WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Whew. Thankfully, the New York primaries have cleared everything up and the political narrative is now set.

Hillary Clinton can continue her imperturbable coronation march to the Democratic nomination while a new and improved Donald Trump — the “other” Donald Trump, or Donald Trump 2.0, as the press would have it — will start looking and acting more presidential to make himself more palatable to a Republican Party now likelier than ever to nominate him.

Certainly the remaining primaries will affirm this narrative, according to media accounts. Ted Cruz has new respect from Trump (it’s “Senator Cruz” at least some of the time, not “Lyin’ Ted”), but Cruz is toast in the eyes of voters, while Bernie Sanders’s campaign, which started out as a long shot, is now once again a long shot.

There’s only one thing wrong with the clarity of this new media narrative. It could well be as mistaken as all the earlier narratives the media have come up with to chronicle this roller-coaster campaign.

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Clinton critics are still hoping that an FBI investigation will torpedo her bid for the White House, or maybe new revelations from a Benghazi committee that has yet to produce anything new.

Trump critics will be reluctant to accept the frontrunner’s new look, or believe that it is anything other than another pose that he will not be able to hold for long.

Nonetheless, it is a narrative that does the most justice to the facts such as they are. Sanders cannot really catch up with Clinton in pledged delegates and there is no way he can turn the superdelegates at the convention unless he does catch her.

Cruz can court all the state delegates he wants but a Trump with 1,237 delegates, or close to that, will win the nomination on the first ballot.

But where does this narrative go after the July conventions?

Will Trump be able to maintain the more presidential pose as the general election campaign proceeds?

Will Hillary Clinton be exposed as the extremely vulnerable candidate she is once the shield of the Sanders’s insurgency is removed from the equation?

New York may not be completely representative of the country as a whole but it is a fair enough microcosm to show how weak Clinton is as a candidate.

First off, though all the headlines emphasized the size of Clinton’s margin, it is not insignificant that Sanders won more than two-fifths of the registered Democrats in the state that sent Clinton to the Senate twice. If independents had been able to vote, as they are in many other states, Clinton’s margin would no doubt have been much smaller or even negative.

But it is the breakdown of the vote that is most telling. Sanders, according to exit poll data published in the New York Times the day after the primary, won the youth vote (18-29), capturing two-thirds of that constituency.

In the 30-44 category, he split the vote about evenly with Clinton. Together, these two age groups made up only two-fifths of the Democratic voters, with 45 and over accounting for three-fifths.

If anyone is wondering whether young people will show up to vote for Clinton as the nominee, this might tell them something. The exclusionary New York primary certainly did nothing to get them engaged.

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Sanders, according to the data published in the Times on Wednesday, also captured the majority of male voters and the majority of white voters, albeit by small margins in both cases.

Trump’s results indicate that he may have greater appeal for some of these Sanders voters in a general election contest pitting him against Clinton. The real estate magnate won three-fifths of male voters (and a proportion of female voters nearly as high).

He also won 57% of those who think Wall Street is harmful to the economy, a category Sanders won 56-44.

It remains to be seen how closely Trump is able to duplicate his New York result in other Northeastern states, but he is generally favored to sweep the five contests on Tuesday.

Everyone loves a winner, and the new, tamer Trump will quickly become more acceptable to a broader swath of voters, especially as it become clear that Sanders will not be a candidate in November.

Perhaps Clinton will benefit from the same effect, and her highly negative favorability ratings will improve.

But the enthusiasm gap that has plagued her candidacy from the beginning — as it did in 2008 — will probably get less help from opposition to Trump as the likely Republican nominee makes himself more acceptable.

Dan Balz, chief correspondent for the Washington Post, ticked off Clinton’s vulnerabilities in a commentary this week — a 24-point negative rating overall, a -40 score among men, -39 among whites (-72 among white men), and considerable erosion in her support from minority voters.

Even among Democrats, Gallup reports, Clinton’s image slipped to a new low in the latest poll, to +36 net favorability (66% positive vs. 30% negative), compared with +63 in November.

As the Democratic primary takes the inexorable course dictated by the party establishment and puts up a nominee with historically low favorability ratings, the Democrats — not the Republicans — may be caught up in a tragedy of their own making, built on the ambition of Bill and Hillary Clinton and a party elite willing to ignore a whole new generation of voters.

That is a narrative to pay attention to.