A new CBS News poll finds 63% of Donald Trump’s supporters say that if he earns more delegates than the other candidates but does not become the party nominee, then he should run as an independent or third party candidate. Among Republican primary voters overall, a third think in that case he should run independently.
Some food for thought:
A March 2008 Gallup poll shows that 28 percent of Clinton supporters say they would vote for John McCain over Obama, and 19 percent of Obama supporters say they would vote for McCain over Clinton. A 2016 Marist poll asks Sanders and Clinton supporters if they would vote for the other candidate in the general election. A New York Times/CBS poll from this year finds that 40 percent of Democrats think the tone of this primary has been more positive than previous primaries, and 48 percent think it’s about the same.
While our little “civil war” may seem nasty now, it is nothing compared to 2008. But in 2008, if my memory serves, we all supported Obama, I believe. At least all the front page contributors. The divide among contributors and commenters this time around may make our primary seem worse than 2008, more divided, but it is really not.
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball says House races are moving towards the Dems: “This week we’re making 14 House rating changes, with all but one of them favoring the Democrats. This has been a common theme for us in recent weeks. Two weeks ago, we offered ratings of a potential Hillary Clinton-versus-Donald Trump presidential race, which tilted the competitive Electoral College states toward the Democrats. Last week, we moved six Senate races and two gubernatorial races toward the Democrats. This is mostly because of the increasingly likely odds of the GOP nominating Trump or Cruz for president.”
“However, these House changes do not represent a massive upgrade of Democratic odds for taking the House. Many of them simply take some already unlikely targets for Republicans off our list of competitive races, and they don’t change the overall House prospects all that much.”
First Read: “In last night’s ninth — and possibly final — Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders fired off the rhetorical weaponry that they had been accumulating over the last two months. And most of the shots sounded very familiar. (In fact, as a colleague remarked, it sounded a lot like a college-dorm-room argument between the campus socialist and the president of the student body,) Clinton knocked Sanders over that New York Daily News interview, his gun record, not raising money for Democrats, and for his inability (so far) to release his tax returns. Sanders countered by firing back at Clinton on judgment, Wall Street, for not being a consistent voice in raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and for her inability to release her Goldman Sachs speech transcript.”
“It was a status quo debate – which benefits the frontrunner (Hillary Clinton) who leads in the polling in New York and in the overall delegate race, especially with Sanders traveling to Rome and Clinton raising money in California over the next two days. By the way, the New York Times is reporting that the Pope will NOT meet with Sanders while he’s in Rome.”
Whoever told Bernie to go relentlessly angry and negative gave him very, very bad advice. He's come this far because of his inspiration.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) April 15, 2016
Delaware’s jobless rate continued to decline in March, to 4.4%, well below the national rate of 5%, according to the most recent data from the state department of labor.
Nate Silver has a few problems with Bernie Sanders’ desperately transparent argument that southern states and their African American voters don’t matter and/or are deeply conservative.
[T]his line of argument … seems to imply that Democratic voters in the Deep South don’t reflect the larger Democratic electorate. (The remarks Thursday night echo previous comments made by Sanders and his campaign.) Consider Sanders’s reference to the term “Deep South,” which traditionally describes Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina: These are five of the only six states, along with Maryland, where at least a quarter of the population is black. Given the United States’ history of disenfranchising black voters — not to mention the importance of black voters to Democrats in November — it’s dicey for Sanders to diminish Clinton’s wins there.
But the Deep South isn’t Sanders’s only issue. His problems in the rest of the South are what really dooms him. Clinton’s largest net delegate gains over Sanders came from Texas (+72) and Florida (+68), two states that are within the South as the Census Bureau (and most other people) define it. Clinton also cleaned Sanders’s clock in Virginia and North Carolina. Overall, Clinton gained a net of 155 delegates on Sanders in the five Deep South states, but she also added 211 delegates to her margin in the rest of the region.
In addition to being important to the Democratic Party’s electoral present and future, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Texas are quite diverse. They’re diverse ideologically — Miami and Austin aren’t exactly “the most conservative part” of the country — and they’re diverse racially. They contain not only a substantial number of African-Americans but also Hispanics and, increasingly, Asian-American voters.
In fact, these states are among the most demographically representative of the diverse Obama coalition that Clinton or Sanders will have to rely on in November.
Although it will be a couple of decades before the electorate as a whole is majority-minority, the Democratic vote is already getting there. In 2012, only 55 percent of President Obama’s voters were white, according to the national exit poll. Our demographic projections of this November’s electorate, which account for population growth since 2012, calculate that the white share of the Democratic vote will tick down another percentage point, to 54 percent. The rest of the Democratic vote will be black (24 percent), Hispanic (15 percent), or belong to Asian or other races (7 percent), according to our projections.
So let’s take those projections as being maximally representative of the broader Democratic electorate as it stands today. In which primary or caucus states has turnout come closest to those ratios?
Hillary’s.
Amy Walter: “Moreover, if Republicans think that denying Trump the nomination will solve their problems, they forget that the guy is neither a magnanimous winner nor a gracious loser. Forget about Trump running as an independent in the fall. He won’t have the organization or time to get on the ballot in most states. But, he’s got something more important than ballot access: Twitter and TV. He will be happy to continue his campaign against the GOP via social media. Do we really think that if Trump loses he’ll go underground never to utter his views again? Do you think that if he loses a floor fight he’ll warmly embrace Ted Cruz? I doubt it.”
“Trump’s success has been driven almost exclusively by his ability to frame the narrative of this campaign. While he may get outmaneuvered on delegates and floor votes, and continues to show only millimeter deep grasp of issues, he has been able to run circles around his opponents on the PR front.”
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown explains why he endorsed Clinton.
I think that Hillary will know how to get things done. I trust Hillary Clinton on what she is discussing in her plans, in her proposals on trade and on Wall Street reform. As the senior Democrat on the Banking Committee, I take a backseat to nobody in applauding the regulators when they are doing the right things, as they recently did with FDIC and the Fed, and in criticizing those regulators when they’re not tough enough. I think that Secretary Clinton’s proposals, which I had input on with her staff, I think that her proposals will make Wall Street way more accountable than they have been in the past.”
Nancy LaTourneau on the conservatism of Bernie’s perfect pure white Midwestern and Mountain States:
I would propose that the Mountain West (where Sanders has notched up big wins lately) could challenge the claim that the Deep South is the most conservative part of the country. An analysis by The Hill on the five most conservative states turns up a mix of these two regions, giving us: Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Kansas and Mississippi. Were the [caucuses and] primaries in Alaska, [Kansas] and Idaho distorted by their conservatism? The other question this assertion raises is: do more conservative Republicans in a state mean that Democratic primaries there are “distorted?”
Ultimately, the elephant in the room about this claim is that the difference between conservative Mountain and Southern states is that the Democratic electorate in the latter is made up largely of people of color – with whom Sanders performs poorly. Do people of color distort reality because they are more conservative?
It is very possible that the answer to that question is “yes.” The truth is…we don’t have a lot of data on that. But I would suggest that anyone who asserts that argument is assuming that a political continuum from conservative to liberal is, by default, based on how white people would construct it. For example, I would imagine that liberals in the Mountain West states would prioritize things like repealing Citizens United and challenging Wall Street, whereas African Americans in the South would prioritize voting rights, ending systemic racism and programs to lift people out of poverty. How progressive one is would be measured by their record and platform on those issues.
Writers I respect, Rebecca Traister, Ed Kilgore, and Nancy LeTourneau, all seem to be discomforted today after witnessing the raucous Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in Brooklyn last night. Maybe it’s my New York metro background, but I thought it was probably the best and most clarifying debate we’ve had so far, and I had no problem with the audience showing some real Big Apple passion.
To each his own, in some respects, I guess, but I do have some basic disagreements.
For starters, I don’t think people should worry about the Democratic Party coming together at the end of this process to unite against whatever candidate the Republicans eventually cough up. There’s no need to fret that these candidacies are poisoning each other, and if Bernie Sanders is going to run this out until he is mathematically eliminated, he should take it seriously and play to win rather than go out there like a tomato can waiting for his cue to take a dive. If he lands some haymakers on Hillary’s chin in the process, well, it’s good to know that she still has that famous steel jaw she’s known for, and getting some sparring rounds in now is good for her. She doesn’t want to come out unprepared the way President Obama did in his first debate against Mitt Romney.
Sanders may be in denial about “The Math,” but he has a point when he says he’s won seven of the last eight contests, some in landslides, and that he’s got some momentum. I agree with Traister that his disparagement of the Deep South in the debate sounded an awful lot like a disparagement of the black vote, but it’s not like he isn’t on a winning streak. He’s trying to win, and it may be a longshot but I can’t begrudge him playing hard. His supporters deserve nothing less.
I tend to agree, though the whole Deep South bullshit borders on outright racism by Sanders, so if he continues in that vein, Bernie will have to go. But if backs off and just says he got beat badly just like he beat Clinton badly in Wisconsin and Wyoming, then fine. I hate to use this expression, but there really is no other way to say this: if Clinton can take her losses like a man, then so can Bernie Sanders. He needs to stop whining like a Donald Trump.