Delaware Liberal

Thursday Open Thread [4.7.16]

Delaware Dem

Josh Barro:

This election has flummoxed the pundits, which is embarrassing, because the outcome was staring us in the face the whole time.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have led the national-primary polls for the entire time that each of them has been in the campaign, except for a November blip in which Ben Carson briefly led Trump. Not unrelatedly, Clinton will almost certainly be the Democratic nominee, while Trump will probably be the Republican nominee.

It seems all we had to do to predict what would happen was read the polls and assume they were correct.

Of course, the polls have been wrong in specific states (in particular, Clinton did much worse in Michigan than was forecast), and they have changed somewhat over time, particularly with Bernie Sanders shrinking his poll gap with Clinton.

But that stuff has mostly been noise. Sanders is still behind, both nationally and in states like California, which he would need to win in a landslide to overtake Clinton in the delegate count. You can tell a candidate is screwed when his chief strategist insists the nomination is “not a matter of delegate arithmetic,” which it is. The remaining question on the Democratic side is not whether Sanders will lose the nomination, but by how wide a margin.

Trump is not a near-lock the way Clinton is, and he will probably lose Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary. But Wisconsin is not a must-win state for him any more than Minnesota was, and he remains positioned to get the delegates he needs from the Northeast and California.

Frank Rich:

Two things that are indisputable about Paul Ryan: He is not stupid, and he is very ambitious. Both of these facts make it highly unlikely that he’d accept a suicide mission in Cleveland. He would never risk alienating Trump and Cruz supporters by grabbing the brass ring out of their hands — it’s why he’s been so reluctant to criticize Trump by name. His clear path to victory in 2020 is to stand back and let the party implode in 2016 so that he, an unsullied friend to all, can pick up the pieces. The one potential wrinkle in this plan is that Ryan is chairman of the convention itself. Will he be able to keep order, stay out of the crossfire, and maintain neutrality when presiding over that free-for-all? With all due respect to Game of Thrones, the Cleveland show is going be the television event of the year.

On Tuesday, 15% of Sanders voters decided they could not be bothered with voting for other Democrats down the ballot, including, most importantly, the Democratic Supreme Court candidate. This is why purist progressives can never form a coherent, effective and long lasting movement. Markos:

So there are lots of reasons why we lost that [Supreme Court race] that have nothing to do with Sanders’ supporters. Still, it is imperative that the Sanders movement figure out how to engage its supporters on the full ballot, particularly since it relies so heavily on independent politically alienated voters (around 20 percent of Sanders’ Wisconsin voters—easily his margin of victory since Hillary Clinton and Sanders split Democrats 50-50). The Occupy movement became mostly irrelevant because of its refusal to engage in electoral politics (compared to the tea party). To its credit, the Sanders movement is engaged electorally, but seemingly focused on a single personality.

Sanders has undoubtedly activated a core group of people, one that could have incredible influence in our politics moving forward. But that will require broadening their portfolio of candidates so that their impact is felt up and down and in every corner of every ballot. Could you imagine Sanders supporters exerting the same level of fear into the hearts of Democratic incumbents as the tea party does to Republicans? That would be something we would all cheer.

The Sanderistas cannot be trusted to support anyone but Sanders. Every other candidate everywhere down the ballot is not as pure as Bernie or has done something to offend the sensitive sensibilities of purist progressives, and therefore no other candidate but Bernie is entitled to support. And that is why Bernie’s talk of revolution is pure bullshit. For Bernie to succeed in office, he needs a progressive Congress. To get a progressive Congress, he needs all of his supporters everywhere to come out and support progressive candidates. But here is where progressives go off the rails: no one can ever agree on who is progressive. From my own experience at PDD, certain hardcore purists in that organization refused to support or endorse Bryan Townsend or Karen Peterson because they are not progressive enough. Therefore, the movement as a whole will always fail because when you build a coalition to elect down ballot members, not everyone is going to be pure or progressive enough.

