It’s two in the morning. My hair is in disarray, and my fingers are caked in Doritos residue. I frantically refresh Twitter, desperate for some flash of hope in the sea of madness.
There is none. I begin to manually rearrange the logical structure of my brain.
Gone is the sliver of optimism I had about the American people. Out go the basic assumptions I had about the American electorate. It finally starts to make sense in my head.
Donald Trump will get the Republican nomination for president, barring a literal coup from the GOP establishment. That means the United States needs to entertain the now-serious thought of him winning the general election.
Let’s back up. Trump won seven of the 11 states that voted on Super Tuesday. Critically, he also won four of the five states with the largest amount of delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday: Georgia, Alabama, Virginia and Tennessee.
Despite what #Marcomentum wants voters to believe, his win in Minnesota did nothing for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign. The frozen wasteland of a state awards delegates ultra-proportionately. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will end up with about the same amount of delegates as Rubio.
Speaking of the Zodiac Killer, Cruz is the only one with a hope of a chance to beat Trump, and he’s already behind where he needs to be. According to the data shamans at FiveThirtyEight, Cruz needed to end Super Tuesday with 384 delegates to be on track for the nomination. He ended the contest with a total of 233.
What would really put the cherry on top of this election season is if the GOP establishment pulled a reverse Ron Paul 2012 at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
For those not intimately aware of GOP drama, in 2012 Ron Paul delegates attempted to nominate him as a candidate at the RNC. The party establishment refused to let them, even filling their seats with shills when they walked out in protest.
If Trump gets a majority or near majority of the votes, the GOP may have to rewrite the rules of the convention on the fly again to prevent Trump supporters from taking over. One thing Republican leaders could do is unbind all of the delegates at the convention, allowing them to vote for somebody else besides the person who won their state’s primary or caucus.
Although rewriting the rules at the last minute to silence dissent is seriously shifty and dubiously ethical, the GOP has done it before to maintain the integrity of the party. The fact that such a situation is thinkable only confirms Trump’s commanding lead.
Trumpamania should also make Democrats rethink their strategy. Although both presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders beat Trump in hypothetical matchups, Sanders does twice as well as Clinton when Trump is the Republican nominee.
If Democratic elites care more about winning the election than anything else, they should support Sanders as their nominee, not Clinton. Unfortunately, Clinton has the DNC in her pantsuit pocket, so chances of that happening are slim.
I’m still hoping this is all a bad dream, but it’s looking more and more real every day.
Jack Richards is a 21-year-old mass communication junior from New Orleans, Louisiana.