Sunday Open Thread [3.13.16]

Florida—Florida Atlantic University–Trump 44, Rubio 21, Cruz 21, Kasich 9
Florida—Florida Atlantic University–Clinton 59, Sanders 31
Florida—NBC News/Marist–Trump 43, Rubio 22, Cruz 21, Kasich 9
Florida—NBC News/Marist–Clinton 61, Sanders 34
Florida—CBS News/YouGov–Trump 44, Cruz 24, Rubio 21, Kasich 9
Florida—CBS News/YouGov–Clinton 62, Sanders 34
Illinois—NBC News/Marist–Trump 34, Cruz 25, Kasich 21, Rubio 16
Illinois—NBC News/Marist–Clinton 51, Sanders 45
Illinois—CBS News/YouGov–Trump 38, Cruz 34, Kasich 16, Rubio 11
Illinois—CBS News/YouGov–Sanders 48, Clinton 46
Ohio—NBC News/Marist–Kasich 39, Trump 33, Cruz 19, Rubio 6
Ohio—NBC News/Marist–Clinton 58, Sanders 38
Ohio—CBS News/YouGov–Kasich 33, Trump 33, Cruz 27, Rubio 5
Ohio—CBS News/YouGov–Clinton 52, Sanders 43

Out of the five Super Tuesday II states, I would have thought Ohio would be competitive Sanders territory, rather than Illinois. Now it looks like he could win Illinois while Hillary could win Ohio by relatively comfortable margins, while trouncing Sanders in Florida and North Carolina. Missouri also looks like a close Clinton win, but there has been few polls out of the Show Me State. So, best case scenario for Sanders on Tuesday: He wins Ohio, Illinois and Missouri. Those three wins, and the margins he wins them by, would give Sanders the first real momentum of this campaign, and first real panic in the Clinton camp. Worst case scenario: five losses to Clinton, which would end his campaign for the nomination. One win would keep him alive, on life support. Two wins would keep him alive as a competitive challenger, though with Clinton still in control of the race.

Adam Smith: “The promise of Rubio never lived up to the reality. In no state did he build an especially strong campaign. He was a good, not great, fundraiser. He generally played it safe — trying hard not to antagonize any particular wing of the GOP while also failing to inspire great passion in any wing. It took great instincts and more guts than many people realize to jump in the race after Jeb Bush signaled he would run, but we rarely saw those guts and instincts from Rubio after he announced. I’m not sure Rubio has shown he’s much more than a Republican John Edwards — a telegenic guy with one great speech and family story but not much else.”

Stuart Rothenberg: “With Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz seemingly positioned to fight it out for the Republican presidential nomination, Democrats are now poised to take over the Senate in November.”

“The two Republicans still in the race who could help their party’s Senate prospects, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, continue to flounder. While a deadlocked GOP convention in Cleveland could, at least in theory, nominate a candidate with broad appeal and low enough negatives to revive the party’s Senate prospects, that development is both a long way in the future and a long shot.”

“No, there is little hard evidence yet that a huge Democratic electoral wave has started to develop and at this point, Democratic control of the Senate is not yet inevitable. But that should not obscure the fact that a fundamental shift has occurred in the electoral cycle over the past six weeks.”

“An already ugly presidential campaign has descended to a new level — one where the question is no longer whether Donald Trump can be stopped on his march to the Republican presidential nomination, but whether it is possible to contain what he has unleashed across the country,” the Washington Post reports.

“The racially tinged anger that has both fueled Trump’s political rise and stoked the opposition to it has turned into a force unto itself. It has also brought a reckoning from his three remaining rivals for the Republican nomination, who are shedding their fear of provoking Trump and of alienating the raging slice of their party’s base that has claimed him as its leader.”

Sen. Ted Cruz won the most delegates awarded in the Wyoming Republican conventions on Saturday, while Sen. Marco Rubio narrowly beat Gov. John Kasich in Washington, D.C., on the last day of voting before Tuesday’s make-or-break primaries in five large states, the New York Times reports. Hillary Clinton was the winner in the Northern Mariana Islands, the only Democratic contest of the day.

The New York Times says Trump decided to enter politics after Obama mocked mercilessly at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner back in late May 2011. That night was also the night Obama personally ordered the mission to kill Bin Laden. “That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world. And it captured the degree to which Mr. Trump’s campaign is driven by a deep yearning sometimes obscured by his bluster and bragging: a desire to be taken seriously.”

“That desire has played out over the last several years within a Republican Party that placated and indulged him, and accepted his money and support, seemingly not grasping how fervently determined he was to become a major force in American politics. In the process, the party bestowed upon Mr. Trump the kind of legitimacy that he craved, which has helped him pursue a credible bid for the presidency.”

Mein Fuhrer Trump is a very vain man, and he has very little to be proud about, what with his small hands and many failed businesses and many bankruptcies.

The New York Times thinks if Bernie is launching a revolution, it has to go beyond Bernie.

“Revolution” is Bernie Sanders’s go-to word. The candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination uses it to celebrate primary victories and explain losses, to rally his young supporters and, most of all, to answer sticky questions about how he’ll get what he wants.

… revolutions are typically bottom-up, not top-down, events. Mr. Sanders’s campaign is powered by $30 contributions and an army of young volunteers, but there are not enough elected office holders in Congress or in statehouses to carry out his revolution through new laws or policies. And that’s the big difference between running an inspiring campaign and actually governing.

Joe Trippi, who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, recently noted that “we’ve been doing this backward.” He added, “The mistake is thinking that we get behind a progressive candidate for president, and that will solve all our problems.”

If Donald Trump doesn’t win both Ohio and Florida next week, “the GOP is likely to find itself in Cleveland with no candidate above the 1,237-delegate majority needed to claim the nomination. If that happens, the Republican Party’s own rules lock in a quagmire in Cleveland—and likely a multi-ballot, no-holds-barred convention,” Politico reports.

“The craziness will unfold in stages, with more delegates increasingly freeing up to vote for whomever they like as the process advances. All that puts a huge premium on an obscure and intricate competition happening right now in each state—the selection of the actual delegates. Any campaign not waging a major, if under-the-national-radar, effort to get its supporters elected as delegates will come up short in Cleveland.”

Ross Douthat:

As Donald Trump attempts to clamber to the Republican nomination over a still-divided opposition, there will be a lot of talk about how all these rules and quirks and complexities are just a way for insiders to steal the nomination away from him, in a kind of establishment coup against his otherwise inevitable victory.

We can expect to hear this case from Trump’s growing host of thralls and acolytes. (Ben Carson, come on down!) But we will also hear it from the officially neutral press, where there will be much brow-furrowed concern over the perils of party resistance to Trump’s progress, the “bad optics” of denying him the nomination if he arrives at the convention with the most delegates, the backlash sure to come if his uprising is somehow, well, trumped by the party apparatus.

…The less-than-democratic side of party nominations is a virtue of our system, not a flaw, and it has often been a necessary check on the passions (Trumpian or otherwise) that mass democracy constantly threatens to unleash.

…Denying him the nomination would indeed be an ugly exercise, one that would weaken or crush the party’s general election chances, and leave the G.O.P. with a long hard climb back up to unity and health.

But if that exercise is painful, it’s also the correct path to choose.