Sunday Open Thread [2.28.16]

Ed Kilgore:

If the ability to break through among minority voters is the key to Bernie Sanders’s winning the Democratic nomination, there was no good news for him from South Carolina tonight. […] The results leave little hope for Sanders other than slow delegate accumulation in such Super Tuesday states as Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. He’ll obviously win Vermont; he has a good chance in Massachusetts, might do well in Colorado and Minnesota, and might exceed expectations in Oklahoma. But the magic from the Granite State has worn off, and with it the idea that, as minority voters became more familiar with Bernie, they’ll trend his way, too. As Nate Cohn of the New York Times pointed out on Twitter, Sanders would need to win Latinos by the same 2-1 margin Clinton enjoyed in 2008 to make up for the margins she’s achieving among black voters. That seems improbable, to put it mildly, and I strongly suspect we’ll find out in Texas next Tuesday that he’s not going to carry the Latino vote at all.

Matt Yglesias says Clinton is on track to win, and looks back at the three prior contests and finds something interesting based on the demographics:

To truly assess the state of the race, we need to assess the candidates’ performance relative to the demographics both of the states they’ve competed in, and the rest of the country. Nate Silver and the team at 538 help us do that by creating a demographics-based breakdown of how we would expect Clinton and Sanders to perform in each state if they tied 50:50 in a national primary. That tells us, for example, that if the race were tied naturally we would expect Clinton to win South Carolina by 20 points — a big win, but smaller than the crushing 37 percent victory she actually scored.

By this metric, Clinton has outperformed her goal in every state.

Based on demographics alone, Iowa should have given Sanders a 19-percentage-point edge. They tied.

Based on demographics alone, New Hampshire should have given Sanders a 32-point edge. He won by 22.

Based on demographics alone, Nevada should have been a tie. Clinton won by 5.

The moral of the story is that while Sanders is certainly doing well enough to win many states in New England and on the plains, he is losing the election perhaps more solidly than his supporters realize. […] Sanders’ insurgency has performed far better than people expected. He gave Clinton a real scare, and has energized an impressively large number of young people and small donors. But after a disappointing loss in Nevada and today’s big defeat in South Carolina, Sanders’ political revolution is running out of time.

“In politics, on a given night, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.”

— Sen. Bernie Sanders, quoted by Politico, after losing the South Carolina primary by 50 percentage points.

Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and NSA, said that if the military would have to disobey Donald Trump if he followed through on certain campaign promises as president, The Hill reports. Referring to Trump’s suggestion to torture suspected terrorists and kill their families, Hayden said, “If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.”

Indeed. When I speak of the coming Second Civil War if Trump wins, you would assume the military will be on Trump’s side. I don’t make that assumption.

New York Times: “Efforts to unite warring candidates behind one failed spectacularly: An overture from Senator Marco Rubio to Mr. Christie angered and insulted the governor. An unsubtle appeal from Mitt Romney to John Kasich, about the party’s need to consolidate behind one rival to Mr. Trump, fell on deaf ears. At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.”

“Despite all the forces arrayed against Mr. Trump, the interviews show, the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair, as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada.”

Former Mexican President Vincente Fox slammed Donald Trump again on Friday, telling CNN that the Republican presidential candidate reminds him of Adolf Hitler. Fox told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Trump would weaken the United States, not strengthen it. “He’s going to take that nation back to the old days of conflict, war, and everything,” he said, adding that Trump “reminds me of Hitler.” He shocked Fox Business on Thursday by saying, on air and uncensored, that he would “not be paying for that fucking wall.”

Josh Marshall: The saving grace for the GOP is that if they’re actually able to destroy Trump with a brutal, scorched earth total war which drives all the way to the convention, he’ll definitely go away quietly.

LOL

Ezra Klein says that Hillary Clinton just showed us how she is going to run against Donald Trump:

Trump sets Clinton up for a much softer and unifying message than she’d be able to get away with against a candidate like Rubio, and you could see her previewing it in her South Carolina victory speech.

“Despite what you hear,” Clinton said, “we don’t need to make America great again. America has never stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again. Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers.”

Trump may be the only force in American politics able to make Clinton into a uniter and not a divider. The Clinton campaign has their hands full winning the Democratic primary. But if they had a vote in the Republican primary right now, they would be casting it for Trump.

Harry Enten:

Sanders’s loss of momentum couldn’t have come at a worst time for his campaign. There are six Super Tuesday states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia) where black voters made up a larger share of the electorate in 2008 than they did in Iowa, New Hampshire or Nevada this year. That Sanders couldn’t break through with black voters in either Nevada or South Carolina, despite a heavy investment, makes it difficult to believe he will have any more success in these six states, where his campaign hasn’t put in the same effort.

What’s worse for Sanders — of the 865 delegates up for grabs Tuesday, 66 percent come from these six states. An average of polls in each state1 gives Clinton at least a 23 percentage point lead in all of them. These include the two biggest prizes of Super Tuesday: Georgia (102 delegates) where Clinton is up by 39 percentage points and Texas (222 delegates) where Clinton is up by 29 percentage points. If the delegates from these states broke perfectly proportionally based on the polling average, Clinton would end up with a 369 to 202 delegate lead.

In the other six Super Tuesday contests, Sanders has a clear lead in only Vermont, and the candidates are likely to split the delegates in the other five contests fairly evenly. That means that on Super Tuesday, Clinton is likely to win around 508 delegates and Sanders 357.

It’s difficult to oversell how big that lead is. Not only will media be filled with “Clinton Wins Big” headlines, but the way that delegates are awarded in Democratic primaries (proportionally) makes it a tall task to come back from a 100+ delegate deficit.

Remember 2008? Obama had a string of victories in February and March (10 in a row at one point) that gave him such a delegate lead that it was impossible for Clinton to ever catch up. That is about to happen again. After Tuesday, it may be all over but the shouting.

Also worth noting, worst possible outcome for party would be a massive attack to make Trump radioactive but fails to prevent his nomination.

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) February 27, 2016