Wednesday Open Thread [3.2.16]

Chris, blink twice if you need rescuing.

Yesterday was the day that broke the Republican Party.

Politico: “Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday sweep propelled him ever closer to the GOP presidential nomination — and pushed the party he seeks to lead to the breaking point. With every victory, Trump is splintering the party, evoking strong emotions from an increasingly outspoken group of detractors and from the rank-and-file voters propelling his candidacy and rendering the GOP’s Washington power brokers powerless.”

New York Times: “Not since the rupture of 1964, when conservatives seized power from their moderate rivals and nominated Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, has a major party faced such a crisis of identity.”

Ezra Klein: “A political party’s power to deliver on its mission comes from its credibility with voters. And the Republican Party has clearly, undeniably, lost credibility with its base. The winner of Super Tuesday, on the Republican side, is Trump. The second-place finisher is Ted Cruz — the only politician Republican elites arguably hate more than Trump. This is Republican voters rejecting the judgment — and thus the purpose — of the Republican Party, or at least of the elites who currently comprise what we think of as the Republican Party.”

Amy Walter: “The only silver lining, if there is any, for those who don’t want to see Trump as the nominee is that Trump has not technically ‘sewed up’ the nomination. The March 15 winner-take-all states will ultimately decide if Trump wins the nomination outright or if the race remains inevitably splintered and leads to a contested convention. However, a non-Trump candidate would need to win Ohio and Florida, which seems unlikely from where we sit now.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper to Rubio: “Senator, you keep saying that and he keeps winning states and you’re talking about Virginia and that’s another state that Donald Trump won. I’m wondering if there’s a certain amount of denial that you’re in about this race.”

Josh Marshall: Listening to Clinton’s speech, I’m struck by one of most unexpected, surreal parts of this campaign: Trump has given Hillary Clinton the turnkey campaign message she simply never had until right now. It’s basically just the Trump message turned upside. And with Trump’s message so rancid and cartoonish, it’s a message that’s fairly hard to quibble with.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic race, Hillary has pulled away from Sanders. Washington Post: “Propelled in part by a sweep of Southern states with large black voting populations, Clinton is now on a path toward a permanent lead among delegates that will be hard for Sanders to surmount. Although Sanders held his own by winning four of 11 states Tuesday, Clinton’s performance dramatically widened her lead as she tries to put to rest any lingering doubts over her shaky start in the 2016 voting.”

Politico: “No doubt about it, Sanders’ presidential hopes are on life support after a string of big blowouts in the South, but it’s a gold-plated, diamond studded ventilator thanks to his defeat-defying online fundraising operation.”

Jonathan Chait:

Donald Trump represents a threat to conservatism in two ways. He is extremely likely to lose if nominated, and even if elected, he engenders little confidence that he will see the party agenda through. The fact that Trump threatens rather than promotes conservative interests has enabled conservative intellectuals to see certain truths that they once obscured: There are deep strands of racial resentment and anti-intellectualism running through the Republican electorate. But these angry spasms of half-recognition attempt to quarantine Trump from a political tradition of which he is very much a part. Bret Stephens’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal provides a comic example of the sort of naïveté circulating among the anti-Trump right. William F. Buckley’s break with the anti-Semitic right, argues Stephens, established the conservative movement as racism-free. “The word for Buckley’s act is ‘lustration,’ and for two generations it upheld the honor of the mainstream conservative movement. Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious.” Now, Stephens laments, that sterling record of racial innocence is threatened by Trump.

Amanda Terkel:

The Republican Party’s top strategist in the 2012 election would rather see Hillary Clinton as the next president than Donald Trump.

“Personally, I think Hillary Clinton would be a better president than Donald Trump because I think that Donald Trump is a dangerous person and is someone who would embarrass America,” Stuart Stevens, who advised 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, said Tuesday on Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect.”

Jeet Heer says Bernie’s revolution is too white to win:

To see Sanders’s ongoing diversity problem, consider Texas, where Clinton won narrowly on Tuesday among whites (51 percent to 47 percent) but overwhelmingly among both blacks (80-18) and Latinos (67-33), according to exit polls.

