Was the first name that leaked. We now have reported the name of a second person whos supposedly being vetted by the white house for the Supreme Court. Weve also got some news today about something dramatic that is about to happen in the next big primary state thats going to be super hotly contested in the race for the white house in both parties. Theres a lot ahead tonight. Including a live interview tonight with the man who is now basically explaining to the Republican Party, and to the country, how republicans might try to deny donald trump the republican president ial nomination at their partys Convention Even if mr. Trump continues to win the most states and the most delegates. So weve got that live interview ahead tonight, plus much more. Its a big show. But before we can get to all that, we are, as you can tell, by the fact that im still at the election desk, we are still under the benevolent penumbra of last nights super tuesday contests including the one result that came in latest of all on super tuesday, came in so late even i had gone to bed. Finally. And that was the result from alaska where the winner of the alaska Republican Caucuses turns out to have been ted cruz. Ted cruz. He won another one. He won alaska. Last night there were nine primaries and two caucuses for each party. On the democratic side, both caucus states minnesota and colorado went for bernie sanders. His campaign had expected to win both of those caucus states and they did. On the republican side, it was a bit of a surprise result. On a night where donald trump basically man handled the rest of the republican field all across the country, the caucuses, those two caucus states on the republican side ended up being a bright spot for mr. Trumps challengers. In the alaska caucus, it was ted cruz adding his third victory to his primary wins in oklahoma, in his home state of texas last night. And in the minnesota caucuses, it was marco rubio. Marco rubio added a win there last night to his impressive in the beltway list of absolutely zero wins anywhere else in the country. Such a weird story about marco rubio that the beltway has decided he is definitely the guy who can be elected instead of donald trump. He is the guy who the voters will definitely choose if you just give him a chance. But not only has senator marco rubio failed to win a single primary anywhere in the country, its not like hes even emerging as a clear second choice, either. Senator rubio came in third all over the map last night. He came in third in alabama, arkansas, massachusetts, oklahoma, tennessee, texas, vermont. He came in third in all of those maces. And he came in third in the alaska caucuses where ted cruz won and donald trump came in second. I should tell you marco rubio did win a Congressional District in virginia that is literally inside the washington, d. C. , beltway. That was enough to give people hope he might win the state of virginia, but it was not enough to have him win the whole state of virginia. The only place he won, the only place he has won all year is in the minnesota caucuses last night. Tada and in the beltway, that undoubtedly will mean that marco rubio will continue to be portrayed as the mighty, mighty trump slayer, just like all the candidates whove only ever won the minnesota caucuses. Regardless of how you feel, though, about any individual candidate, regardless of how you feel about those individual races and how those caucuses and those primaries turned out so far this year, you may have noticed in the reporting on the president ial race more broadly, its not just this year, happens every year, but you might have noticed when people in the media, people commenting on the race and political figures are talking about primaries and caucuses, you may have noticed that the caucuses dont get as much respect. And usually they dont get as much attention as the primaries do. And that is true for a couple of reasons. First is that the caucuses are hard to poll is you dont get a lot of advance notice about whats going to happen in the caucuses and that keeps anticipation down about whats going to happen there. Second is that the caucuses tepid to be smaller events. They take longer and theyre more of a pain and theyre arcane and hard to figure out. Not as many people tend to participate in the caucus as compared to the primaries. Theres also the matter that the caucuses are sometimes a mess. Theyre sometimes a little sketchy in their results like in the 2012 Republican Caucuses in iowa where three different winners were announced at three different times and at one point the party tried to get away with saying that they had no idea who had won and we should all just decide to perceive iowa as a tie that year. It was the great moment we accidentally captured live on camera at the caucuses in nevada this year when donald trump walked into the room during a Republican Caucus just outside las vegas and everybody in the room just left their ballots that they were filling out, they left their ballots on their little tables and ran over to see donald trump in the corner of the room. And who knows whatever happened to all those ballots and all those votes. Caucuses are weird. Caucuses are weird. Theyre a little sketchy. They are not official governmentrun elections. Theyre just events hosted by the party. And, frankly, sometimes the parties are nuts or incompetent and so sometimes the caucuses are bonkers. I dont want to get iowa or nevada or minnesota or colorado or alaska, i dont want to get you guys mad at me. Caucuses are not always bad. Even though theyre run by the parties, sometimes now the caucus are run professionally