NATIONAL—NBC News/Wall Street Journal–Cruz 28, Trump 26, Rubio 17, Kasich 11, Carson 10, Bush 4
BOOM!!!
Said pollster Bill McInturff: “When you see a number this different, it means you might be right on top of a shift in the campaign. What you don’t know yet is if the change is going to take place or if it is a momentary ‘pause’ before the numbers snap back into place. So, one poll post-Saturday debate can only reflect there may have been a ‘pause’ as Republican voters take another look at Trump. This happened earlier this summer and he bounced back stronger.”
But then again, other polls don’t agree:
NATIONAL—CBS News–Trump 35, Cruz 18, Rubio 12, Kasich 11, Carson 6, Bush 4
NATIONAL–USA Today/Suffolk–Trump 35, Cruz 20, Rubio 17, Kasich 7, Bush 6, Carson 4
NATIONAL–USA Today/Suffolk–Clinton 50, Sanders 40
SOUTH CAROLINA–Bloomberg–Trump 36, Cruz 17, Rubio 15, Bush 13, Carson 9, Kasich 7
SOUTH CAROLINA–Monmouth–Trump 35, Cruz 19, Rubio 17, Bush 8, Kasich 9, Carson 7
NORTH CAROLINA—PPP–Trump 29, Cruz 19, Rubio 16, Carson 9, Kasich 11, Bush 7
NORTH CAROLINA—PPP–Clinton 52, Sanders 35
ALABAMA—PPP–Clinton 59, Sanders 31
ARKANSAS—PPP–Clinton 57, Sanders 32
GEORGIA—PPP–Clinton 60, Sanders 26
LOUISIANA—PPP–Clinton 60, Sanders 29
MASSACHUSETTS—PPP–Sanders 49, Clinton 42
MICHIGAN—PPP–Clinton 50, Sanders 40
MISSISSIPPI—PPP–Clinton 60, Sanders 26
OKLAHOMA—PPP–Clinton 46, Sanders 44
TENNESSEE—PPP–Clinton 58, Sanders 32
TEXAS—PPP–Clinton 57, Sanders 34
VIRGINIA—PPP–Clinton 56, Sanders 34
VERMONT—PPP–Sanders 86, Clinton 10
In case anyone was wondering how badly the GOP is tanking with Latino voters, Lynn Vavreck has a reminder:
Surveys of Latinos conducted by the Gallup Organization, NBC News and CNN all show that the party’s brand has been hurt by the language of the 2016 contest. Data from ImpreMedia and Latino Decisions that spans the three years after Mitt Romney’s loss detail the magnitude and depth of the reaction to the 2016 campaign.
In 2012, only 18 percent of Latino voters thought Mr. Romney was “hostile” toward Hispanic voters. By November 2015, the number who thought that [about the GOP] had jumped to 45 percent. The largest shift was among those 18 to 35. More than three times as many young Latino respondents think the party is hostile toward them compared with 2012 results (a move to 65 percent from 18 percent in 2012).
Donald Trump has railed against anyone and everyone who’s foreign in one way or another, but he launched his campaign last year with an all-out assault on Latinos in particular, characterizing them as rapists and drug dealers and criminals. Even with a field that includes three fluent Spanish speakers, the whole GOP just played along, letting The Donald drag them down to the lowest common denominator. Now the entire GOP brand is saddled with his hateful politics, regardless of who wins the nomination.
Justice Antonin Scalia was taking a free vacation at a ranch in Texas when he was found dead, the Washington Post reports. The trip was apparently a gift from the ranch’s owner, who just last year obtained a favorable result from the Supreme Court.
Nate Cohn: “If the Republican Party remains divided for much longer, it will start getting more difficult for a mainstream candidate to win the nomination.”
“On Super Tuesday, March 1, 25% of the delegates to the Republican national convention will be awarded. If the mainstream field hasn’t been narrowed by that point, it will become very hard to avoid serious damage to the candidate who ultimately emerges as the party’s anointed favorite. The top mainstream candidate could easily fall more than 100 delegates short of what he might have earned in a winnowed field. He would even be in danger of earning no delegates at all in several of the largest states because of one number: 20%.”
“That’s the threshold for earning delegates in Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Vermont, which combine to award 57 percent of the delegates on Super Tuesday and 14% of all of the delegates in the Republican race.”
In other words, hey GOP Establishment, stop attacking Cruz and support him. He is the only one that can take down Trump.
