Friday Open Thread [2.5.2016]

NEW HAMPSHIRE—UMass/7News (Tracking): Sanders 55, Clinton 40
NEW HAMPSHIRE—ARG (Tracking): Sanders 54, Clinton 38
NEW HAMPSHIRE—NBC/WSJ/Marist: Trump 30, Rubio 17, Cruz 15, Kasich 10, Bush 9, Christie 4, Carson 4, Fiorina 2
NEW HAMPSHIRE—UMass/7News (Tracking): Trump 34, Rubio 15, Cruz 14, Kasich 8, Bush 8, Christie 5, Fiorina 3, Carson 4
NEW HAMPSHIRE—ARG (Tracking): Trump 36, Rubio 15, Kasich 14, Cruz 12, Bush 8, Christie 6, Fiorina 2, Carson 2

Cruz’s path to the nomination:

Cruz managed to dispose of both Huckabee and Santorum [and] Paul, which gives him more running room on the movement-conservative right[.] He’s also much better financed than the perennially cash-strapped Huck was in 2008, and has a broader donor base than Santorum (heavily dependent on Foster Friess, a single super-pac donor) in 2012. But Cruz, too, could be constrained by the size of the Evangelical vote in upcoming states; he ran a poor third in Iowa among non-Evangelical caucusgoers.

So it’s worth a good look at the calendar and where white Christian soldiers do and don’t dominate. Fortunately, Geoffrey Skelley of Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball looked at past exit-poll data to tabulate estimates of the Evangelical percentage of Republican primary and caucus participants by state, and correlated it to the 2016 calendar. New Hampshire famously has a relatively small Evangelical electorate (21 percent), as does Nevada, which caucuses on February 23 (24 percent, though this number could be supplemented by outsize LDS participation). But from the February 20 South Carolina primary through March 15, there are nine states (South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and North Carolina) with an estimated white-Evangelical percentage of the GOP electorate over 60 percent, and another four (Texas, Kansas, Louisiana, and Missouri) that come in over 50 percent. That’s quite a potential hunting ground for Ted Cruz. But he’d better bag the limit, since after March 15 there are only four states, none of them all that large, with estimated white-Evangelical majorities of the primary vote: Indiana, West Virginia, Montana, and South Dakota.

Cruz’s path to the nomination, then, requires a favorable combination of three factors: (1) big and consistent wins in the states with Republican electorates most like Iowa (Huck ran out of gas before many of them voted, and Santorum lost in some of the larger Evangelical-heavy states like Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina); (2) a favorable landscape of surviving opponents for as long as possible, whether it’s multiple “Establishment” candidates or Rubio and Trump blasting away at each other; or (3) a breakout by Cruz into other demographics making him competitive in less Evangelical states.

Sam Stein and Amanda Turkel at the Huffington Post argue that Hillary Clinton’s problem is not that she isn’t progressive, it’s that she is cautious. That’s true, and sometimes necessary.

On several issues, her record has indeed run more to the ideological center than a pure progressive would like. But the charge glosses over a larger point: Clinton’s vulnerability, longtime observers insist, is a tendency towards caution and incrementalism and a willingness to occasionally suppress beliefs out of perceived expediency.

“I’m a progressive who likes to get things done,” Clinton responded Wednesday during the CNN town hall to address the criticism.

Indeed, throughout much of her husband’s career, she was viewed as an interloping hippie. The attacks were often gendered — going after Clinton for keeping her maiden name — but some of them were ideological as well.

“The right started its 20-year jihad against Hillary precisely because she was an advocate for progressive causes and a champion of equal rights,” said Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress.

Clinton often clashed against the centrists in her husband’s White House. One famous example was successfully pushing then-President Bill Clinton to veto bankruptcy reform legislation in the late 1990s, when she joined forces with Elizabeth Warren, who was then still a law professor at Harvard University. A 1998 Warren op-ed moved her to request a meeting examining how the legislation — pushed by credit card companies — would disproportionately affect women trying to collect alimony and child support from their ex-husbands.

“I never had a smarter student,” Warren recounted in a 2004 interview with PBS host Bill Moyers.