and they really are just elections in all but name. That does sometimes happen. But honestly, lets be real. Sometimes the caucuses are a mess. And that comes from somewhere. Because in the not too distant past, the parties didnt even try to make caucuses look like real elections. In the not too distant past, caucuses really were, they just were the place where Party Leadership chose who they wanted to be the president ial nominee. Without really any regard at all for the voters wishes. Thats what caucuses were until not that long ago. And that ends up being really important to understanding how the success of donald trump is about to explode the Republican Party. Because this is not a fantasy about what might happen at some distant point in the future. This is what the Republican Party is planning on doing right now to deal with him. And if you want to see how what theyre planning is going to work out, we can see how it works in recent history because parties have tried this sort of thing before. This is the way parties used to do it. And in the most recent history, when parties have tried to do this, it ended up in catastrophe. And let me show you what i mean here. Take 1968. 1968 was a strange year, right . There was a democratic president who could have run for reelection if he wanted to, but he didnt. President johnson started off running for reelection. He ran in the first state that year. He ran in New Hampshire. But he won there by an unexpectedly small margin then he bugged out. He got out of the race. The spring of that election year, he said he would not run for reelection. And so Eugene Mccarthy was going to run against lbj. Gene mccarthy was running against him. Once johnson withdrew and said he wouldnt run for reelection, robert f. Kennedy started running against him as well and these two antivietnam war candidates started winning primaries all over the country for the democratic nomination. And lbj at the time was escalating the war in vietnam and the country was turning against the war in vietnam. In the states that had primary, the democratic voters were making very clear over and over and over again they wanted a break with lbj, they certainly wanted a break with the war. They wanted an antiwar democratic nominee. And so after scaring the daylights out of lbj in New Hampshire and effectively chasing him out of the race, Gene Mccarthy went on to win 6 of the 13 primaries that year. Of course, robert f. Kennedy was assassinated that year. He was assassinated during the campaign on the night that he won the california primary. Robert f. Kennedy won four primaries that year to Gene Mccarthys six. And in that bizarre, tragic year, 1968, with the incumbent democratic president not running for reelection but still looming large over the party, as the party voted in primary after primary for democrats who would turn the party against the war, with all of that going on, democrats went to their convention in chicago in 1968 in this very strange circumstance where Gene Mccarthy had won six primaries and robert f. Kennedy had won four primaries but then hed been killed and nobody else still in the running had won more than one primary anywhere in the country. Democrats in that bizarre year, they went to their convention with Gene Mccarthy having won six primaries and robert f. Kennedy having won four primaries. They went to their convention that year and they picked for their nominee Hubert Humphrey. Hubert humphrey had won no primaries. Hubert humphrey didnt compete in the primaries in 1968. He was lbjs Vice President. He was lbjs choice for the nomination because Hubert Humphrey wasnt antiwar, would continue lbjs policies. Although nobody voted for Hubert Humphrey anywhere in the country, he put together a slate of delegates at the National Convention by collecting them from the Party Leadership. By collecting delegates and negotiating for delegates and trading for delegates just with Party Leaders at the various caucuses around the country, where regular voters had nothing to do with the process, it was just a Party Leadership thing. And so he didnt win any primaries. The delegates that he collected that way, not through votes but just through the partys backroom dealings, with just those delegates, the party maneuvered that year in 1968 to make Hubert Humphrey the nominee. Hed won zero primaries. He won zero votes. He represented a continuation of Lyndon Johnsons prosecution of the war. He was his Vice President , after all. Humphrey had won nothing. He was not what democratic voters said they wanted that year. Whether or not you agreed with democratic voters that year and what they wanted, he was not what they wanted. But the Party Leadership wanted him. So the Party Leadership installed him at that convention. Thus giving the partys voters a big onefingered salute. How did that work out at that convention that year . Im looking down at Edward Newman in the middle of a huge bunch of security people, how this got started, we dont know. Your microphone is broken, ed. A lot of pushing. Watch it. Theyre going to knock it over. The man is a delegate. Just leave him in here. Check with our state chairman, hes an elected delegate. What are you trying to hes an elected delegate. Check with the delegates. Where are the rules that say we have to are you the one theyre trying to throw out . Yes, i am. Why are they trying to throw them out . Objected my behavior. This is my first memory of going to convention that the police have come in on the floor armed as they were and taken out people who were disputing the checking of credentials. Can you ever remember that, ed . No, i dont, john. First time in the United States, john. Including the eight alleged delegates arrested with dick gregory, there is a total of 64 persons that have been arrested tonight. Just a few minutes ago, about half a dozen policemen went into the crowd. It is believed they went in to try to take control of the microphone. Theres been shoving and jostling and release of tear gas. The committeemanelect from california says he plans a drive to eliminate the Convention System as a means of nominating a president ial ticket. Of course, mr. Reinhart is not by any means the first one to make that proposal. And there may be more of them made after this Convention Ends and the delegates go back. Theres been all sorts of talk about it this year and reams of materials written about it. But we were talking the other night to some of the delegates to this convention and one insisted that before going too far in eliminating the Convention System, and his basis and his central argument was that a party simply has to have a convention. It just cant get along without a convention, but it might be very helpful if each state would set up a primary for the election of delegates to the convention. You know what, they didnt get rid of the convention after that disaster, but they did set up in each state a primary or some other way to elect delegates to that convention for the purpose of picking the partys president ial nominee. And that disaster in 1968, that violent disaster is how we got the modern system of caucuses and primaries so that voters in each of the states can actually pick their partys president ial nominee instead of what the party did to such disastrous effect in 1968 when the voters of the Democratic Party were clamoring for an antiwar candidate but the Party Instead used the convention and the delegate process to pick lbjs Vice President even though he hadnt won a single primary. It did not go well inside the convention, did not go well outside the convention. Incidentally in the end, it did not go well for the party. Handpicked candidate chosen by the Party Leadership, demoralized, fractured the party, divorced the party, itself, from their voters, right . Went on to lose in november in the general election. Thats how we got Richard Nixon as a republican president. No wonder. Both parties used to have a straightup system where the voters were basically decoration. And, yes, obviously voters matter in the general election in november, but when it comes to picking the partys nominee, used to be that voters were just decoration. They provided a nice comment on the process. The Party Leadership ultimately picked whoever the Party Leadership wanted to be the nominee. No matter what the voters said. We used to have a system like that in both parties. We decided to get rid of it. Not that long ago, when tv was in color, we decided to get rid of it only about a generation ago. Now the Republican Party is thinking about bringing back the old way. Because specifically of who their voters said they like this year. And you know what, donald trump is not Gene Mccarthy, right . Donald trump is not an antiwar candidate. Hes not particularly anti or pro anything in particular that is as stark and galvanizing an issue as the vietnam war was in the Democratic Party in 1968. Like it or not, after 15 state contests all around this country, it could not be more clear that donald trump is the clear choice of Republican Voters. He is who the republican electorate wants. As that partys nominee for president this year. Way more than any of the other 16 worthies who have tried to run against him, they want him. Nobodys anywhere near him in the delegate count. Nobody runs against him has any plan to win the nomination outright by winning enough states between now and the convention to actually lock up the nomination. The only candidate who is capable of doing that now is donald trump. And the only way anybody else can win other than donald trump is to somehow pull off some 1968 lbjstyle delegate magic at the convention to deny him the nomination. They are right now working to come up with a process by which the Republican Party will tell the candidate who Republican Voters chose to be their nominee that hes not going to be the nominee. Despite what the voters said, hes not allowed to be the nominee. And instead, the Party Leadership is going to pick someone else. Thats the plan. That really is the plan right now in the Republican Party. And regardless of whether you love donald trump or hate donald trump, regardless of whether you think he is politics as usual, or absolutely terrifying, if the Republican Party tells the voters who picked him as their nominee that they dont get him, the partys going to pick someone else despite what the voters said, think about how thats going to go over. What could possibly go wrong . Finally as you saw, it came to this, at some point my microphone was yanked. Drated sk. Hydro boost. From neutrogena get one of our right best deals ever. For just 9. 99 you can get any large pizza with up to five toppings pile on your favorites with up to five toppings for just 9. 99 better ingredients. Better pizza. Papajohns. Com what are you doing later . Would you like to get together later . Will you be watching tv later . Because tonight i would like to see you later on the tonight show with jimmy fallon. Im going to be on the tonight show tonight with jimmy fallon. I can prove it. It seems like its cleaving party, the cleave are all the people in washington, beltway press, all the people in the republican establishment who are like, trump, we cant give our party to trump. Then on the other side is all t