Clinton Must Motivate, Trump Needs to Persuade

This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on May 12, 2016. It’s a little iron­ic that the pre­sumptive nom­in­ee in one party put all his rivals on the side­lines after win­ning just 40.64 per­cent of the vote in the primar­ies and caucuses, while a can­did­ate for the oth­er party’s nom­in­a­tion has won 55.97 per­cent of the vote but is still be­ing stiffly chal­lenged and lost this month’s primar­ies in In­di­ana and West Vir­gin­ia. These per­cent­ages, com­piled by the num­bers-crunch­ers at TheGreen­Pa­pers.com, are just an­oth­er mani­fest­a­tion of the strange year it’s been. There was no path left for Ted Cruz or John Kasich, so they’ve dropped out of con­ten­tion for the Re­pub­lic­an nom­in­a­tion while Bernie Sanders is still plug­ging away and win­ning con­tests des­pite the fact that he has no vi­able path to the Demo­crat­ic nom­in­a­tion. The NBC News polit­ic­al unit cal­cu­lates that Sanders would have to win 86 per­cent of the re­main­ing del­eg­ates over­take Hil­lary Clin­ton. That’s a vir­tu­ally im­possible task in a sys­tem of pro­por­tion­al al­loc­a­tion of del­eg­ates. When Sanders won West Vir­gin­ia this week, he got just 16