…for Ted Cruz. Alaska has an open caucus, but Ted Cruz still picked up 36.4% of the vote to Donald Trump’s 33.5% and Marco Rubio’s 15.1%. Looks like the metro areas came in for Cruz enough to compensate for Trump’s (and, oddly in one place, Ben Carson’s) wins in the rest of the state.  That brings the final total to: 7 Trump, 3 Cruz, 1 Rubio.  If you took Vegas odds on the number of Donald Trump’s wins last night, I regret to inform you that you lost your money.

Not much that I can say about this particular race, except that it doesn’t disprove a theory that I’m working on. Said theory is that Donald’s Trumps wins are largely being fueled by highly disaffected Democrats who are coming over with him to vote in open primary states; which would handily explain why Trump has yet to win a closed primary*.  As I understand it, up in Alaska pretty much everybody is kind of jaundiced about the system already. In isolation, that apparently works for Ted Cruz.

Well. Onward to the weekend.  All closed primaries, by the way: more on that later.

Moe Lane

*Or why Ted Cruz won so strongly in Texas, where there aren’t enough disaffected Democrats to enter an open primary and the party apparatus is strong. It also, I think, explains Massachusetts: in that race disaffected Democrats are mostly strongly liberal ones who’d rather fight over Clinton vs. Sanders, and the number of blue-collar Dems drifting over were rather small in comparison (to be fair, so is the Massachusetts Republican party these days). So we saw increased crossover, but not enough to make up for the sheer number of Democrats ready to vote [in the Democratic primary].