NATIONAL—Morning Consult–Trump 46, Cruz 26, Kasich 13
NATIONAL—NBC/SurveyMonkey–Trump 46, Cruz 28, Kasich 19
NATIONAL—Morning Consult–Clinton 46, Sanders 43
NATIONAL—NBC/SurveyMonkey–Clinton 50, Sanders 43
CONNECTICUT—Quinnipiac–Trump 48, Kasich 28, Cruz 19
CONNECTICUT—Quinnipiac–Clinton 51, Sanders 42
MARYLAND—PPP–Trump 43, Kasich 29, Cruz 24
MARYLAND—PPP–Clinton 58, Sanders 33
MARYLAND–US SENATE—PPP–Van Hollen 42, Edwards 33
Congratulations to the winner of the New York Primary and the presumptive 2016 Democratic nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Democratic Presidential Primary is over. Going forward, in order to promote unity, I will not insult or otherwise attack or criticize Bernie Sanders or his supporters in my comments. And I understand some of you are still in denial and will enter a primal scream phase soon enough, if you are not already there, so I will not engage you over that. Some of you no doubt will proclaim that you will vote for Trump before you vote Hillary. That’s fine, I will not engage, I will let you work through it. And I am sure I am insulting some of you right now because you think this little speech is condescending. So I apologize for that.
What I will do, however, is still post excerpts of the punditry that is relevant to our politics. Some of that may not speak of Sanders in glowing terms. Indeed, there is a Jonathan Chait piece below that some will find unpleasant. But I won’t offer my usual asides and commentary.
National Journal reports that Donald Trump has spent more than $3 million on fuel for his Boeing 757 — more than he’s spent on staff and consultants — so that he can sleep at home in New York or Florida while on the campaign trail.
Martin Longman asks what binds progressives together post-Sanders?
It seems to me that the glue that held conservatives together was a serious of losses, both political and judicial, but progressives are making incremental progress across the board in nearly every area except reversing the trend towards greater income inequality. In any case, people need to be motivated, and it’s hard to predict which parts of Sanders’ platform will be picked up by the next progressive champion and how much their appeal can expand to attract other pieces of the Democrats’ coalition.
[Jamelle] Bouie does a good job of explaining how progressives may lose the battle but win the long war, but he doesn’t do a good job of telling us the “what for.” And I think the lack of a “what for” is the biggest impediment to making that “how” come true.
I got one, and Hillary has already expressed an openness to this: putting the public option into Obamacare. That’s the next step. Then pressuring Hillary on progressive tax reform: reestablishing the mega rich levels on income that existed prior to Reagan. That is the necessary next thing because we will need funding to 1) fund social services and 2) fund infrastructure improvements.
The aforementioned Jonathan Chait says Bernie Sanders has lost the nomination and its making him crazy:
Sanders’s denunciations of the primary system as rigged have merged with his descriptions of the economy and the political system as rigged. In combination with his attacks on Clinton for succoring Wall Street — which are exaggerated but not entirely imagined — Sanders has conjoined Clinton and the Democratic Party apparatus to the shadow nexus of villains that he and his revolution are pledged to overthrow. Jeff Stein traveled to Ithaca, an outpost of Sanders enthusiasm, and found the place almost uniform in its conviction that Democratic voters actually had preferred their man, only to be thwarted by some ill-defined combination of fraud or corporate/media chicanery.
If he grasps the situation clearly, Sanders is no longer running a presidential campaign in the sense that he’s leading an effort designed with the end goal of winning the presidency. He is running a message campaign, using the platform of a campaign and its free media publicity to organize supporters and circulate his ideas. That is a perfectly valid thing for him to do. But does Sanders grasp the situation clearly? When Clinton kept her doomed campaign churning to the bitter end in 2008, even in the face of insurmountable delegate odds, she was driven by delusional advisers who believed an inflammatory tape of Michelle Obama assailing white people was poised for release. Sanders may well be in grips of similar fantasies. Given the shaky mathematical foundations of some of his domestic plans, it would almost be a surprise if he were not.
Even a message campaign needs something to say about the process — some reason to motivate its supporters to organize and turn out. That becomes difficult when victory is off the table. The problem for Sanders is that his message about the campaign is infecting his message about the country with an angry, self-serving paranoia.
You should also read the Jeff Stein piece linked above in Chait’s excerpt. I would offer further commentary, but I promised I wouldn’t.
