ArcaMax

In short, there was nothing in those numbers to encourage Trump to be a nicer guy, whether to women or to anybody else.

But here's where we see the differences between Trump and Sanders. While Trump makes a rallying cry of his defiance to "total political correctness," Sanders has been stalked by it.

In particular, the Black Lives Matter movement, which grew out of protests over shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers, has interrupted two major Sanders events, including one in Seattle last weekend.

Demanding that Sanders, who has focused mainly on income inequality, address more directly issues related to institutional racism in housing, education and criminal justice, the group ultimately forced the senator to leave the stage without speaking.

Frankly, I find the silencing of a valuable ally to be a foolishly self-defeating way to call for more dialogue, even when you're right.

Yet Sanders seems to have gotten the message. He has released a comprehensive "racial justice platform" that has won praise from some of the movement's leaders and he has hired a young African-American activist Symone Sanders, no relation to the senator, to serve as his campaign's press secretary.

That's a smart move, for starters. The junior senator has been an activist in civil rights and other causes since his student days at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s. But his impressively huge crowds have been less diverse than his 95-percent-white home state of Vermont.

As Republican Mitt Romney's demographically-driven defeat revealed in 2012, both parties need to reach beyond their traditional base to win national elections. Republicans say they got that message. They have yet to show it.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.