Hillary May Win The Dem Nomination (If Not Indicted), However, Will Her Major West Virginia Major Mistake Be Her Waterloo?

The battle of West Virginia

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Ben Crystal

If Donald Trump somehow manages to defeat Hillary Clinton in November — a prospect I still consider fairly unlikely — I will look back at this week’s West Virginia primary when I make excuses for being wrong about Trump’s chances.

Of course, Trump walked away with the Republican title. Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich still appeared on the ballot, and even garnered a few votes, but GOP primaries are perfunctory at this point. Barring a brokered convention, Trump is already general election-bound. While his problems remain legion, he will spend the rest of the summer firing artillery at Hillary’s — ahem — broadside.

Hillary, on the other hand, came out of West Virginia with a lot of country road yet to run. The old girl didn’t just lose, she lost big. Senator Bernie Sanders, who is showing surprising resilience for a man of his years, beat her by more than 15 points. His nearly 40,000 vote margin of victory was wide enough that the Democrat wire-pullers couldn’t rig the delegate count to her benefit. Moreover, in a detail which escaped most observers, 13 percent of West Virginia’s Democrats chose “none of the above.”

Not only has Clinton failed to put away a guy who wasn’t a Democrat until last year, she has yet to reel in quite a few lifelong Democrats who wanted nothing to do with him either. It speaks loud volumes that a sizable portion of the Democrats’ own cheering section would rather sit on their hands than vote for Hillary. Trump may not have brought the GOP to his table yet, but at least his primary competition is out of the kitchen.

And let’s be honest; Hillary’s West Virginia face-plant wasn’t entirely a product of Bernie and Trump throwing banana peels in front of her. The old girl tied her own shoelaces together before she walked in. If I can remember her cheerfully promising to put thousands of West Virginians on the unemployment line, I’m quite sure they can. The mere act of rolling back into the state as if she hadn’t crowed “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” earlier this spring demonstrates either a profound lack of self-awareness, a coal-black heart or both.

Only the most dyed-in-the-wool Hillary cultists weren’t left at least mildly uncomfortable by her borderline-sneering at her intended victims. Defenses of her cruelty were almost sheepish. The left-wing blog Politifact gently tried to contextualize her bumbling: “(S)he wanted to create new economic opportunities for current coal workers, possibly spurred by clean energy development…” I’m sure that will come as a real comfort to the tens of thousands of coal workers Hillary plans to impoverish. Sure, they’ll be broke and homeless, but maybe they can land gigs with Solyndra; because mining skills are super handy when applying for jobs at bankrupt “green” energy companies.

Hillary will ultimately win the Democratic nomination, if for no other reason than Bernie Sanders couldn’t even win a game as scripted as professional wrestling. But in West Virginia, she finished a distant second behind Sanders, thanks in no small part to the third place entrant “neither.” And rather than mitigate the disaster by either avoiding the place altogether or pretending contrition, Hillary strode back in like an overconfident serial killer revisiting a crime scene.

The voters of West Virginia noticed, undecided Democrats noticed and you better believe Trump noticed. Even Hillary’s own people noticed; their mumbled retconning of her vicious anti-West Virginia statements prove that. The latest national polling, which shows Trump having pulled nearly even with Clinton, suggests the rest of the country has noticed, too.