If you thin Democrats are weary of progressivism, that is why. It’s not because they don’t share the same opinion on policy. It’s because progressives have a lousy track record of being a coalition ally. They are not there for you when you need them. Unions are good allies. They support down ballot. Progressives are not because they do not. If progressives want to become a growing and effective movement, they will cure their purism.

Matthew Yglesias says Sanders is actually worse off after Wisconsin: “The good news for Bernie Sanders is that he won Wisconsin… The bad news for Sanders is that in doing so he likely fell even further behind the pace he needs to capture the Democratic nomination.”

“With seven of the past eight states to vote in the Sanders column, Berners feel they have momentum on their side. But the truth is that little has changed in terms of the underlying demographic divides in the race — young and white Democrats like Sanders; older, black, and Latino Democrats like Clinton. And relative to its demographics, Sanders simply didn’t do well enough to catch Clinton.”

“New York is 17.6 percent African-American (versus 6.6 percent for Wisconsin) and 18.6 percent Hispanic (versus 6.5 percent for Wisconsin). Relative to that much more diverse electorate, it’s not good enough for Sanders to narrowly edge out Clinton. According to Silver’s math, he needs to beat her by 4 points to net enough delegates to stay on track — and that’s even before he fell a delegate or two short in Wisconsin. Right now he’s down 10 points.”

The Atlantic: “Since 1970, the year Harry Blackmun received Senate confirmation, there always have been at least five justices appointed by a Republican president on the Court. If Merrick Garland is confirmed to replace Antonin Scalia, he will join Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan as Democratic appointees to the high Court.”

“With a possible Merrick Garland confirmation and the prospect of another Democrat in the Oval Office, the left can’t help but dream about an ideal judicial docket: abortion rights, voting rights, campaign finance…”

“The possibility of five or six Democratic justices allows one to imagine what might be done in other areas. Might the Court find a constitutional right to education and conclude that disparities in school funding violate the Constitution? Might the Court find that the racial injustices in the criminal-justice system violate equal protection? For so long, progressives have had to focus primarily on keeping the Court from overturning precedents and limiting rights. Justice Scalia’s death and the coming presidential election allows liberals to dream of how much a different Court could do to advance liberty and justice for all.”

Ed Kilgore:

The big question in the Republican race going forward is whether Cruz can extend this broadening of his base of support into Donald Trump’s Northeastern stomping grounds, beginning with New York in two weeks. The crucial thing to understand about New York is that a majority of the vote, either statewide or in any given congressional district, wins all the marbles. The latest RealClearPolitics polling average for the Empire State has Trump at 53 percent. On the positive side for Cruz, New York is a closed-primary state where Trump won’t get a boost from independents unless they re-register as Republicans. Plus, a revived and perhaps last-chance Kasich effort could help keep Trump below the majority thresholds for delegate sweeps.

If you subscribe to the theory that Trump’s gaffes and crude insults to candidates and voters alike are finally catching up with him, Wisconsin looks like a bit of a breakthrough, particularly as interpreted alongside a dip in his national-poll ratings and some terrible general-election trial heats. But the estimated 58 percent of delegates he needs to win the nomination remains feasible if he wins big in the Northeast and remains sufficiently competitive in California to win some rotten-borough congressional districts mainly populated by minority folk who are feared and resented by their few Republican neighbors. But Cruz did his part in Wisconsin to keep hope alive for a contested convention. Add in the anecdotal evidence of Cruz stealing delegates from the Donald here and there as actual names are named, and it could continue to be a cliffhanger.

Gawker reports that Ivanka Trump-branded scarfs are being recalled because they could just burst into flames. On their own? LOL.

Bernie Sanders’ only hope to win the nomination is to secure the blessing and votes of all super delegates. He just irrevocably lost the votes of all remaining super delegates.

He was just a necessary annoyance. Now he is just annoying.

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