What the commentators said

His enemies have repeatedly underestimated Donald Trump, said Andrew Macleod in The Independent. At the start of his campaign, The Huffington Post even put its coverage of Trump’s bid on its entertainment page. Now the naivety of those journalists “is coming back to haunt them”. Trump is not only set to be the Republican candidate; his “momentum is upward”. One poll has put him narrowly ahead of Clinton, and – crucially – he is winning support from people who don’t normally vote at all. Nor should Democrats be “kidding themselves” that Trump’s Republican enemies will opt to stay away from the polls in November. The same was said of Obama’s Democrat opponents in 2008: it didn’t happen. It doesn’t help that the Democrats are so divided, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Barely half of Sanders’s supporters, according to one poll, would be prepared to vote for Clinton in November; 15% are even ready to vote Trump. The truth is that many Americans are sick of their entire political class, and to them Clinton is “a veritable poster child of the establishment”.

Indeed, the real danger to the Clinton campaign now comes from Bernie Sanders, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. To be sure, the left-winger has recently “lightened up” his attacks on Clinton, and offered her his full support if she wins the nomination. But he’s determined to stay in the race until the very end, and his “increasingly harsh rhetoric”, aimed at what he terms the “Democratic establishment”, could cost the party badly needed votes in November. I quite understand why the Bernie-or-bust crowd might want to shun Clinton, said Darby Saxbe on Slate.com. In 2000, I voted for independent candidate Ralph Nader because I was convinced that Al Gore and George W. Bush were “essentially indistinguishable”. But Nader votes helped put Bush in the White House. We can’t risk a similar outcome in 2016: “the Bush administration was catastrophic, a Trump administration could be cataclysmic”.