Missouri and Illinois primary results foretell tough climb for Cruz, unity challenge for Clinton [View all]

[pstokely]

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/missouri-and-illinois-primary-results-foretell-tough-climb-for-cruz/article_2f21cea6-a55c-5252-b644-8554053a5c6b.html

"On the Democratic side, the question after Tuesday’s five-state sweep by Hillary Clinton is no longer whether Bernie Sanders can beat her to the nomination — a realistic path is no longer there — but whether she can count on his supporters to rally around her for the general election this fall.

Results in Missouri and Illinois show the Vermont senator got his expected boost from college towns, but also from many of the same kinds of rural enclaves where Trump’s insurgent campaign found so many votes. It could mean that Sanders’ support is coming in part from those who aren’t voting for something, but rather against something — the “establishment.” That opens the question of whether those voters will ever back such a quintessentially establishment candidate as Clinton."

"Cruz takes evangelical vote
On the Republican side, the good news for Cruz is that he dominated in southwestern Missouri, the state’s most heavily evangelical area, besting Trump by about 20 points in some counties there. Evangelicals are a bloc Cruz has wooed and yet has lost to Trump in some other contests."

"The rift between Trump and many Republicans appears to be an unprecedented one, with some GOP officials declaring publicly that they will never support Trump and would even break into a third party to oppose him. But the Sanders-Clinton conflict appears to be more of a standard primary-season dustup — the kind that usually ends in party unity.

“My students say, ‘Dr. Warren, all the Sanders people I know say that they won’t vote for Clinton,’ ” said Warren, of SLU. “But I think once he loses, he’s going to say, ‘Please back Hillary Clinton.’ That will mean a lot. I think when push comes to shove, they will come to Hillary.”

One of the big stories out of Tuesday — one that perhaps should unnerve Democrats — is the surge in primary voter turnout among Republicans in both Missouri and Illinois, with no corresponding surge among Democrats.

In 2008, the last time both parties had open presidential primaries, more than 827,000 Missourians voted in the Democratic presidential primary, and about 588,000 voted in the Republican primary. Tuesday, more than 913,000 voted in the GOP primary and roughly 620,000 cast votes in the Democratic primary."