As for Cruz, he’s spent a long time there and is likely to win, but it’s not quite clear that this is a major bump in the road for Trump.

This Tuesday, America’s long-running primary contest goes to Wisconsin. Per most of the media coverage, Sanders will beat Clinton and Cruz will beat Trump, in the latter case derailing his victory march through the states. Sanders may well win Wisconsin. It is, after all the home of Lafollette’s Progressive party and for a very long time its largest city, Milwaukee, had socialist mayors.

Don Surber explains:

With a commanding 289-delegate lead, Trump is on pace to have a nearly 400-delegate lead in Cleveland and is likely to have 1,200 of the 1,237 needed for an indisputable victory, according to FiveThirtyEight Politics. Trump has 752 delegates and Cruz has 463. But the lead is even wider than it appears to be. Economist Nate Silver, who started the site eight years ago, for this race figured out the path to the nomination individually for each candidate, state by state. For example, Trump is expected to do better in New York than Cruz, who was expected to do better than Trump in Texas. It is an interesting theory At this point, Trump needed to be at 789 delegates. He is at 752. So he is on pace for 1,200 delegates. But Cruz needed to be at 882 delegates. He is at 463. So he is on pace for 818 delegates. How does this pace thing work? According to Silver, Trump needs only 18 of the 42 delegates from Wisconsin. Cruz needs 33. Kasich needs 39. In other words, Wisconsin was never a Trump state, according to Silver. But even if Cruz takes all 42 delegates, he will still be 245 delegates behind Trump with fewer opportunities to catch up as the month will end with primaries in Trump's home state of New York and Trump friendly states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.

The delegate selection process is different in the Wisconsin Democratic and Republican party primaries, which are open primaries in any event, allowing voters to vote in either primary regardless of their registration:

Of the state’s 42 Republican delegates, 24 are allocated by congressional district. Wisconsin has eight U.S. House seats, and each one is worth three Republican delegates to the winner. The GOP’s other 18 delegates -- 15 at large and three members of the Republican National Committee -- go to the winner statewide. Wisconsin Democrats do things a bit differently. Of their 96 convention delegates, 57 are allocated by congressional district, 29 go to the statewide winner and 10 are unbound “super-delegates.” Unlike Republicans, Democrats don’t give equal weight to each district. Those that produce more Democratic votes in statewide elections are rewarded. The very blue Second District anchored by Madison, for example, has more than twice as many delegates (11) as the very red Fifth District, which includes most of Waukesha and all of Washington County (5). The Fourth District has 10, the Third has 7, and the First, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth have 6 apiece. Democrats award their district and statewide delegates proportionally, instead of winner-take-all, as the GOP does. If Republican Ted Cruz wins Milwaukee’s Fourth District by just one vote, he gets all that district’s delegates. But if Democrat Clinton wins 60% of the vote in the Fourth, she would get only six of its ten delegates, while Sanders would get four.

No one expects Cruz to win every district, so it is unlikely he could sweep the table in Wisconsin.

It’s details like these that escape most of the pundits predicting Wisconsin will be Trump’s Waterloo -- something by the way they keep predicting in vain.

Ann Coulter, in fact, argues that the Democrats have an electoral college advantage that only Trump can overcome.

Online this week, most of the attention was focused on whether Trump flubbed his response to a Chris Matthews predictable setup on abortion. Trump, instead of refusing the hypothetical as he should have, instead opined that if abortion was made illegal (which it hasn’t been and probably will never be) both the patient and the provider would be subject to criminal penalties. The favored answer -- as it was to my knowledge in the pre-Roe days -- was only the abortion provider would be subject to criminal penalty, In any event he quickly clarified his response.

Much will be made of this by his opponents of both parties -- after all, it’s always ladies are delicate flowers who must be protected against their own folly.

And that, too, was the point of the Michelle Fields contretemps which so conveniently played into the narrative, Trump as Bully.

In sum, Michelle Fields, late of Breitbart, claimed that Trump’s campaign manager had thrown her almost to the ground at the conclusion of a presser and got the Clinton campaign worker Palm Beach D.A. to bring battery charges against him. Fans and foes filled the internet with heated argument, but the latest video clarified what the others had not -- at most Corey Lewandowski brushed past her for a few seconds after she’s broken through the security barrier around the candidate and kept touching him after having been warned off that.

For once IOTW agreed with Piers Morgan that this was an utterly silly charge:

Women want to be treated equally, paid the same, and not looked upon as a second-class citizen. When it suits their agenda they will twirl their hair and draw circles on the ground with their toe and talk in a baby voice. Men agreeing with Fields, that this is assault, are patronizing women like they are made of spun sugar, and Michelle Fields is gladly accepting the patronization. Either men will have to adopt a girly view of the world, and accuse their Lewandowskis of causing “the worst experience since their father’s death,” or women will have to toughen up, you know, for the sake of equality.

