PENNSYLVANIA—NBC/WSJ/Marist–Trump 45, Cruz 27, Kasich 24
PENNSYLVANIA—NBC/WSJ/Marist Clinton 55, Sanders 40 Clinton +15
RHODE ISLAND—Brown University–Trump 38, Kasich 25, Cruz 14
RHODE ISLAND—Brown University–Clinton 43, Sanders 34
PENNSYLVANIA—NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 54, Trump 39 | Clinton 52, Cruz 41
PENNSYLVANIA—PPP–Trump 51, Cruz 25, Kasich 22
PENNSYLVANIA—PPP–Clinton 51, Sanders 41
CONNECTICUT—PPP–Trump 59, Kasich 25, Cruz 13
CONNECTICUT—PPP–Clinton 48, Sanders 46
RHODE ISLAND—PPP–Trump 61, Kasich 23, Cruz 13 Trump +38
RHODE ISLAND—PPP–Sanders 49, Clinton 45
Washington Post: “Transgender rights have become an unlikely and heated issue in the presidential campaign after North Carolina enacted a law that, among other things, mandated that people use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their birth certificate.”
“Cruz has seized on Trump’s assertion that the North Carolina law, which also rolled back other protections for gay, lesbian and transgender people, was unnecessary and bad for business — corporations including PayPal and Deutsche Bank scrapped plans to create jobs in the state after the legislation was enacted. Trump said there has been ‘little trouble’ with allowing people to use the bathroom they want, though he later said that states should have the power to enact their own laws. Trump also said he would let transgender reality television star Caitlyn Jenner use the women’s bathroom at his properties.”
Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich “have agreed to coordinate in future primary contests in a last-ditch effort to deny Donald J. Trump the Republican presidential nomination, with each candidate standing aside in certain states amid growing concerns that Mr. Trump cannot otherwise be stopped,” the New York Times reports.
“In a statement late Sunday night, Mr. Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, said that the campaign would ‘focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Governor Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico.’ Minutes after Mr. Roe’s statement, the Kasich campaign put out a similar message.”
Trump responded on Twitter: “Lyin’ Ted and Kasich are mathematically dead and totally desperate. Their donors & special interest groups are not happy with them. Sad!”
This may be the case of too little too late, but maybe, just maybe, if the deal extends to California and New Jersey, with Cruz concentrating on Cali and Kasich NJ, then maybe it might prevent Trump from gettting to 1237.
Donald Trump mocked “candidates who praise their opponents during concession speeches, saying that if he lost the contest, Americans would probably not hear from him,” Yahoo News reports.
Said Trump: “They fight like hell for six months, and they’re saying horrible things, the worst things you can imagine. And then one of them loses, one of them wins. And the one who loses says, ‘I just want to congratulate my opponent. He is a brilliant man, he’ll be a great governor or president or whatever.’” He added: “I’m not sure you’re ever going to see me there. I don’t think I’m going to lose, but if I do, I don’t think you’re ever going to see me again, folks. I think I’ll go to Turnberry and play golf or something.”
That makes Donald Trump an unpatriotic, unAmerican petulant piece of shit. The concession is an important piece of our political tradition and civic history. Remember how Sarah Palin wanted to give a nonconcillatory rally speech on the night of her and John McCain’s loss to Obama and Biden, and how McCain and Steve Schmidt shut her down?
The bright side of this is WHEN Trump loses in Goldwaterian fashion to Hillary, he will be gone, never to be seen again by human eyes.
Lucia Graves at The Guardian says a President Hillary Clinton would be historic and that is not something to be ignored
Another exciting plot twist came this week when Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, announced that his boss is currently mulling a number of womenon her VP list. It’s a move that, if realized, would shatter the glass ceiling not once, but twice. Yet that it comes as such a surprise that Clinton has multiple qualified women she’s considering underscores how far from representative government the US is.
There are just three Democratic women governors Clinton might choose from. Women, though they make up more than half of the population, hold just 104 of 535 seats in Congress, and for minority women the numbers are considerably worse. There have been just two women of color elected to the Senate – ever – and only one black woman in the history of the institution: Carol Moseley Braun in 1992.
That Veep talk has turned so quickly to progressive favorite Elizabeth Warren, who still hasn’t even endorsed Clinton, is evidence mostly of a shallow bench.
Many of Clinton’s feminist detractors will tell you they want a woman president, just not this woman. But if not this woman, which woman, and how long are they willing to wait?
Mark Salter: “He might lose more Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in November than he won in the primaries. It’s possible that as much as a third of Republicans won’t vote for him, especially if a conservative alternative runs independently.”
“It’s safe to say and a comfort to know that barring some catastrophic misfortune, Donald Trump will be remembered as one of the biggest losers in the history of presidential elections.”
