CALIFORNIA—LA Times–Trump 36, Cruz 35, Kasich 14
CALIFORNIA—LA Times–Clinton 47, Sanders 36
CALIFORNIA—LA Times–Clinton 59, Trump 28 | Clinton 54, Kasich 35 | Clinton 59, Cruz 31
To be the nominee, Bernie needs to win California 75-25. He won’t. And Jason will be eating his dumb post from this morning.
David Axelrod says we are witnessing the implosion of the Republican Party: “The normal pattern of GOP nominating contests for the past two decades is that the party endures heated primary fights between populist, evangelical and center-right candidates, only to settle on the leading establishment choice. No more.”
“Having stoked anti-Obama fever in order to score midterm victories at the polls and then failed to deliver on pledges to derail major elements of the President’s agenda, the party elite now finds itself overrun by a wave of outrage and discontent.”
It’s not an implosion. It is merely chickens returning home to roost, or its karma, whatever ironic metaphor you want you to use. The GOP created a monster, and now the monster is taking over the GOP.
LOL, and as if on cue, Donald Trump blasted reports that Sen. Ted Cruz will pick up extra delegates in Louisiana weeks after the state’s primary. Said Trump: “What’s going on in the Republican Party is a disgrace.”
Harry Enten says Sanders overperforms in Caucauses, and he doesn’t gain momentum from his caucus wins, and he is about to run out of caucuses to win.
The problem for the Sanders campaign is that there are only two caucuses left on the Democratic primary calendar. […]
Now, I know what some of you are thinking: How do we know that Sanders’s big wins this week aren’t a sign that something more fundamental about the Democratic race has changed? We don’t, necessarily. But look at the calendar: Sanders also outperformed his delegate targets in Colorado, Kansas and Maine earlier this month, and he still went on to suffer big losses on March 15. And that was after his shocking Michigan victory. Moreover, Sanders greatly underperformed his delegate targets last Tuesday in Arizona, which held a primary and has a more diverse electorate.
Most likely, Sanders will need to find another way to make up ground on Clinton in the delegate race. Wyoming (April 9) and North Dakota (June 7) are the only remaining stateside caucuses. The rest of the stateside races are primaries. Sanders has exceeded his delegate targets in just three stateside primaries. He’s matched them in three and underperformed in 15. Given that Sanders is still so far behind in the delegate count, he needs to outperform his delegate targets by a lot.
How likely is that? Well, he’s behind by about 6 percentage points in Wisconsin, according to FiveThirtyEight’s weighted polling average. That’s not a huge deficit, and it wouldn’t shock me if Sanders won Wisconsin given that the black population there is below 10 percent. (To match his delegate target in Wisconsin, he needs a net gain of 10 delegates there.) Sanders, though, will likely have more difficulty in later primaries in April, such as Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania, where African Americans make up more than 10 percent of the state’s population.
Sanders had a strong week, and this has been a crazy year in politics. But there’s nothing in the recent results to suggest that the overall trajectory of the Democratic race has changed. Clinton was and is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination.
From Julian Zelizer’s “Is Sanders doing Clinton a favor?” at CNN Politics: “In the long run, Sanders may turn out to have been one of the best things to have happened to Clinton’s campaign…Assuming that she does win the nomination, Clinton will emerge as a much stronger candidate and her campaign operation will be in a better position for the fall, thanks to Sanders’ insurgency. Unlike divisive primaries that hurt a political party — such as Sen. Ted Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter in 1980 or, most likely, the internecine battle that is ravaging the GOP this year — the Democrats will benefit as a result of the past few months.”
But Joan Walsh argues, also at The Nation, that Sanders can’t win without broadening his base of support beyond white working-class voters. Translation: he needs to win old voters and black voters. He is not and thus will not win the nomination.
New York Times: “As the Republican Party collapses on itself, conservative leaders struggling to explain Mr. Trump’s appeal have largely seized on his unique qualities as a candidate: his larger-than-life persona, his ability to dominate the airwaves, his tough-sounding if unrealistic policy proposals. Others ascribe Mr. Trump’s rise to the xenophobia and racism of Americans angry over their declining power.”
“But the story is also one of a party elite that abandoned its most faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans, who faced economic pain and uncertainty over the past decade as the party’s donors, lawmakers and lobbyists prospered. From mobile home parks in Florida and factory towns in Michigan, to Virginia’s coal country, where as many as one in five adults live on Social Security disability payments, disenchanted Republican voters lost faith in the agenda of their party’s leaders.”
David Atkins states that if Sanders demands concessions, it should be cabinet appointments (not for himself, obviously):
Realistically, the greatest difference between a Sanders and Clinton presidency would be in cabinet appointments. Sanders would doubtless appoint more Keynesian, less finance-sector-friendly officials at Treasury, and at Justice he would appoint those more willing to aggressively prosecute white collar, financial and environmental crimes. If Sanders could extract concessions from Clinton on those fronts, then he would in theory accomplish de facto most of what he could practically do differently as president.
And those concessions alone would be ample justification and rationale for his insurgent campaign, while doing little to no damage to Clinton’s prospects against the Republican nominee in the fall.
I know Berniebros do not deal in reality (read Jason’s piece this morning), so starting off a paragraph with “realistically” is perhaps asking too much.
Secretary of State John Kerry warned that the Republican presidential campaign raises awkward questions abroad about the reliability of the United States, Yahoo News reports.
Said Kerry: “They cannot believe it. I think it is fair to say that they’re shocked. They don’t know where it’s taking the United States of America.”
He added: “It upsets people’s sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability, and to some degree I must say to you, some of the questions, the way they’re posed to me, it’s clear to me that what’s happening is an embarrassment to our country.”
Right wing organizations have been working overtime to spread dissension about Clinton. Liberals who fall for this shit need to get a grip.
— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) March 28, 2016
Bernie, on the other hand, has much broader appeal. He's winning with every shade of white, and every age group under 30.
— Tom Hilton (@TVHilton) March 23, 2016
Flow Chart by Chris Lay added by Jason330 because it is the best thing ever:
