NEW YORK—Emerson–Trump 55, Kasich 21, Cruz 18
NEW YORK—Emerson–Clinton 55, Sanders 40
NEW YORK—NBC 4 NY/WSJ/Marist–Trump 54, Kasich 25, Cruz 16
NEW YORK—CBS News/YouGov–Trump 54, Kasich 19, Cruz 21
NEW YORK—CBS News/YouGov–Clinton 53, Sanders 43
PENNSYLVANIA—CBS News/YouGov–Trump 46, Cruz 26, Kasich 23
CALIFORNIA—CBS News/YouGov–Trump 49, Cruz 31, Kasich 16
CALIFORNIA—CBS News/YouGov— Clinton 52, Sanders 40
PENNSYLVANIA—Morning Call–Trump 41, Kasich 26, Cruz 23
NEW YORK—Emerson–Clinton 55, Trump 36 | Sanders 51, Trump 37 | Clinton 59, Cruz 28 | Sanders 58, Cruz 27
“In his ever-escalating fight with the Republican National Committee, Donald Trump warned Saturday that party leaders should reform its system for selecting a nominee or face a ‘rough July’ when it holds its convention in Cleveland,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Trump: “The Republican National Committee, they’d better get going, because I’ll tell you what: You’re going to have a rough July at that convention. You’d better get going, and you’d better straighten out the system because the people want their vote. The people want their vote, and they want to be represented properly.”
In the alternative universe where Democrats award delegates on a winner-take-all basis, Clinton would clinch the nomination with a win in NY
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 18, 2016
The nomination will also be essentially, if not mathematically, clinched if Clinton wins in New York tomorrow in our proportional system. With Bernie behind by well over 200 delegates, in every contest going forward, Sanders will need to have gained net delegates on Clinton. Indeed, according to Nate Silver and Chris Bowers, as of right now (before New York), he needs to win 59% of all the remaining pledged delegates to get to a majority of 2026. If he loses New York by the expected margin currently reflected in the polls, that percentage jumps up to 64%. So, right now, Bernie needs to be winning every state going forward (New York included) by margins of at least 58-42. After New York, he will have to win every state by margins of 64-36.
Thus, while it will not be mathematically over as it would be in a winner take all system, it still will be over in every other sense.
WDEL reports that lawmakers in Dover are considering a bill that would mandate all school elections in Delaware be done by mail. How about we broaden it to all elections, with same day registration?
There will be another Congressional debate/form between Sean Barney, Bryan Townsend, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Mike Miller this Wednesday, April 20, at 7 pm at William Penn High School. To attend the debate in person, you must RSVP with the Del Dems by clicking here.
Peter Beinart argues that the best the GOP can hope for in 2016 is to have Trump lose to Cruz, who in turn will lose to Clinton, who in turn will lose to a revived mainstream GOP in 2020. In other words, Cruz would be the far right’s long hoped for very conservative nominee, and no one can excuse a loss by saying Ted Cruz was not conservative enough.
[A] Cruz defeat at the hands of Clinton this November leaves the GOP in a better position to rebuild than a Trump loss to Clinton does. By conventional standards, Trump isn’t all that conservative. That means, if Trump loses this fall, conservative purists can again make the argument they made after John McCain and Mitt Romney lost: The GOP needs to nominate a true believer. And they’ll have such a true believer waiting in the wings as the early front-runner in 2020: Ted Cruz. After all, losing the nomination to Trump would put Cruz in second place, and the GOP has a history of giving second-place finishers the nomination the next time around (Bob Dole, McCain, Romney). Plus, after building the best grassroots network of all the 2016 candidates, Cruz — who’ll be barely 50 years old in four years — would enter 2020 with a big organizational edge. Thus, the GOP would remain at the mercy of its extreme base.
[A] Cruz loss in November would undercut the right’s argument against choosing a more moderate nominee. To be sure, some grassroots conservatives would find a way to rationalize Cruz’s defeat and preserve their belief that a right-wing ideologue can win. But more pragmatic conservatives would be confirmed in their belief that the next GOP nominee must reach out to Millennials, Latinos, and single women, and offer more to working-class Americans than just less taxation and regulation. A Cruz general-election defeat would strengthen the “Reformicons” who are trying to reform the GOP in some of the ways New Democrats reformed their party in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The problem with this is assuming that the Trump base of the party that constitutes 40% of the GOP vote will come back to the GOP in 2018 and 2020.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post summarizes the state of the race and opines on what Clinton and Sanders owe progressives:
Any doubt that Clinton and Sanders are fed up with each other was put to rest in Thursday’s debate. In big block type, the New York Daily News proclaimed them “Brooklyn Brawlers.” They went at each other as if there would be no tomorrow after New York voted. That’s pretty much true.
You sensed from Sanders’s aggressiveness that he knows he’s on the edge of effective elimination. If he does win on Tuesday, he’d throw the Democratic race into turmoil and make Clinton’s path to the nomination much rockier. A Clinton victory in New York, which polls suggest is more likely, would all but seal the deal for her. […]
At a time when ideological polarization between the parties is so high, such contrasts [on issues such as banking regulations, in that Clinton and Sanders are much closer to each other than they are Republicans] should be obvious. But the bad blood between many of Sanders’s supporters and Clinton obscures the stakes and presents Democrats with a special challenge.
