Clinton and Trump Victory Thread [2.21.16]

Jeet Heer says Hillary’s decisive victory in Nevada gives her a clear path to the nomination:

If this win is followed by Clinton’s expected victory in next Saturday’s South Carolina primary and the six Southern states of Super Tuesday on March 1, she has a clear path to racking up enough delegates to be the prohibitive front-runner, especially in light of her strong lead among the Democratic super-delegates. The irony is that Clinton might end up making the same argument from delegate math that Obama made in 2008. If Clinton wants to wrap up the primary early, she could soon be in a position to argue that the delegate math overwhelmingly favors her—and Sanders would have to make the same argument that Clinton did in 2008, when Obama took the lead, that every voter needs to be heard from and that he could still conceivably win a majority of votes going forward.

The news isn’t entirely bleak for Sanders. He doesn’t have as clear a path out of Nevada, but he has done better in the state than he could’ve been expected to do even a few weeks ago. By all logic, a state where the demographics trend both older and non-white should have been a bigger Clinton blow-out. Even as the Clinton campaign will likely gather force in the Southern states, Sanders can still make a credible showing in other Super Tuesday states like Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. In theory, if he does well enough in those states he can make the race tighter again nationally, especially if the inroads he appeared to make among young Latinos in Nevada can be replicated elsewhere.

Man, Fox News is like a wake right now. Pollster just said Clinton would trounce Trump in general election; called it the nightmare scenario

— Molly Knight (@molly_knight) February 21, 2016

Andrew Prokop:

Trump’s Palmetto State win is also significant because he has won the first Southern contest. It seemed, in theory, that the evangelical, staunchly conservative Texan Ted Cruz could be more appealing to Southern voters than Trump, a New Yorker who is not particularly ideologically conservative or religious. Yet Trump’s anti-immigration message — focused on “making America great again” — seems to have resonated here.

That could matter a great deal, because those Super Tuesday states coming up so soon are mainly Southern states. If Trump follows up his win today with similar wins in states like Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas on Super Tuesday, he could rack up a pretty sizable delegate lead — and his remaining rivals would have to scramble to try and catch up.

Chris Cillizza:

I’ve come to realize that Clinton’s best traits as a candidate are her resilience and her perseverance. She will not give up. She will not stop working because she is tired. She will not back away. Ever.

Those traits were on display in Iowa and again today in Nevada. Sanders was the momentum candidate in each of those races. Clinton had the weight of expectations anchoring her down. And yet, in both instances, she found a way. Not by a lot. And maybe not exactly in the manner and style that some of her allies — or the broader Democratic party — will love.

But, she won when she needed to win. It doesn’t mean she will be the nominee. It doesn’t mean the race is over. What it does mean is that Clinton found a way when she needed to find a way. For that, she and her team deserve a huge amount of credit.

Rick Klein:

Donald Trump now owns the Republican party. The only question left is whether what’s left of the GOP establishment can winnow the field fast enough to take it back. South Carolina reveals a three-way Republican race — with six candidates in it. Pressure will be enormous for all but Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to exit before it’s too late for the party to block Trump. What Trump has established himself, though, cannot and should not be ignored. He has mocked, taunted and threatened the party establishment on his way to his undisputed front-runner status.

Nate Cohen:

Hillary Clinton’s victory in the Nevada caucus on Saturday suggests that her national advantage, although diminished, has survived a big loss in New Hampshire and a tight race in Iowa. Nevada is fairly representative of the national electorate, and it’s a state where Bernie Sanders would be expected to fare slightly better than he would elsewhere. Mr. Sanders’s supporters will undoubtedly protest this framing. Their candidate exceeded the expectations of a month ago, and he fared better among Hispanic voters than many would have guessed. […] But judging Mr. Sanders merely by whether he makes life tough for Mrs. Clinton diminishes his candidacy. It assumes that he’s a mere protest candidate who should be judged by a lower standard. If he is taken as a serious candidate, and judged by whether he’s on a path to the nomination, then his performance today fell short.

Tim Murphy says this is really happening: Trump is going to be the nominee.*

Trump didn’t win in spite of being a boor, a bigot, and an analog internet troll; he won because he was proudly all those things. For all the diversions (who picks a fight with the Pope, anyway?), he articulated a remarkably clear theory of politics: Other people are screwing you over, and I’m going to stop it. “He’s got balls,” Julia Coates, a longtime Trump fan, told me as we waited for the real estate magnate to take the stage in North Charleston. “He’s got big ones. And that’s what we need. I’m tired off all this shit going on.” It’s the kind of approach that plays poorly among the genteel Southerners who crowd into Low Country town halls in boat shoes and Nantucket red. But he recognized the electorate as something greater—and angrier. If you hadn’t voted in decades, Trump was your guy. If you felt betrayed by the people you had voted for, Trump was also your guy.