“I feel better just writing that.”
Joshua Holland at The Nation says if you’re going to accuse a Democratic campaign of election theft, you should offer some evidence:
Last week, I attempted to debunk allegations of widespread election fraud by the Clinton campaign that have been swirling around on social media. My argument was an appeal to common sense: If Hillary Clinton entered the race with a very large lead in the national polls and an enormous amount of support from Democratic Party activists and elected officials, as she did, and then quickly built up a significant lead in pledged delegates, as she did, then at no time since the start of the race, regardless of how unscrupulous her campaign might be, would there be any rational motive for risking infamy by rigging the vote. You don’t need to cheat when you’re winning.
That didn’t sit well with Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis, whose earlier piece for The Free Press, “Is the 2016 election already being stripped & flipped?,” I had mentioned briefly in the column. They’ve now published a lengthy broadside accusing me, and The Nation, of not being able to handle the truth when it comes to “election theft.” (It’s an odd charge, given that my Nation colleague Ari Berman has done some of the best reporting in the country on vote suppression.)
The scale of the disconnection from reality and facts seen in some Bernie supporters is matched only by the right wing. It is very troubling.
Michelle Goldburg of Slate talks about Bernie Sander’s failure to support Jon Fetterman in the Pennsylvania Senate race:
Given the money and political power stacked against him, Fetterman says he needs Sanders’ help to have any chance [this] Tuesday, the same day as the Pennsylvania presidential primary. So far, however, it has not been forthcoming. There’s been no endorsement, no fundraising support, no joint appearances. Fetterman’s campaign finds this confounding. On the ground, he says, there’s enormous overlap between his supporters and the Sanders grassroots. (“The crowd at the Fishtown brewpub is young, liberal, urban. They rave about Sanders—and Fetterman,” says a recent Philadelphia Inquirer story.) In a three-way race, he believes, Sanders’ backing could be decisive; Fetterman estimates that he’ll win if he gets 60 or 70 percent of Sanders’ voters.
Right now, that seems unlikely; a poll from early April had him at 9 percent of the vote, with 66 percent saying they haven’t recently seen, read, or heard anything about him, and 63 percent saying they didn’t know what his ideology was. The only ray of hope: When people had heard about him, what they heard made them like him more. Lacking the resources to get on the airwaves, he’s doing as much retail campaigning as he can, including going to Sanders rallies to talk to voters one on one. (The Sanders campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.) […]
Sanders often says that his audacious agenda depends on a political revolution, one that would sweep progressives into office behind him. So far, however, he’s done notably little to make that happen. It’s not just his failure to support Fetterman; he hasn’t gotten involved in any Senate races. He made his first congressional endorsements just last week, sending out fundraising emails for three female House candidates: Zephyr Teachout of New York, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and Lucy Flores of Nevada.
Will Bunch from the Philly Daily News:
I spent a big chunk of last year studying Sanders’s life story, and so his actions up until now don’t really surprise me. His life has been devoted to two things: Promoting his “political revolution” to raise up the American working class, and promoting himself, Bernie Sanders, as the avatar of that revolution. It would be easy to call that selfish — except that it’s a strategy that’s brought remarkable results. The notion of putting Sanders in the White House has electrified a generation of young voters around issues such as income inequality and the corrupting influence of big money in our policy. He has an unmatched ability to raise money from regular people — not special interests — and has developed an email list that is the envy of American politics.
But if Sanders is truly serious about a political revolution in the United States, the time for him to shift gears is…yesterday, frankly. Even though it’s probably too late to help him get elected, Sanders would be wise to use his campaign stops in Pennsylvania on Monday to finally endorse Fetterman, and to begin doing more to use his $40-million-a-month money machine to raise money for progressive outsider candidates, not just for Congress but for the less glamorous posts in the state legislature or the county commission or even the local school board.
The reason I have been insultingly dismissive of any talk of a “revolution” is because I saw that Bernie was not doing the work needed to bring about the revolution. If Bernie had funded 100+ candidates for Congress, including Fetterman, and done joint appearances with him and other candidates like him, then I might have respected the revolution talk as something substantive. As it was, there was no revolution planning, which meant there was going to be no revolution, which meant that if by some miracle Bernie Sanders got the nomination and won the Presidency, he would have no support or plan in Congress to pass his program.
“Of the 63 unbound delegates who have already been named, 26 have told TIME or other news outlets that they are either committed to support Cruz, lean towards supporting Cruz or refuse to support Trump on the first ballot. By contrast Trump has the public support of only one delegate in North Dakota. Another delegate in American Samoa is Trump’s local campaign chair, but he declined to confirm to Time that he will support Trump on the first ballot. Fifteen others declined to tell TIME their preference, and 15 more could not be reached for comment.”