Noam Chomsky explains Donald Trump's recent success
quora.com
quora.com
I believe trumps success owes a lot to how differentiated he is from other candidates; to the point where he is effectively a 'third party' within the republican party. The other candidates split one pool of votes (because they are so similar) and he takes a largely unopposed pool. This is even worse because the republican party recently switched to a winner-takes-all voting scheme for their primaries.
Example: Arkansas had 33% Trump, 31% Cruz, 25% Rubio. If only one of them ran, then either Cruz or Rubio seems more likely to have won. Instead Trump got 2/3 of candidiates, Cruz got 1/3 of candidates and Rubio got nothing.
The rest of the candidates (of which Rubio is the only one with any even dim signs of life at this point) seem to be mostly splitting the remaining group with who gets the non-Trump/non-Cruz support determined by factors like regional appeal and visibility (which mostly means Rubio gets the lion's share, but Kasich's second-place -- after Trump -- showing in Vermont after his unusually focused effort there is part of this.)
Now, even though Trump and Cruz are targeting very similar voters, there seems to be enough enmity between the camps that voters that have committed to one already (rather than undecided that might commit to one or the other) may be unlikely to switch to the other if their preferred candidate goes away, so a Cruz withdrawal, if it were to occur, might still benefit the remaining non-Trump candidate (presumably Rubio), but I don't think Rubio (et al.) and Cruz supporters are really a coherent block that is being split.
> This is even worse because the republican party recently switched to a winner-takes-all voting scheme for their primaries.
Its a lot more complicated than that; there isn't a single scheme used by all state Republican Parties to allocate delegates: http://frontloading.blogspot.com/p/2016-republican-delegate-...
(The Republicans have for some time had, overall, a far more disproportionate system than the Democrats, and I believe its more disproportionate in 2016 than it was previously, but its not "winner-take-all", except in a few states.)
On the other side, I see Bernie losing heavily in conservative states, but nearly equal or slightly better in others. I'm assuming he's so polarizing that republican voters are voting against him. This may be a good system for Americans in general even if I'd love to see him win (it keeps candidates towards the middle).
He's losing heavily in states where the Democratic electorate has a large black component, and, from the exit polling, losing heavily because Clinton is getting pretty much all the black vote.
Those happen to also be largely southern, conservative states, but its not conservatives or Republicans voting in Democratic primaries that are giving Hillary big wins.