As for the criminal charge, it strikes more than me that it is a joke:

the decision by a prosecutor in Florida to charge Lewandowski with criminal assault in connection with his encounter with former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields is a joke. The police report in the case says that “probable cause exists to charge Corey Lewandowski… with (1) count of simple battery… in that he did intentionally touch Michelle Fields… against the will of Michelle Fields.” That’s true enough, but if every instance where someone touched someone else against his or her will were prosecuted, just about all of us would be criminals. This is what the video shows -- an unwanted touch, certainly, but hardly a criminal assault: Why did the local authorities choose to prosecute Lewandowski? It came out yesterday that Palm Beach County’s States Attorney is Dave Aronberg, a former Democratic state senator and a high-profile backer of Hillary Clinton: The Florida prosecutor whose office is handling the battery case involving Donald Trump’s campaign manager is a long-time Democrat and former state senator who’s now part of Hillary Clinton’s so-called Florida leadership “council.” … Aronberg, who was elected to the post in 2012, has been listed as a member of Clinton’s “Florida Leadership Council” since November, along with several state senators, representatives and local elected officials. He also gave $1,000 to Clinton’s campaign in January, according to campaign finance records.

Michelle Fields was not the only Ladies First woman to beclown herself over this nothingburger.

WOW! A new low for the #NeverTrump Cruz gang…. LOOK FOR THESE GALS ON MEGYN KELLY TONIGHT? A group of self-righteous Ted Cruz supporters released a prepared statement today demanding Donald Trump fire Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski for the media hoax that he assaulted Michelle Fields by walking past her at a Trump event in Jupiter, Florida. Lewandowski was charged with “battery” for bumping into FOR THE RECORD -- THESE SAME SELF-RIGHTEOUS WOMEN -- Were going to release this letter after the alleged “assault” two weeks ago but held back after video was released that showed nothing happened. The group of “guilty until proven innocent” are led by Dana Loesch, Katie Pavlich and Meghan McCain. HAH-HAH-HAH! These so-called “conservatives” do not believe a person is innocent until proven guilty. They’re going for it! They also don’t believe in their own lyin’ eyes that shows NOTHING HAPPENED! But, hey… It’s what Ted Cruz wants.

Riffing off Fields’ repeated baseless claims of having been mistreated, the People’s Cube satirized the incident,

The contretemps is only a small fragment of what is happening both here and in Great Britain -- a devolution of political alignments. Wretchard at PJ Media lays it out:

Trump or Cruz can try to bring back the jobs, but it won't be easy; it certainly won't be quick. Although Labor's Jeremy Corbyn has promised to keep the steel works open with government money, in much the same way as Sanders or the CTU or California would mandate increases to solve the downward mobility problem perhaps enough people are beginning to realize this no longer works if ever it did. The parties are selling merchandise that is no longer in production. Enough disillusionment on both sides of the political divide can lead to an erosion of established two party political systems. This has already occurred to some extent in the UK where the Lib-Lab-Con party monopoly is shattering. The London School of Economics is tracing the ongoing emergence of a British multi-party system. Will a similar development occur in the US? It seems reasonably certain Herbert Stein's law will eventually kick in. "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." What replaces it? That's the question.

Are the Trump verbal gaffes worse than those Obama made and were spackled over by the press? Is being able to parse elegantly one’s positions the most important thing for a candidate? Despite the bleats of the chattering class, which microscopically examines every word for purity?

Author and master wordsmith Tom Wolfe weighs in and says no.

If you go through our history, the strictly intellectual component of the presidency is not all that important. Just look at Reagan. He was a huge success. He was considered an idiot by half of the people in the political field. I remember Henry Kissinger was at a university once, holding a seminar for ten students and he didn’t know that his remarks were being recorded. And he said something like, “You know, when you first meet Reagan and you spend a half hour with him, you leave saying, ‘Oh my God, how could the future of the free world be dependent on such a stupid guy?’” But then Kissinger said, “And yet every move he makes is right.” Kissinger was horribly embarrassed when that came out. The point is that decision making is not necessarily an intellectual talent. One of the stories about Reagan that I remember is the time he went to Germany to speak before the Berlin Wall. It was at the time when the Berlin Wall was still a big factor. And so Reagan had a discussion with his advisers about whether or not he should say that the “wall should come down.” And they said, “Oh, don’t say that,” and then told him what he should say instead. But when Reagan gave the speech, he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and it was a real turning point in the Cold War. It was just Reagan’s gut reaction to the facts.

Time will tell, of course, and I might be proven wrong, but I think Trump is the front runner will be the front runner when convention time comes, and if he is denied the nomination the party will lose against whoever the Democratic nominee is. And, I do not think that nominee will be Hillary because there is every indication that within weeks the FBI head will recommend a substantial criminal prosecution against her. Whatever Attorney General Loretta Lynch decides, the Democrats would be ill-advised to not force her out of the race because the entire intelligence community would not stand still her being let off the hook.