“When I first started covering her, people would be like, ‘She is the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,'” Politico’s Glenn Thrush, a longtime Clinton chronicler, said at that same HuffPost discussion. […]

Clinton certainly has steadfast beliefs. But she’s also more of a tactician than your full-hearted ideologue. Her theory of governance involves an implicit tradeoff: more legislation will get done but bolder stances — like coming out for marriage equality before it is more politically safe to do so — will be sacrificed. And whereas Sanders promises to commit to a position and negotiate from there, Clinton pledges to negotiate her way towards that position.

Rachel Maddow told Playboy that the thought of Bernie Sanders’ winning the Democratic nomination is “hard to imagine.”

Said Maddow: “My prediction for Bernie: populist hero forever but hard to imagine him still being there at the convention.”

Taegan Goddard:

The debate focused entirely on substance and the differences between the candidates. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders probably agree more than they disagree, but this debate highlighted where they diverge. It was very useful to anyone watching.

Both candidates did a great job. It was an evenly-matched fight but Sanders kept Clinton on the defensive for most of the debate. With the exception of foreign policy, it was primarily fought on Sanders terrain. By that measure, he won. But Clinton also did her best to use everything in her opposition research file against Sanders.

Of their weaknesses, Clinton still hasn’t figured out how to answer the charge that she’s in the pocket of Wall Street. Sanders still hasn’t figured out he needs to come up with a coherent foreign policy view. In the end, the debate was probably a draw.

The real winners were Democratic voters. Anyone who watched learned a lot. It made the Republican debates look like over-produced game shows.

Dylan Matthews has his winners and losers. Winner: Bernie and Hillary. Losers: Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Wall Street.

On some level, the Democratic primary process is now zero-sum, with any gains to Sanders hurting Clinton and vice versa. And that’s true in a narrow sense. But both candidates gave very strong performances that emphasized their respective strengths. Regardless of who won in relative terms, both clearly succeeded in making the most compelling case for their respective candidacies.

For Clinton, that meant giving her strongest performance to date on foreign policy. She’s still well to the right of the Democratic Party as a whole on these questions. But she also is actually well-versed in them, whereas Sanders’s comments on foreign policy appear limited to a) praising the foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration, and b) hammering Clinton for her vote for the Iraq War. […]

Sanders clearly won on domestic policy. Clinton clearly won on foreign policy. And both gave excellent performances that offered compelling substantive grounds for supporting them. It feels perverse to label either a loser.

Matt Yglesias says the progressive v. moderate attacks on Clinton are actually helping her for the general election.

[T]he reality is that no matter how annoying Clinton, her team, and the dozens of senior party figures backing her may find it, Sanders’s attacks are in her own long-term best interest. That’s because his framing of Clinton as a temperamentally cautious, ideologically moderate politician who tries to straddle the divide between progressive activists and status quo business groups is for better or for worse exactly how she is going to want to portray herself for the coming general election.

After all, though this is obviously not what most of the Democratic Party base wants to hear, there’s simply no evidence that the mass public in the United States is eager to mobilize on behalf of Sanders’s vision of a drastic policy lurch to the left.

Many progressives believe in the Ted Cruz and Tea Party delusion that if only we nominate the MOST PROGRESSIVE PERSON EVAH!!!!, then it will be a landslide for progressives. We need a President that will pursue a progressive agenda, not the Champion of all Progressive Purity, as President. And the first step to being President is actually winning an election in a nation where not everyone is progressive, not even a majority.

Given that graphic, it is amazing that Obama won reelection, yet pure progressives view him with nothing but disdain. Given that graphic, Bernie would be a the very liberal line. The electorate will have to have made a major lurch to the left for Bernie to even have a chance, and I am not feeling that it has.

But where ideology is a factor in elections, this data shows that voters are likely to prefer a moderate Democrat, like Sanders says Clinton is, to a more left-wing one, like Sanders says he is. Clinton’s specific arguments against Sanders on the progressive question were not necessarily so convincing — it’s clear that with the exception of guns, he is a uniformly more left-wing politician. But given that she is very likely to be the nominee, it’s likely in her interest to lose this argument to Sanders. A moderate is a good thing to be.

Almost 50% of Democratic primary voters identify as moderate or conservative. So don't get Bernie's strategy lately. https://t.co/X3lOXIbp8B

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 5, 2016