If Trump was a winner, then everyone else is (to use his term of choice) is a loser—including Marco Rubio, who finished third in Iowa and a disappointing fifth in New Hampshire. Now you can add the South to the list of regions that have been less than receptive to his pitch. It’s not because he didn’t make his message clear. Over the last week, he cast himself as the anti-Trump, a fresh-faced Cuban-American who could lead the party into the future. He toured the state with rising-star Rep. Trey Gowdy; the state’s African America senator, Tim Scott; and its Indian American governor, Nikki Haley, who joked that the quartet looked like a “Benetton commercial.” Rubio bet the house on the idea that South Carolina was ready for the future and mentioned the Republican front-runner only in passing during his speeches, and never by name. Trump stuck with the past; he went all-in on white identity politics, and like Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush before him, came through unscathed—two divorces be damned.

*-I stick with my prediction of Cruz through a brokered convention.

Matt Yglesias‘ Winners and Losers from the South Carolina GOP Primary: Winners–Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. Losers–The Bush Family, The Pope and the South Carolina GOP.

On the one hand, Jeb Bush suffered yet another humiliating defeat — so humiliating that he was forced to drop out. But the South Carolina loss was a larger loss for the entire Bush family. He brought in his mother and his brother — it didn’t work. In fact, it got worse. Trump went out and trashed George W. Bush’s record as president, slamming the Iraq War and the dishonest sales pitch for the war. He even pointed out that Bush was president on 9/11, and that the various intelligence failures surrounding that attack were, in part, failures of his administration. The idea that you can win Republican Party primaries while saying this kind of thing casts the entire legacy of the Bush family in a very different light.

And his Winners and Losers from the Nevada Democratic Caucus: Winners–Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and Democratic Socialism. Losers–Democracy and the Political Revolution.

Sanders has brought two distinctive ideas to the 2016 primary campaign. One is a policy agenda. The other is a theory of politics, the notion that a candidate who eschewed corporate cash and spoke bold truths could spark a political revolution grounded in mobilizing vast hordes of new voters. What we’re seeing so far is that there’s no sign this works.

I'm hearing state Dems estimating turnout at 80,000. It was almost 120,000 in '08.

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) February 20, 2016

Sanders is doing very well with young people and with liberals, but he’s not transforming electorates and even if he were to win the nomination he would still have to grapple with the basic reality that the median voter in the United States is politically moderate.

BUT….

Clinton has formidable advantages in this campaign — including a much broader network of endorsers, surrogates, and policy experts along with superior name recognition and a bigger, more experienced staff. Sanders had really only one advantage: A message about transforming the Democratic Party into a much more ideologically rigorous political party than its historically been, advocating a robust European-stye social democratic agenda of free public provision of health care and higher education. It looks like this message won’t be enough to put Sanders over the top, but it took him much closer than the Democratic establishment believed possible twelve, six, or even three months ago. Ambitious politicians in the party are going to be paying attention, and something like the Sanders agenda will be the agenda of the Democratic Party’s future.

That’s what I always wanted to happen: A credible Sanders campaign that pushes the party left but doesn’t win the nomination.

Also, Attention Democrats, make 2016 the last year of the caucus.

Jonathan Chait asks if Marco Rubio couldn’t win in South Carolina, where can he win?

The Republican primary race is far from over, and Marco Rubio and (to a lesser extent) Ted Cruz will have a chance to consolidate more support from party regulars going forward. But despite the happy talk, their double-digit loss to Trump is a concerning sign for both candidates. Cruz has seen his constituency — designed to appeal to “libertarian” and “Tea Party” — voters narrowed to evangelical Christians only, and he has failed to gain a quarter of the vote in a heavily evangelical state. Rubio’s performance may be even worse.

South Carolina has a nearly-ideal combination of characteristics he needs to surpass Donald Trump. It is a religious, Southern state, ill-suited for Trump’s secular appeal. It is a hawkish and pro-military, making it well-suited to Rubio’s belligerent neoconservatism, and the perfect place to reject Trump’s attacks on George W. Bush’s foreign policy record. And it is also traditionally a hierarchical state, where voters take their cues from party elites.

That latter quality is what has made the state a traditional firewall for the establishment after Iowa and New Hampshire elevate insurgent candidates. And the state’s establishment lined up fully behind Rubio here. Its popular governor, Nikki Haley, its Senator, Tim Scott, and Rep. Trey Gowdy all endorsement Rubio. Yet the voters did not take the cues — or, at least, failed to take them to the requisite degree. The theory that the party would prevail assumed that eventually it would unite behind a single non-Trump alternative. That finally happened. And yet.