These numbers show that Clinton’s support much more closely mirrors the Democratic Party’s base than Sanders’s does. One of the key divisions in American politics is that the Republicans are an overwhelmingly white party, while the Democrats are a multiracial one. In 2012, the Obama coalition consisted of 56 percent white, 24 percent black, 14 percent Latino, and 4 percent Asian. By contrast, Mitt Romney’s electorate was 89 percent white, 2 percent black, 6 percent Latino, and 2 percent Asian. Clinton’s coalition, in both Texas and elsewhere, looks like Obama’s; Sanders’s looks like Romney’s.

The Sanders campaign seems resigned the whiteness of his support, and reportedly intends to make the most of it. According to Kyle Cheney writing in Politico:

Sanders’ goal was to emerge from Super Tuesday with a viable comeback path. But it’s unclear how he envisions proceeding from here. His team has sketched a strategy that involves running up margins in the predominantly white states that have responded better to his message. He’s hoping to rattle off wins in the weeks ahead in friendlier territory — Nebraska, Kansas and Maine, which are next on the calendar.

This strategy might be dictated by necessity given Sanders’s failure to gain traction among black voters and limited success among Latinos. But whatever the cause, by having such a narrow demographic base, Sanders has a much harder time claiming to represent the Democratic Party than Clinton does.

It is amazing to me, and ironic, that Sanders is now in the Hillary role from 2008, relying exclusively and explicitly on the white vote to win hand picked states rather than campaigning everywhere, while Hillary is now in the Obama role from 2016, running up an insurmountable delegate lead due to large wipe-outs in more diverse states. Look, I know Bernie’s supporters do not want to hear this, but this race for the nomination is over. To quote Tim Russert from 2008, we now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be and no one can dispute it: Hillary Clinton.

Hillary is now running a general election campaign, removing her focus from Sanders and directing it to Trump. Her campaign will not attack Sanders or demand he drop out. Nor should he drop out. The race should continue, so that he accumulates delegates to have a voice at the convention and in the party platform, and to keep his supporters engaged. And even he knows that, since last night he said his campaign was about more than the Presidency.

Harry Enten says Hillary is the nominee:

To borrow a phrase from Dan Rather, Hillary Clinton swept through the South like a big wheel through a delta cotton field on Super Tuesday. She won seven states total, including Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia in the South. She also won Massachusetts and American Samoa. Bernie Sanders emerged victorious in four states (Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Vermont), but his victories tended to come by smaller margins and in smaller states. The end result is that Clinton has a clear path to winning the nomination, and Sanders’s only hope to derail her is for something very unusual to happen. […]

The end result is that Clinton will now have a substantial delegate lead. When I wrote on Saturday that Clinton was on her way to winning the Democratic nomination, I projected that she would win 508 delegates on Tuesday. It will take a little while to get the exact delegate totals, but FiveThirtyEight contributor David Wasserman projects Clinton to win well over 500 delegates. That will give her a lead of around 200 pledged delegates, not counting her large lead among superdelegates.

This lead is pretty much insurmountable. Democrats award delegates proportionally, which means Sanders would need to win by big margins in the remaining states to catch up. He hasn’t seen those kinds of wins outside of his home state of Vermont and next-door New Hampshire. Consider the case of Massachusetts: My colleague Nate Silver’s model had Sanders winning the state by 11 percentage points if the race were tied nationally and by 3 points based on the FiveThirtyEight polling average last week. Instead, Sanders lost by nearly 2 percentage points.

Ezra Klein asks Obama’s Chief Strategist how the Democrats can beat Trump:

Axelrod’s first rule, then, is to “take him seriously. Don’t look at him through the lens of the elites. Recognize that he’s a salesman, and a very good one. He’ll say whatever it takes to get you in that car.”

To attack Trump effectively, Axelrod argues, you need to understand his appeal. “There are a lot of folks out there who want to deal the system a punch in the face, and Donald Trump is the clenched fist.”

The mistake Axelrod seems worried Democrats will make is that they’ll attack Trump as if he’s a normal candidate as opposed to an orange symbol of voter rage. “Because his candidacy is so much about him and his persona, I’m not of the mind that taking him apart on policy will be successful,” Axelrod says. “I think you take him apart on his business record and his offensive statements.”

The argument here is that attacking Trump’s policies is almost a kind of category error: He doesn’t take his policies seriously, and it’s not clear voters do, either. Trump’s appeal isn’t the solutions he promises so much as the problems he identifies and is, uniquely among major American politicians, willing to talk about.