Ezra Klein says Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, put in an amazing appearance on MSNBC last night after everyone, from Brian Williams, to Chuck Todd, to Nicole Wallace to Eugene Robinson to Rachel Maddow to Steve Kornacki, declared the Democratic Primary to be essentially done.
There is, to say the least, a certain amount of tension between two of the arguments the Bernie Sanders campaign made today.
First, Sanders blasted New York’s primary for being closed to independents. “Today, 3 million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary,” Bernie Sanders said. “That’s wrong.”
But later that same night, Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, went on MSNBC and said that the campaign’s plan is to win the election by persuading superdelegates to dump Hillary Clinton.
This isn’t the first time the Sanders campaign has previewed this strategy. They began talking about it in March, arguing that if they could finish the primaries strong, then even if they trailed Clinton in delegates, they could use their strong poll numbers, tremendous small-donors fundraising, and general momentum to persuade superdelegates to switch sides and hand them the nomination.
And fair enough. It’s an incredibly unlikely stratagem — superdelegates are the very definition of the Democratic Party establishment, which is why Clinton has an enormous advantage among them — but it’s completely within the rules of the game.
It is, however, a bit unseemly for Sanders to blast New York’s primary for barring independent voters only to have his campaign manager go out and say they’re explicitly planning to use superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters.
Ted Cruz Says America Is Best “When She Is Lying Down With Her Back on the Mat.” Yeah, it eventually dawned on me what the Canadian was talking about, but the first image in my mind was not a good one.
Rick Klein says both Trump and Clinton exceeded expectations in their landslide primary wins: “Trump blasted through his supposed ceiling by reaching a new high-water mark, and in the process kept his hopes of capturing a delegate majority alive. He did not and could not, though, significantly widen his narrow path to a first-ballot win.”
“Clinton dispatched with Bernie Sanders in the state Sanders was born in, and where Sanders outspent Clinton substantially. But neither this nor any likely subsequent wins will end the Sanders challenge, not to mention the issues his candidacy has elevated, to Clinton’s regular discomfort.”
“New York did serve a critical purpose for Trump and Clinton: both will walk away from the state with large caches of delegates, and give them leads that will be practically impossible to overcome.
Nate Cohn says Sanders needed to win New York: “If you had told me one year ago that Bernie Sanders would manage to survive in the Democratic primary race all the way until New York, I would have been surprised and impressed.”
“But if you judge Mr. Sanders by the standard his campaign now wants him to be judged by — as a serious candidate with a shot at the nomination — the result Tuesday night was terrible.”
“New York, like every contest at this stage, was a state he needed to win. The result confirms that he is on track to lose the pledged delegate race and therefore the nomination.”
There are few things older than me still kicking around, but arithmetic is one of them. I'm not certain that gentleman's numbers add up.
— John Dingell (@JohnDingell) April 20, 2016
Matt Yglesias has two pieces on Vox this morning that say basically the same thing: that Bernie Sanders will not be President but that the Democratic Party of the future will be the Sanders Party. I’m fine with that. Whoops, that was personal commentary. Sorry.
Even in defeat in New York and most likely in the overall quest for the 2016 Democratic nomination, he’s already won in another, perhaps more important way: His brand of politics is the future of the Democratic Party.
Sanders is the overwhelming choice of young voters, scoring 67 percent of voters under 30 in New York even while losing overall amidst a set of election rules that were highly unfavorable to his cause. National Reuters polls now show him with a large 56-38 edge over Clinton with voters below the age of 40.
The votes of old people count just as much, of course, but any young and ambitious Democrat looking at the demographics of the party and the demographics of Sanders supporters has to conclude that his brand of politics is extremely promising for the future.
Whether the first Sanders-style nominee is Sanders himself or Elizabeth Warren or someone like a Tammy Baldwin or a Keith Ellison doesn’t matter. What’s clear is that there’s robust demand among Democrats â especially the next generation of Democrats â to remake the party along more ideological, more social democratic lines, and party leaders are going to have to answer that demand or get steamrolled.
The second Yglesias article says:
Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign was about starting a revolution. Having lost by landslides across the South and having been defeated in New York and facing the reality of several more closed primaries in unfavorable states, it now looks exceptionally unlikely that his message will carry him into the White House.
But his campaign greatly exceeded expectations and showed that the kind of politics he represents is considerably more viable and mainstream than most of us in the press realized. He showed that there’s a coalition ready to support and finance candidates that embrace a more democratic style of politics than mainstream Democrats thought possible.
It’s a young coalition whose clout and power will only grow in years to come. Now it’s time for Bernie to point the revolution in a new direction and lay groundwork for the future.