are discussed at length and with great intelligence, a race that our nation so desperately needs in this time and so richly deserves.
Instead, we will be treated to an election devoid of all of those wonderful things, those things that make a democracy work. Instead, we will find ourselves surrounded by two campaigns that devolve into slogans and ten word answers, the sort of things that can fit on a hat, and no longer.
If, or I suppose I should say when, this happens, the Democratic Party may win, and we may win big, but the nation will be left for the worse after losing sight of the one thing that makes a democracy thrive, the one thing that can only improve and not detract: Debate.