NATIONAL—NBC News/Wall St. Jrnl–Clinton 50, Sanders 48
NATIONAL—NBC News/Wall St. Jrnl–Trump 40, Cruz 35, Kasich 24
NEW JERSEY—Rutgers-Eagleton–Trump 52, Kasich 24, Cruz 18
NEW JERSEY—Rutgers-Eagleton–Clinton 51, Sanders 42
NATIONAL–NBC News/Wall St. Jrnl–Clinton 50, Trump 39 | Clinton 46, Cruz 44 | Sanders 52, Cruz 40
So Bernie Sanders decided to distract from his coming landslide loss tonight and falsely accuse Hillary Clinton and the DNC of campaign finance violations. Leave it to Rachel Maddow to expose Bernie’s false allegations:
Rick Hasen, an elections law expert, says that there doesn’t seem to be any basis for Sander’s allegations:
Clinton, like Sanders and other presidential candidates, has set up a joint fundraising committee with her political party. The JFC allows you to raise a huge chunk of change (more now than in past campaigns, thanks to the Supreme Court blowing out the aggregate federal limits in the McCutcheon case). A small bit goes to the candidate’s committee under the federal limits (currently $2,700 for the primary and $2,700 for the general). The next bit goes to the DNC, and the rest so state parties in $10,000 chunks. Sanders is accusing the joint committee of raising really big donations, and then having the JFC using some of those really big donations to engage in direct mail and internet targeting of small donors. When those small donors donate small amounts, contributions up to the first $2,700 benefit Clinton under the JFC agreement, and because these are small donors, it means Clinton gets all that small donor money.
The [Sanders campaign’s] letter cites no authority showing that this use of the JFC is not allowed, and it is hard to see what provision of the law it violates when donors give only small amounts that happen to benefit only Clinton. The letter says that maybe this is like an in-kind contribution from the DNC to the Clinton campaign, but I don’t see how it is that if the money is coming from the JFC not from the committee. The letter even says this means that those giving big checks to the DNC might thereby be giving more than the $2,700 to Clinton, which is not literally true – it is what the JFC is doing with the money, over which the donors have no control.
Steve Benen says the false accusations were only made to help with Sander’s own fundraising:
It’s not altogether clear how serious the Sanders campaign is about the allegations themselves. The “proof” of wrongdoing is a Washington Post article from two months ago, which doesn’t actually point to any specific misdeeds, and there’s been no explanation as to why Sanders waited two months to complain about it.
What’s more, the Sanders campaign didn’t take its complaints to the Federal Election Commission, which is responsible for reviewing such allegations, but rather, to the DNC itself – the entity that already believes there’s nothing improper about its own operation.
It didn’t help matters when, less than 30 minutes after making the accusations, the Sanders campaign sent out a new fundraising message to its donors, asking for more financial contributions in response to the allegations.
When this Democratic primary ends tonight, Bernie Sanders is going to have a lot of work to do if he hopes to speak or win any policy or process reforms at the Convention. He will have to fully and publicly retract his allegations, and then enthusiastically endorse Hillary within the next two weeks. If he doesn’t and he continues this Ralph Naderesque Kamikaze mission to destroy Hillary and the Democratic Party, then he will be shut down and shut out. All of the super delegates will immediately endorse Hillary the moment she clinches a majority of the pledged delegates (which will be on April 26 I believe, I have to check the schedule and the math), which would then ensure that the nomination is clinched. And then it is over. He will be shut out of the convention, and shut out of the Democratic caucus in the Senate in 2017, and forbidden any committee membership or chairmanship. All because Bernie can’t handle losing, or at least cannot lose in a respectful or dignified way.
Now, Sanders partisans, both here at DL and elsewhere, will react quite negatively to this, saying that instead Hillary and the Democrats will have to come crawling to them, and if they don’t, they will vote Trump or stay home. I am calling your bluff on that. Those who want respect, give respect. So Bernie and his supporters are going to have to change their tune first before any considerations are expected from Hillary and her supporters.
So when a rich person is a liberal and agrees with you and your liberal political and policy positions, and wants to fund your political party and all its candidates up and down the ballot, and all you have to do is attend a fundraiser and share inane small talk and cocktails with them, what the fuck is the big deal, and why wouldn’t you do it? The center failing of all purist progressives and rabid BernieBros and Naderites is that they assume that if you are wealthy, you are evil, even if you are a liberal. You are assumed to have nefarious goals, you are assumed to be corrupt and crooked, in the pocket of corporations and Wall Street. It is idiotic.
