NATIONAL—YouGov/Economist–Clinton 49, Sanders 41
NATIONAL—YouGov/Economist–Trump 53, Cruz 25, Kasich 18
NEW YORK—Siena–Trump 50, Kasich 27, Cruz 17
NEW YORK—Siena–Clinton 52, Sanders 42
MARYLAND—Monmouth–Trump 47, Kasich 27, Cruz 19
MARYLAND—NBC 4/Marist–Clinton 63, Trump 27 | Sanders 65, Trump 26 | Clinton 60, Cruz 31 | Sanders 63, Cruz 28
NORTH CAROLINA–GOVERNOR—WRAL-TV/SurveyUSA—Cooper 47, McCrory 43
GEORGIA—Lake Research Partners–Clinton 50, Trump 37 | Clinton 47, Cruz 40
Pay special attention to that GEORGIA POLL!!!!!
Potential surrogates for the Clinton campaign—former President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, and First Lady Michelle Obama—are all assets to the campaign. Michelle Obama has the highest popularity (61% favorable, 27% unfavorable) while President Obama could be helpful in mobilizing Democratic voters (among Democrats: 94% favorable, 5% unfavorable; overall: 56% favorable, 41% unfavorable). Former President Bill Clinton can be helpful persuading independents (61% favorable, 29% unfavorable) as well as voters overall (53% favorable, 39% unfavorable).
Georgia voters are also highly supportive of a progressive economic issue agenda for the next president. More than seven-in-ten voters (72% rate ‘10’ on a scale from 0-10) believe protecting Social Security and Medicare benefits is extremely important for the next president. This crosses all party lines and is an extremely important priority for Democrats (78%), independents (69%), and Republicans (68%). Georgia voters also want the next president to focus on tough enforcement of equal pay for women (53% rate ‘10’) and closing corporate tax loopholes and making the wealthy, big corporations pay their fair share (48% rate ‘10’).
Georgia voters are also much more likely to vote for a candidate that supports the progressive economic agenda. Fully 75% of voters are more likely, including a near majority (47%) who are much more likely, to support a candidate for president who runs on this set of issues. Support also crosses party lines with a solid majority of Republicans (61%) more likely to support such a candidate and Democrats (93%) and independents (70%) being even more supportive. These issues can also help mobilize voters – fully 81% of African Americans want the next president to protect Social Security and Medicare benefits and 72% want tough enforcement of equal pay for women.
Rick Klein wonders if Paul Ryan doth protest too much: “One does not have to question Paul Ryan’s sincerity to question his ultimate veracity. The House speaker’s extraordinary news conference, held to reiterate his position that does not want and will not accept the Republican presidential nomination, will hush the Ryan buzz and mute some – though surely not all – of Donald Trump’s grievances against the RNC. But the fact is that if the convention heads where it looks like it might, not even Ryan can control where it goes. And if it comes for him, can he really balance the honest-broker chairman role at the convention with that of an organically drafted candidate?”
“There’s a plausible scenario where neither Trump nor Ted Cruz demonstrates an ability to lock down 1,237 delegate votes after two, three, four ballots. The what? ‘Count me out,’ is what Ryan said Tuesday. What happens when the GOP needs to deal someone new in, though?”
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that 31% of Americans have a favorable view of Donald Trump while 67% are unfavorable — nearly identical to an early March Post-ABC poll which found he would be the most disliked major-party nominee since at least 1984.
Ted Cruz fares better with 36% favorable and 53% unfavorable among the public at-large; his strongly unfavorable mark is 20 percentage-points below Trump’s level (33% for Cruz vs. 53% for Trump).
Both Trump and Cruz are less popular than Mitt Romney at this point in the 2012 campaign, a year in which the eventual Republican nominee was haunted by weak personal ratings.
Trump begins quest for Sorcerer's Stone in order to resurrect Joe Paterno pic.twitter.com/kSXw6wMVH6
— Ian McKenna (@Ian_McK_) April 13, 2016
How’s Joe Paterno? He’s dead. Before that, he was disgraced for allowing and ignoring child sexual abuse.
“We’re going to bring that back.” Bring what back? The dead? You are going to reanimate Joe Paterno to commence the Zombie Apocalypse? Or do you mean the child sexual abuse? Are you a fan of that Donald?
The Atlantic on the Future of Bernie Sanders’s Grassroots Army
Will fans of the Democratic presidential candidate succeed in creating an enduring political movement?
“There is definitely a danger that people that are excited will lose momentum when we either win, or we don’t win, so we need to start thinking about that now,” said Maria Svart, the national director for Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that backs Sanders and has spent thousands of dollars to support him. “There needs to be something long-lasting that comes out of this. We just don’t know what it will look like yet.”
It won’t be easy to keep people interested and engaged after the election. Laying the groundwork while the primary is still in full swing for political machinery that can push a progressive agenda might be the best way to capitalize on the success of the campaign.
Color me skeptical. Purist Progressives don’t do long lasting movements. If they did, Occupy would have lasted longer. Hell, Occupy couldn’t even agree on what that movement wanted to accomplish, other than just to protest. The first requirement of any long lasting movement is to accomplish at the very least a set goal, and really successful long lasting movements have benchmarks or accomplishable steps along the way to keep momentum and morale building. The requirement of the Bernie Sanders “movement” is not to get people like Bernie Sanders elected to Congress all over the country, but to only elect Bernie Sanders himself. Once that goal is not realized, the “movement” will fade away. And that is a shame. The goal should have always been the former, rather than the later, for then the “movement” would have made a real difference.