Their victories (compare 2008 with 2010, or 2012 with 2014) depend on high participation among younger voters, who are turned on to Sanders and, in many cases, turned off to Clinton. The pro-Sanders young are unlikely to vote Republican, but if too many stay home in November, much of what Sanders and Clinton believe in could be consigned to the dustbin.
That’s why the day after New York, the Brooklyn Brawlers would do well to sit down over a couple of Brooklyn Brewery ales and figure out a way forward.
And the answer is not “well, Hillary should abdicate in favor of Sanders.”
Jill Abramson at The Guardian says HBO’s latest movie, Confirmation, concerning the nomination battle over Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harrassment, shows how women were treated in Washington, and that not much has changed.
The tableau of the lone woman testifying before a congressional committee of white men has become iconic. It is the dominant image in Confirmation, the gripping HBO film about Anita Hill’s testimony in the Clarence Thomas hearings before the Senate judiciary committee in 1991, which premiere[d] on Saturday. […]
I was in the room when the real Anita Hill testified. At the time, I, too, was struck by the contrast between her vivid testimony about how Thomas described pornographic films, including one starring Long Dong Silver, and the formal setting, the crystal-laden, mahogany Russell Caucus Room where Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment against Thomas were heard. […]
Although those hearings were a generation ago, Confirmation brought to mind more recent congressional proceedings with a lone woman witness facing a mainly white, male set of inquisitors, and another striking outfit, this time dark purple. Hillary Clinton was the star of this show trial, the Benghazi hearings last fall.
Both sets of hearings were billed as fact-finding exercises, but turned out to be poisonous displays of partisanship.
The movie did not portray Joe Biden in the most favorable light, though Greg Kinnear nailed Biden’s accent and mannerisms.
More on the movie from Esther Breger at The New Republic:
Clarence Thomas is portrayed with empathy by Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Treme) as a husband and father; a black man terrified that powerful, hypocritical white men will ruin his career. In advance publicity for the film, the director and screenwriter have been frustratingly insistent that the film takes no sides. “It’s hard to know what the truth is,” Famuyiwa told Mother Jones last week. Even after repeated probing, no one involved with the film has just come out and said, “I believe Anita,” even though it’s hard to watch the film and come to any other conclusion.
This equivocating hasn’t prevented Confirmation from being attacked by some conservatives as liberal propaganda. That’s ironic, since the film’s real villain isn’t Thomas, who is presented as almost a figure of pity; nor is it Senator John Danforth, Thomas’s close friend who led the charge to smear Anita’s name; nor odious Republican senators such as Alan Simpson and Strom Thurmond; nor Kenneth Duberstein, a White House aide played ineffectually by Eric Stonestreet. The most infuriating character in Confirmation is Joe Biden, not because he’s hostile to Hill (he isn’t), but because the figure of male power he represents—benign, feckless, incurious—is one that’s still so familiar to women, especially within liberal circles.
Emphasis mine. I agree.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic says Bernie Sanders Won’t Go Quietly Into the Night and Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, should be grateful that he’s sticking around.
The ninth Democratic primary debate revealed almost no new daylight between Clinton and Sanders. It mainly just revealed that Sanders won’t go quietly into the night. Sanders was withering in his criticisms, but the criticisms were almost all familiar. Occam’s razor suggests his strategy is intended to avoid a blowout defeat in New York’s presidential primary on Tuesday, which would probably constitute a fatal blow to his candidacy.
And yet despite the campaign’s bitter turn, despite the fact that Sanders’s Hail Mary tack is much more likely to damage Clinton in the general election than to secure the nomination for himself, supporters should maintain a fondness for him as a fundamentally decent rival who has left Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the country better off. At the stage where all kindness has drained out of a campaign, most candidates find themselves tempted to sacrifice their remaining integrity to win. Sanders, by contrast, reminded skeptics why his supporters have been so loyal: With everything on the line, given the opportunity to obfuscate at Clinton’s expense, Sanders held firm even to views that promise to damage him in the state that could seal his fate.
Beutler was talking about Sanders’ Israel answer. I am convinced that the answer neither helped him nor hurt him. Those turned off by his answer were likely already with Hillary and those who would like his answer were likely already with Bernie. Like Beutler says, if Bernie tried to go all hawkish and pro-Israel, he would have likely damaged himself with his own supporters.
“Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is expected to announce this week that Alexander Hamilton’s face will remain on the front of the $10 bill and a woman will replace Andrew Jackson on the face of the $20 bill,” a senior government source told CNN.
Long overdue on two fronts: a woman on our money and that genocidal fuck Jackson off it.
Washington Post: “Looking forward, there’s reason for optimism in the Trump camp. He looks well positioned to take the lion’s share of New York’s 95 delegates Tuesday. Seven days later, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island vote — these should be good states for Trump. It’s not until May 3, in Indiana, where Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich will go all out, that Trump would be likely to face the prospect of defeat again.”
“Then there’s this fact: Recent polling suggests little appetite in the Republican Party to keep the nomination from Trump if he has the most votes but can’t get to 1,237 delegates before the convention.”