[The Press and the BernieBros] completely ignore [George Clooney’s] rationale for raking in so much money. A rationale that has been repeated by Clinton and completely ignored.
CLOONEY: But, you know, I think what’s important and what I think the Clinton campaign has not been very good at explaining is this and this is the truth: the overwhelming amount of money that we’re raising, and it is a lot, but the overwhelming amount of the money that we’re raising is not going to Hillary to run for President, it’s going to the down ticket. It’s going to the congressmen and senators to try to take back Congress. And the reason that’s important and the reason it’s important to me is because we need, I’m a Democrat so if you’re a Republican, you’re going to disagree, but we need to take the senate back. Because we need to confirm the Supreme Court justice because that fifth vote on the Supreme Court can overturn Citizens United and get this obscene, ridiculous amount of money out so I never have to do a fundraiser again. And that’s why I’m doing it.
Bingo!
It is not enough to have a Democrat elected to the Oval Office. For said occupant to deliver on their promises they are going to need a Congress filled with as many like-minded elected officials as possible. That requires the national and state parties to coordinate “get out the vote” operations, staffing phone banks, sending email blasts and a host of other things for the Democratic presidential nominee and congressional candidates down the ballot. Not only does this require dedicated supporters, but also it requires money to finance it all. And such financing cannot be left until the general election.
Sanders talks about his revolution. Clinton is the only one building the infrastructure that will allow such a revolution to take place. And it costs money. Clooney and like minded rich liberals want to give their money to Clinton and the Democrats to do it. And Bernie complains?? And says George Clooney, and all the rich liberals, and the DNC and Hillary are corrupt??
In response to Sanders’ statement about Clinton winning in the “most conservative part of this country,” Nate Silver notes that she is winning the states that look like the Democratic Party.
The most representative state by this measure is New Jersey. We expect its primary electorate to be about 57 percent white, 26 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian or other, quite close to the national Democratic electorate. New Jersey won’t vote until June 7, although Clinton was well ahead when the last poll was released there in February.
After New Jersey comes Illinois, which Clinton won narrowly — and then Florida, where Clinton won going away. Then there’s New York, which votes Tuesday, and where Clinton is 15 percentage points ahead in our polling average. Virginia, another Southern state, ranks as the next most representative; Clinton won it easily. Then there’s Nevada, another Clinton state, before we go back to the South to North Carolina, also won by Clinton. The next group of four states (Maryland, Tennessee, Arkansas and Michigan) are roughly tied and include some further representation for the South, along with, finally, one state (Michigan) that Sanders won.
In other words, Clinton has won or is favored to win almost every state where the turnout demographics strongly resemble those of Democrats as a whole.
Paul Waldman has an interesting post up at The American Prospect, “Why Hillary Clinton Could Be the Kind of President Bernie Sanders Supporters Will Love.” As Waldman frames his argument:
It’s frustrating to be a Bernie Sanders supporter right now. Your candidate has plenty of impressive wins behind him, Hillary Clinton is still far from having the nomination wrapped up, and yet everyone is talking as if the race is over. First they didn’t take your guy seriously, and now they want to push him out of the race. With the expectedly raucous New York primary coming up Tuesday, it’s no wonder that there’s no small amount of animosity coming from Sanders fans toward Clinton. In fact, in a recent McClatchy/Marist poll, 25 percent of Sanders supporters say they won’t vote for Clinton if she’s the party’s nominee.
They may not want to hear it yet, but those who support Sanders might start thinking about how they could exert influence over Clinton’s presidency. Because some of what they don’t like about Clinton–her caution, her propensity for difference-splitting, her inclination to seek the path of least resistance–is exactly what will enable liberals to pull her to the left once she’s in the White House.
I reject part of this argument. Hillary has always been the liberal Clinton. When her husband was the squishy moderate, Hillary was called a feminazi. She is already there. She doesn’t have to be pulled anywhere. The difference here is not between liberalism and centrism, it is between purity and pragmatism or radical chaos and incrementalism.
The Supreme Court “seemed sharply divided during an extended argument over a challenge to President Obama’s plan that would shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and allow them to work in the country legally,” the New York Times reports.
“The case, brought by 26 states, may produce a significant ruling on presidential power and immigration policy in the midst of a presidential campaign in which both issues have been prominent.”
Washington Post: “Instead, the court’s conservatives and liberals seemed split, and a 4-to-4 tie would leave in place a lower court’s decision that the president exceeded his powers in issuing the directive. It could affect about 4 million undocumented immigrants who have been in the country since 2010 and have family ties to U.S. citizens and others lawfully in the country.”