President Obama “plans to travel to Cuba next month, the first such visit by a sitting American president in 88 years,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Obama’s visit would mark a major stride in U.S.-Cuba relations. The last, and only, sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba was Calvin Coolidge in 1928. Relations between the two countries were cut off in 1961, shortly after the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro. The U.S. has since had an embargo on Cuba.”
Embassies in Washington and Havana were reopened last summer, and President Obama said in December that he would like to visit Cuba before leaving office, if certain conditions could be met. “If I go on a visit, then part of the deal is that I get to talk to everybody,” he said. “I’ve made very clear in my conversations directly with President [Raul] Castro that we would continue to reach out to those who want to broaden the scope for, you know, free expression inside of Cuba.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that if Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, Republicans will get “slaughtered” in the November election, The Hill reports.
Said Graham: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.”
Kevin Drum says the Sanders campaign has crossed into neverland.
Here’s a summary from Amherst professor Gerald Friedman about the impact on the economy if we adopt all of Bernie Sanders’ domestic spending proposals:
WTF? Per-capita GDP will grow 4.5 percent? And not just in a single year: Friedman is projecting that it will grow by an average of 4.5 percent every year for the next decade. Productivity growth will double compared to CBO projections—and in case you’re curious, there has never been a 10-year period since World War II in which productivity grew 3.18 percent. Not one. And miraculously, the employment-population ratio, which has been declining since 2000 and has never reached 65 percent ever in history, will rise to 65 percent in a mere ten years. […]
I’ve generally tried to go easy on Bernie Sanders. I like his vision, and I like his general attitude toward Wall Street. But this is insane. If anything, it’s worse than the endless magic asterisks that Republicans use to pretend that their tax plans will supercharge the economy and pay for themselves. It’s not even remotely in the realm of reality. […] Enough is enough. Everyone needs to get back to reality. This ain’t it.
More Kevin Drum on how he thinks the Supreme Court fight will play out: it will be a battle over Reasonableness.
So now Republicans are backing off a bit. President Obama announced in mild tones that of course he’d nominate someone—that’s what the Constitution tells him to do—and Republicans are kinda sorta saying that they’ll hold hearings after all. If they do, they’ve probably dodged a bullet since most of America isn’t really paying attention yet. The next stage in this PR battle is up to Obama: will he nominate someone who’s scrupulously centrist and well qualified? That would rack up some points for Team Liberal in the battle to seem most reasonable. Will Republicans then run hearings that are at least tolerably efficient and fair-minded? That would rack up some points on their side.
Roughly speaking, every statement or action by anyone in the Supreme Court fight should be interpreted as a shot being fired in the underlying PR war. Most people won’t care about this—they’re already firmly on a team—but there’s a small sliver of voters in the middle who do care, and they could make the difference in November. For that reason, it’s worth it for each side to try to rein in its extremists and put up a show of being the most reasonable. Democrats have the early lead right now, but they won’t necessarily keep it. After all, they have a base to keep happy too.
It depends on who the centrist is. Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) suggested the so called “centrist” Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval (R). LOLz. Meanwhile, Sri Srinivasan is also considered a respectable moderate choice, given his 97-0 Senate vote of confirmation in 2013 to the DC Circuit, the supposed minor league to the Supreme Court’s big league, but he would be much more decidedly liberal in his opinions.
Vox on how a sharp Scalia dissent made the liberal majority opinion better:
None of this is to say that Justice Scalia was a liberal on the Court. He was not, as any number of anecdotes will reveal. These conservative contributions are easy to observe because they can be seen in his majority opinions. But under the right circumstances, conservatives can be important for the development of good liberal law. These contributions are much harder to observe, for it is the shadow of Scalia’s dissent and his critical evaluation that improved liberal opinions behind the scenes.
Justice Ginsburg has attested to this empirically. My colleagues’ scholarship suggests that the rational tactic of a Supreme Court justice committed to liberal doctrine — as many commentators presume Ginsburg is — would be to improve the quality of her draft opinions in order to win the support of a justice like Scalia. That tactic reflects the rules established by the founders of the Court. And perhaps testimony to their apparent wisdom is the most fitting tribute to Scalia of all.
Rembert Browne with a great read, on how Hillary won Harlem:
The moment was a brief callback to the controversial opinion of scholar Michael Eric Dyson in his November 2015 New Republic piece, which said that Hillary Clinton will do more for black people than Barack Obama. And like Dyson further argues in his book, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, Obama uniquely had to comply with the expectations of whites. That’s not something Clinton will ever have to deal with to the same degree.
