Donald Trump Is Now The Last Man Standing In GOP Race

Nearly 11 months after he announced his candidacy for President, which featured controversial statements about illegal Mexican immigrants that set the tone for the rest of his campaign, Donald Trump has all but clinched the Republican nomination.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has a great breakdown as to why Republican voters decided ultimately on Trump and how his campaign has made history in shaping the future of campaign politics.

But whereas Cruz offered a mix of anti-establishment-ism and movement conservatism — and whereas Marco Rubio offered movement conservatism plus a strong claim to electability — Trump’s main differentiator was doubling down on cultural grievance: grievances against immigrants, against Muslims, against political correctness, against the media, and sometimes against black people and women. And the strategy worked. It’s a point in favor of those who see politics as being governed by cultural identity — a matter of seeking out one’s “tribe” and fitting in with it — as opposed to carefully calibrating one’s position on a left-right spectrum.

Silver hit it right in the head. Trump played on the right wing’s social grievances and had the celebrity to pull it off. “He’s a billionaire but he HATES illegals JUST LIKE ME!” He collated JUST enough support to handily defeat a watered down GOP field and grew stronger as the herd began to thin late.

Now with Cruz and Kasich out of the way, Trump and the GOP (albeit reluctantly) can finally set their sights on strategizing against Hillary, who holds a double digit lead over Trump in the national polls.

Regardless of his elect-ability, here we are with Trump being literally one step away from the Presidency and we have nothing but our closet prejudices to thank for that.