Sohn: The endless election season lurches ahead

Hillary Clinton is riding the wings of victory in the so-called SEC primary where voters cast ballots on Super Tuesday.

There is still a contest ahead with Bernie Sanders, who carried his home state of Vermont, along with Oklahoma, Minnesota and Colorado.

Sanders, who raised $42.5 million in February alone, won more primaries Tuesday night than did second-tier GOP candidates Marco Rubio, who won Minnesota, and Ted Cruz, who won his state of Texas as well as Oklahoma and Alaska on the GOP ticket.

Sanders has galvanized younger voters – and going forward Clinton will have to keep up with and improve what she has already been telling those younger voters: “You may not be on my side, but I’m on yours.”

Meanwhile, it looks to be a bloody spring as Republicans take out their long knives to slash their own. That’s apparently the price of the Republican Party’s past prostitution of its evangelical base.

Much to party leaders’ horror, Donald Trump – fresh off an endorsement from the Ku Klux Klan – dominated Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia on Super Tuesday – along with Massachusetts, Arkansas, Vermont and Virginia.

Super Tuesday’s balloting and delegate contests awarded huge chunks of delegates – about 30 percent of all GOP delegates and about 24 percent of all Democrat delegates for the 2016 presidential race.

With 595 GOP delegates up for grabs in Tuesday’s contests, Trump hauled in the lion’s share of them.

Democrats had 865 delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday. Clinton took about twice as many as Sanders.

The day’s elections, restructured by the GOP after the 2012 presidential election to help Republicans streamline their nomination process, were front-loaded with conservative southern states. And streamline it did – much to the chagrin of GOP leaders and moderates who are now kicking themselves for a strategy that strengthened Trump.

The GOP panic over the TV reality show star-come-to-power was palpable early Tuesday as Speaker Paul Ryan denounced the New York businessman’s refusal to quickly distance himself from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

“If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games,” Ryan told reporters “They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices.”

Ryan added: “And if someone wants to be our nominee, they must understand this. I hope this is the last time I need to speak out on this race.”

For Marco Rubio and John Kasich, their only hope may ride on their abilities to win Florida and Ohio, respectively, and to hang on to enough delegates to be in the running for a possible brokered convention.

Meanwhile, with Republicans busy in their knife fight, Clinton is readying a buzz saw.

Unlike Trump’s GOP rivals, Clinton isn’t in denial that the blow-hard billionaire’s crass remarks about immigrants, women and religions other than his own will not blow up in his pocket during a general election. Both she and her husband understand that Trump excels at reading the electorate’s mood and “only a concerted campaign portraying him as dangerous and bigoted” would win what both Clintons believe will be a close November election, according to The New York Times.

Clinton would beat Trump in November 52 to 44 percent, according to a new CNN/ORC poll, but perhaps not Cruz or Rubio. Sanders would trump Trump 55 to 43 percent, and beat the others as well. Go figure.

What it all means is that a political season that already seemed to be an endless time warp is just beginning.