Brian Beutler has the same question:

Had Rubio finished third—ideally a distant third—Cruz could have credibly continued portraying the primary as a two-man race between himself and Trump. But Trump is a popular favorite, and Rubio is an elite favorite. Cruz enjoy neither of those advantages. To the extent that he thrives, it is thanks to the loyalty of conservative ideologues and Christian conservatives (many of whom, again, are still supporting Carson, Rubio, and Trump). If their affinity for Cruz isn’t robust enough to reliably outperform Rubio, his supporters will begin to question the logic of his candidacy. A fading Cruz would have little room to expand his appeal beyond right-wing purists (his concession speech tonight once again played up his “consistent conservative” bona fides), and his campaign would serve barely any purpose other than to deny Rubio a chance to challenge Trump one-on-one.

As time goes on, though, all the effort we expend examining the race for second place so granularly starts to seem like whistling past the graveyard. Trump probably could’ve won Iowa, and arguably should have. He won New Hampshire overwhelmingly. He just won South Carolina overwhelmingly, too, and is poised to do the same thing in Nevada’s caucuses on Tuesday night. This is a waking nightmare for the Republican Party. Their played-up enthusiasm for Rubio can’t disguise it.

Now this is some spin:

Harry Enten says that while Hillary Clinton is now again the favorite for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders has won something:

The Democratic electorate turning out in 2016 is more liberal than the one that turned out in the party’s last competitive primary eight years ago. Democratic voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada this year were far more likely to describe themselves as liberal than they were in 2008. In Nevada, 70 percent of Democrats said they were liberal compared to just 45 percent in 2008. Sixty-eight percent of Democratic voters identified as liberal in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Nate Silver says the Trump Optimists and Trump Skeptics are about to go to war:

Two competing theories about the Republican race are about to come to a head, and both of them can claim a victory of sorts after South Carolina. The first theory is simple. It can be summarized in one word: Trump! The more detailed version would argue the following:

Trump has easily won two of the first three states.
Trump is ahead in the polls in pretty much every remaining state.
Trump is ahead in delegates — in fact, he may win all 50 delegates from South Carolina.
Trump has been extremely resilient despite pundits constantly predicting his demise.1 He’s been at 35 percent in national polls for months now. That’s as steady as it gets!
So, ummm, isn’t it obvious that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee?

Not so, say the Trump skeptics. Their case is pretty simple also:

Trump is winning states, but he’s only getting about one-third of the vote.
Trump has a relatively low ceiling on his support.
Trump now has a chief rival: Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

What did the Trump skeptics find to like about South Carolina? Quite a lot, actually.

Ed Kilgore:

The HUGE UPSET hype machine that’s on stand-by every time election returns come in was being cranked up noisily when the initial entrance polls from today’s Nevada Caucuses were released, showing a dead even race and Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton among Latinos, an important voting demographic in the Silver State and part of Clinton’s nonwhite voter “firewall.” And had the returns stood up to the initial impressions, you might have seen political reporters parachuting into South Carolina this very night to look eagerly for signs that young African-Americans and blue-collar rednecks were feeling the Bern and making the next stop on the nominating contest trail another dicey proposition for the former Secretary of State.

But alas for the dramatics, it looks like Hillary Clinton’s going to win the popular vote by roughly 6 percent and the national delegates awarded by more than that. […] What may matter most in terms of the road just ahead, with South Carolina (where a solid majority of primary voters will likely be African-American) and 12 March 1 primaries coming up where (with the exception of Texas and Colorado) black voters have more weight than Latinos. If the New Hampshire blow-out shifted the pressure from Sanders to Clinton to show her campaign (not to mention her “firewall”) wasn’t melting down, now the pressure shifts back to Sanders to show he can win in states without big white liberal voting populations.

Kilgore also says the GOP race is now Trump’s to lose.

Patrick Caldwell:

“I think March is going to be a very good month for Hillary Clinton,” Plouffe said after talking with the volunteers. “February is going to be more challenging, and Robby and his team knew that months ago, before Sanders even began to pick up noticeable steam. Early states by definition tighten.”

Saturday’s results show what the Clinton campaign has long contended: States with diverse electorates aren’t going to back Sanders. Early entrance polls (with a small sample size) initially indicated that Sanders had won Latino voters, but the results from precincts with large populations of Latino voters suggest otherwise. That’s good news for Clinton, who will rely on strong minority support in South Carolina a week from today. “One of the reasons the caucus is here in Nevada,” Clinton said at a rally Thursday night in Las Vegas, “is because you’re a Western state, number one, and number two are a diverse state. You are the future of our country, and we’ve got to make sure it’s a good future.”