The Washington Post talks about Cruz’s strategy to win from behind: “Cruz’s decision to lavish attention on parochial power brokers 3,000 miles away from the next big contest underscored his novel approach to the final three months of the Republican presidential race: He is effectively creating his own primary calendar, map and electorate in hopes of cobbling together enough support to prevent front-runner Donald Trump from clinching the nomination outright.”
“It is a strategy born of necessity for the senator from Texas, who now acknowledges that his best path to the nomination is through a contested convention decided by thousands of little-known activists.”
Hillary Clinton spoke about her plans yesterday to fight for environmental and climate justice. The first of eight items in the plan prompted this from Kevin Drum.
Be still my heart! […] Clinton will establish a Presidential Commission on Childhood Lead Exposure and charge it with writing a national plan to eliminate the risk of lead exposure from paint, pipes, and soil within five years; align state, local and philanthropic resources with federal initiatives; implement best prevention practices based on current science; and leverage new financial resources such as lead safe tax credits. Clinton will direct every federal agency to adopt the Commission’s recommendations, make sure our public water systems are following appropriate lead safety guidelines, and leverage federal, state, local, and philanthropic resources, including up to $5 billion in federal dollars, to replace lead paint, windows, and doors in homes, schools, and child care centers and remediate lead-contaminated soil. […]
I’m especially happy to see Hillary acknowledge the importance of remediating lead in soil, which usually doesn’t get much attention. But that’s where all the lead from automobile emissions settled, and it’s worst in low-income urban neighborhoods that are dense with traffic.
Ed Kilgore is prompted by John Judis to wonder if all of Bernie’s voters really want him to win?
That thought arises from reading a column by the renowned liberal journalist John Judis at Talking Points Memo today:
“He’s not going to get the nomination, is he?” my wife asks anxiously as she gazes out of the kitchen window at the Bernie for President sign on our front lawn. No, I assure her, and he certainly won’t win Maryland on April 26. I’m voting for Bernie, and my wife may, too, but we’re doing so on the condition that we don’t think he will get the nomination. If he were poised to win, I don’t know whether I’d vote for him, because I fear he would be enormously vulnerable in a general election, even against Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, and I’m also not sure whether he is really ready for the job of president.
Why vote for him at all, then? For me, it’s entirely about the issues he is raising, which I believe are important for the country’s future.
This is a sentiment heard often in casual conversations with Democrats before and immediately prior to this year’s nomination contests. Before Bernie Sanders threw a genuine scare into Team Hillary, the formulation was often “We need Bernie [or before that, Elizabeth Warren] to run to keep Hillary honest.” By that it was inferred that without some pressure from the port side of the Democratic Party, Clinton might indulge the family habit of leaning a bit too far starboard to suit “the base” or the activists purporting to speak for said base. Left unsaid (though it is articulated by Judis) is the belief that Clinton is a far better bet to make sure Republicans don’t make away with the White House while Democrats are arguing over what to do with it.
Republicans control both houses of Congress, and they set a April 15 deadline to pass a budget. They are not going to make that deadline and it is highly unlikely they will be able to pass a budget at all. This is proof that all Republicans everywhere cannot govern and should be disqualified from participating in the electoral process at all. Let the true libertarians have a shot for once, if only for the comedy of seeing the budget that ideology would produce.
Jeet Heer on the burden of Bill Clinton:
In theory, Bill Clinton should be the perfect surrogate for Hillary Clinton. Only five living men have held the job she’s vying for, and of the select group of living presidents he is the most popular, enjoying a 64 percent favorability rating. Many Americans remember the 1990s under President Clinton as the last time the nation enjoyed peace and sustained prosperity. He put this popularity to good use campaigning for Barack Obama in 2012, when his convention speech and cross-country barnstorming were seen as major assets for the re-election campaign. And if Bill Clinton was such an effective advocate for Obama, shouldn’t he be an even better spokesman for the candidate who has, after all, been his political ally and life partner for more than four decades?
Yet the reality is that Bill Clinton has repeatedly sabotaged his wife’s presidential aspirations, both in 2008 and this year. In 2008, when race was already an incendiary topic given the rise of Barack Obama, the former president kept throwing lit matches onto the woodpile: He said Obama’s victory in South Carolina didn’t amount to much since Jesse Jackson also won there, called Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war “a fairy tale,” and complained that the “race card” was being used against him.
Last month he did it again, making what sounded—at best—like a gaffe about Obama by lamenting the “awful legacy” of the last eight years. The former president might have been trying to refer to Republican obstructionism, but it came across as an unfortunate slag against the sitting president, all the more damaging since Hillary Clinton is basing her campaign on a promise to preserve and extend Obama’s legacy.
Bill Clinton’s sabotage of his wife’s campaign is so recurring a problem that two estimable analysts, Michelle Goldberg at Slate and Rebecca Traister at the New Republic, have both suggested that he be sidelined. “Fire Bill Clinton,” says Goldberg. “Ditch Bill,” Traister advised last May.
The pattern of inadvertent subversion is so persistent that Goldberg speculates it might have psychological roots. “It is somehow only when he is working on his wife’s behalf that he veers into sabotage,” she writes. “What is needed here is probably a shrink, not a neurologist. Either he doesn’t want her to overtake him, or he doesn’t want her to repudiate him. Regardless, Hillary should shut him down. She can’t divorce him, but she can fire him.”