The polls were wrong. But that wasn’t the biggest shock.
The big shock was . . . who was that guy pretending to be Donald Trump?
Millions and millions of people waited to watch The Donald melt down after finishing second behind Ted Cruz.
But it didn’t happen. Instead, Trump managed to show humility and graciousness without giving up his signature bravado. Pretty brilliant. As Romney and Rove learned in 2012, though, air power will not win many races. You need boots on the ground. Cruz had them; Trump didn’t.
A bigger shock: Marco Rubio’s performance. And that’s bad news for both Cruz and Trump. Rubio stands to pick up the lion’s share of support from Kasich, Jeb!, Christie, and Fiorina as they drop. Add 60 percent of those supporters to Rubio’s numbers, and he’s the frontrunner. Plus, Rubio stands to win a lot of delegates in the deep blue states (California, New York, etc.).
Expect the establishment and the media to turn their fire toward Cruz.
But the biggest shock: Bernie Sanders might have driven a wooden stake into the heart of Countess Clinton and the Arkansas Vampire Gang. As I write, with 91 percent in, Hillary leads by 0.02.
Even if Hillary prevails, the margin of error will likely be less than 1%. She will do better on the delegate count, but with an indictment looming for mishandling top secret documents while Secretary of State (and repeatedly lying about it), Clinton is in serious trouble.