Hillary then followed up the Flint statement with the following series of points, all delivered in about two minutes:
“We still need to face the painful reality that African-Americans are nearly three times as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage.”
“Something’s wrong when the median wealth for black families is just a tiny fraction of the median wealth of white families.”
“Something is wrong when African-American men are far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white men convicted of the same offenses.”
“Black kids get arrested for petty crimes, but white CEOs get away with fleecing our entire country — there is something wrong.”
“Just imagine with me for a minute if white kids were 500 percent more likely to die from asthma than black kids — 500 percent.”
Imagine if a white baby in South Carolina were twice as likely to die before her first birthday than an African-American baby.
“Imagine the outcry. Imagine the resources that would flood in.”
“Now, these inequities are wrong, but they’re also immoral. And it’ll be the mission of my presidency to bring them to an end. We have to begin by facing up to the reality of systemic racism.”
I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The tiptoeing had vanished. She wasn’t trying to win everyone’s vote by flying as close to the middle as possible. And even though the room was markedly black, these thoughts were now on her permanent electoral record for all to see. The use of “imagine” was powerful, because it comes with an almost implied, You can’t imagine it, because that shit wouldn’t fly. She was finally just saying it, bluntly. Hearing this, in February, was so much more powerful than any policy plan. Because before many people want to know your plan — or before people will ever truly consider believing in your plan — they want to know that you understand their world.
Marco Rubio approves of waterboarding Hillary, given his laughing at the suggestion from one of his Town Hall attendees.
Rick Klein asks what is next for Jeb: “There may be no bigger question in the Republican race after the two GOP contests that will fill the next week. Unless Jeb Bush turns expectations on their head, he’s in for a rough South Carolina: a new CNN/ORC poll there has him in a distant fourth place – as close as he is to catching Marco Rubio as Ben Carson is to catching Bush. That’s despite perhaps his strongest debate performance, in a state where he’s leaned as heavily as possible on his family legacy to turn things around. Then comes Nevada, where the new CNN numbers have him in sixth place in the caucuses – out of six remaining candidates.”
“If that’s how Bush limps into Super Tuesday, the question will be asked sooner rather than later by the donor and pundit classes: Will remaining in the race do more harm to the other candidates than good to Bush’s own chances? Bush has earned the right to stay in the race as long as he wants, and even diminished fundraising capabilities leave him with the ability to stretch through the March 1 and March 15 elections. But he’s awkwardly positioned to reach a point where some hard questions will need to be asked, particularly if Donald Trump romps through the balance of February.”
Bernie Sanders’ supporter and surrogate Rapper Killer Mike says a uterus does not qualify you to be President. This statement was made Tuesday. Has there been any condemnation from the Sanders campaign? I haven’t seen any.
First Read: “For starters, South Carolina isn’t New Hampshire: 65% of Republican voters in the Palmetto State are evangelical Christians, per the 2012 exit polls, versus the 25% we saw in New Hampshire. Also, while only 55% of GOP voters in the Granite State considered themselves to be Republicans (due to the state’s heavy presence of independent voters), it was 71% in South Carolina four years ago.”
“Yet beyond demographics, South Carolina has been Bush Country in past cycles — George H.W. Bush won it in 1988 and 1992, George W. Bush won it in 2000, and John McCain won it in 2008. Yes, New Gingrich was your 2012 victor, breaking the state’s streak in its winner going on to be the GOP’s presidential nominee. But if Trump wins South Carolina on Saturday, it not only would give him a clear path to the nomination; it also would be another sign how much the Republican Party has changed since 2008.”
Leonard Steinhorn on how the Establishment got 2016 so wrong: “And here’s why: the economic and social wreckage wrought by the Great Recession of 2007-2009, which flat lined the lives and aspirations of so many, barely registered on the lifestyle Richter scale of media and political heavies.”
“Some of these elites may have seen their bull market portfolios or 401(k) plans dip, and for those trying to sell vacation homes they saw demand soften a bit. But as economic growth recovered so did their assets, and for the most part the recession to them was a talking point, a dinner party topic.”
“Not so for the vast majority of Americans. The recession’s economic pandemic may have caused the establishment only seasonal sniffles, but it has had an ongoing, debilitating, and personal impact on working and middle class Americans. And to young people raised to believe in a buoyant America and bigger future, a pinched economy is all they have known.”