It's time once again to play another installment of our ongoing game of "pick the primary winners." Now, whenever multiple states hold their primaries on the same day, it has become de rigueur for the pundits to slap some cutesy name on it. This started with the granddaddy of all cute primary names, "Super Tuesday" (which was also, confusingly, known as "SEC Tuesday" this year). However, because a lot of states seem to shift around their primary dates each election cycle, new names are constantly being thought up for the new primary groupings. For tomorrow night's primary, the punditocracy seems to have settled on "Acela Tuesday," but for some reason this irks my sensibilities. Maybe it's because I never thought "Acela" was all that cool a name to begin with. It sounds like something a drug company dreamed up to hawk their newest laxative, or something.

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You have to have at least a little bit of pity these days for the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus. He seems like one of those guys in a horror flick who keeps trying to convince everyone that the monster isn't real, and that everything can be explained by rational means... right up until the monster unexpectedly (for maximum shock value) rips his head clean off, in graphic 3D. The guy who has persevered in keeping his little group of teenyboppers together and somewhat sane ("If we can just get out to the barn and fire up that Model T/snowmobile/hot air balloon/mine cart/tractor... we can make it out of here to safety!"), who eventually sacrifices himself (in some horrific way) so that the rest of the group of worthless highschoolers can have a chance at survival. You know the guy, right?

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What is Donald Trump's real threshold for gaining the Republican nomination on the first vote at the convention? We've all (well, the wonkier among us, to be accurate) had the number 1,237 burned into our brains from all the punditry obsession with the subject (indeed, I didn't even feel the necessity of fact-checking that number, because it has become so prevalent). But because we're so deep into the minutiae of Republican nomination practices, there's an open secret that few have yet noticed: Republicans also have "unbound" delegates at their convention. They aren't "super" (like the Democrats), since nobody gets one of these seats just for being a current member of Congress, but they are just as free to select whichever candidate they feel like. I've seen numbers from the low 100s up to about 200 for how many of these there are (again, too lazy to fact-check that one), meaning they are an extra reserve of possible votes that could be drawn upon if a candidate is close enough to the outright majority of 1,237.

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Tomorrow's New York primary will be the decisive one, the pundits tell us. It will join a long list of other primaries and caucuses which were also deemed to be the crucial one which would decide the whole race: Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and (of course) all the Super Tuesday states. All of these, in turn, were the decisive ones to watch, we were told. The fact that no decisive winner has emerged on either side is deemed irrelevant afterwards, of course, because by then we'll all be focused on the next big, definitive primary on the calendar. This will likely continue right up to California's (decisive) vote, in June.

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Believe it or not, it was a fairly quiet week on the Republican campaign trail. That's news in a sort of "man bites dog" (or, at the very least, "rabid attack dog refuses to bite") sort of way. In fact, the biggest news from the Republican side this week was Paul Ryan definitively refusing to be the Republican nominee this year. Ryan delivered a speech (called "Shermanesque" by every political reporter in existence) which essentially said: "Man, you couldn't pay me to be the GOP nominee this year -- no thanks, but I'll see you all bright and early for the 2020 contest!" This is a smart move indeed for Ryan, since it is looking more and more like Republicans don't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of winning the White House this particular year. So we're ignoring all the "but that's what he said about the speakership" tease articles, and we're taking Ryan at his word. No how, no way is Ryan going to be the nominee this year.

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There was some good news and some bad news on marijuana this week, which got us thinking about how the subject of federal marijuana policy relates to the presidential nomination race. So while we'll take care of the news (good and bad) in the awards section, we're going to also devote the talking points section to a list of questions we would love to hear answered by all the candidates. Obviously, the answers from Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are the most important, since they'd be the only ones who might actually try to improve the current situation, but it really shouldn't excuse the Republicans from having to answer them as well. Rather than just a quick "Do you support medical marijuana?" question, we really think the issue needs to be addressed in a little more depth.

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We've reached the sparse and arid part of the primary calendar, which means that instead of another multi-state Tuesday, the political world is now focused solely on the Badger State. This follows last week, when (gasp!) no state voted on Tuesday, and will be followed by another two-week gap, before New York weighs in.

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President Obama made a big breakthrough in public opinion polling in March, one that is (for once) pretty obvious in his chart. For the first time since May, 2013, Obama's average job approval number for last month was higher than his average disapproval. Take a look at this month's new chart -- it's pretty easy to see how big a deal this is, even on the overall chart of his entire time in office.

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I'm going to start this week's column by apologizing for it, up front. This is because I know it is going to be a weak and wooly-headed column today. I already know this because I myself am getting sick -- I woke up with flu symptoms, complete with the usual weakness and fuzzy thinking. I considered just punting altogether on today's column, but am feeling slightly better now, so I'm going to make the attempt. But it's going to be a pretty poor attempt, I'll warn you of that from the get-go. It will probably not be anywhere near as long as usual, for which some of you might actually be thankful (I do tend to ramble on, every Friday). One last warning -- normally, on such an auspicious date, I have lots of fun writing a piece of satire and then at the end stick in an "April Fools!" But I'm not going to do that today, which I'll explain further in the talking points section.

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I'm pleased to announce that ChrisWeigant.com is applying for press credentials for both national political conventions this year. Longtime readers of the site will remember that I (and my lovely wife, whose blogs also appeared in the Irish Times) attended the 2012 Democratic National Convention, but seeing as how the level of political excitement this year (in both parties) seems almost unparalleled, this year we really want to see what both parties have to offer, in person.

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