The core of Trumpism is that the things he says signal which side he’s on — and the backlash to the things he says signals which side all of his opponents are on. Destroying Trump’s appeal, then, requires showing that Trump’s allegiances are opportunistic and even false — an argument Axelrod suspects will be backed up by careful combing of Trump’s business record.

Trump creates some real problems for Hillary Clinton, Axelrod admits. “She’s thoroughly part of the establishment in an anti-establishment year.” It’s easy to imagine Trump crisscrossing the country demanding she release transcripts of her Goldman Sachs speeches and mocking her email travails.

But Trump also solves some real problems for Clinton: “There’s been a lot of speculation about Hillary and the lack of enthusiasm she’s generated. There’s been a lot of speculation about a fall-off in Democratic participation in this primary. But Donald Trump will ignite the Democratic base. He and the Supreme Court blockade will be great assets in energizing Democrats.”

Dylan Matthews has his winners and losers from last night:

Winners: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz
Losers: Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio.

[A]t the end of the night, Clinton had won 7 out of 11 states, including Sanders’s neighboring state of Massachusetts. Even with the Sanders campaign performing about as well as could be expected, it wasn’t enough to keep him realistically in contention. It wasn’t shocking, especially after South Carolina, that Clinton easily won southern states where black voters dominate southern primaries. But even if she didn’t beat expectations, she underlined an inconvenient fact for Sanders: you just can’t win a Democratic primary without black support.

And Clinton did better than just winning. She won by huge, landslide margins. The fact that Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia were all called so fast was indicative of just how thoroughly she demolished Sanders. And given that Democrats have a proportional delegate allocation system, the scale of Clinton’s victories matters and helps her run up the score.

David Corn asks if the GOP can survive Trump.

Claiming victory on Tuesday night, Trump declared, “I am a unifier.” But he threatens not only to smash up the GOP but to blow apart the conservative movement. The conflicts he has detonated will not easily be resolved. He presents an irreconcilable difference. In recent years, the Republicans and the conservatives were already warring among themselves over the tea party and whether it was best to obstruct and threaten debt crises and government shutdown or to take a stab at actual governance. Trump raises the stress level within the party and the movement to 11—maybe 12. He is forcing both to come to terms with the anger, fear, bigotry, and hatred they have encouraged and exploited in the Obama years. However the GOPers and conservatives handle this existential challenge, it likely won’t be pretty or classy.

Brian Beutler says a potential Trump nomination will have lasting upsides:

[L]iberals [have] complained to and warned conservatives—as they have for decades—that Republican politicians were pandering to racists for votes. Conservatives, as is their custom, reacted poorly to this critique, dismissing it as race-card-playing cynicism designed to stifle substantive debate. To the extent that they internalized it at all, it was thanks to 2012 election data, which showed Republicans hemorrhaging support among Hispanic and other minority voters. The GOP responded to this data not by reinventing itself, but by trying to hustle an immigration reform bill through Congress before the very voters they’d been pandering to got a hold of the legislation and killed it. That effort also failed.

Conservatives remain loath to acknowledge the obvious, but the liberal critique of their politics is correct, and it took the Donald Trump juggernaut to wake them up to it. Indeed, the fact that liberals had a more accurate read on conservative politics than most professional conservatives seems to bother many conservatives more than the substance of the critique itself.

“It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years,” Bret Stephens wrote on Monday at the Wall Street Journal. “Nativist bigotries must not be allowed to become the animating spirit of the Republican Party. If Donald Trump becomes the candidate, he will not win the presidency, but he will help vindicate the left’s ugly indictment.” […]

Conventional political defeats are not enough to shake loose the conservative movement’s viselike grip on Republican politics. But a Trump nomination seems like it would do just that.

The downside risks of a Trump nomination are undeniable. But they are far smaller than the salubrious effect his primary victory would have on the country if it forced upon Republicans the kind of reckoning the 2008 and 2012 elections didn’t. If the politics of resentment were no longer readily available to them—lost to disgruntled Trump voters, or rendered toxic by the fact that they gave rise to Trump in the first place—Republicans might no longer interpret governing with Democrats as surrender.

“Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him. And if I don’t, he’s going to have to pay a big price.” — Donald Trump, quoted by The Hill.

USA Today: “Six New Jersey newspapers issued a joint editorial Tuesday calling on Gov. Chris Christie to resign in the wake of his failed presidential campaign and his subsequent endorsement of rival Donald Trump.”