Day: April 28, 2016

I don't know these candidates, but knowing that it takes time to build up campaign chops, these youngsters (Chapman, Delcollo, and Spadola) appear to be recruited for this cycle and the next.

Claire Snyder-Hall and the rest of the team at Common Cause Delaware want to hear your story if you had any difficulty voting at your polling place. I know that Nemski was asked for his ID before voting, and there is always some confusion regarding that procedure. It turns out that, while you are not required to show ID in Delaware, poll workers will ask for it, and if you do not have an ID or are unwilling to show it, you will be required to fill out a form before you can vote. I presume that this form has you swear under penalties of perjury that you are who you say you are. Anyway, if you had a problem with your registration or your polling place, let Claire and Common Clause know.

Three Newark-Area state lawmakers have endorsed their fellow colleague, State Senator Bryan Townsend, this morning. These endorsements come on top of earlier endorsements by Sen. Karen Peterson, Sen. Nicole Poore, Rep. Ed Osienski, and Rep. Paul Baumbach.

Josh Marshall on Clinton v. Trump:

These two candidates aren't just appealing to different demographics or voting coalitions. They're operating in what almost amounts to two different political universes. In linguistic terms it is almost like two mutually unintelligible languages. I guarantee you that everyone who has voted for Trump in any primary so far loved those remarks. They hate Hillary. They hate 'political correctness'. More than anything else they love provocation itself. But this kind of talk, while a single instance itself, reminds us that Trump has already all but disqualified himself with huge swaths of the electorate. It's like a long fingernail drag over the chalkboard for a significant majority of voters. Trump has a 70%+ disapproval rating among women; roughly 80% disapproval among Hispanics; and the list goes on and on. At the moment he's even doing fairly poorly among whites! But we should expect those numbers to rise significantly as Republican partisans unify around Trump. Meanwhile Clinton is talking about opportunity, inclusion across racial groups and the gender divide. It is a message framed around inclusion for rising groups, young people and incremental improvements in the safety net and wages for those just hanging on in the 21st century economy. It really amounts to a simple continuity message with the Obama presidency. What he did. My point isn't to pump this agenda. This is an ideologically agnostic point. It is to point out how it is virtually incomprehensible in the Trump universe. Gibberish or nonsense in a worldview based on reclaiming things your supporters believe were or are being taken away from them by others, and a powerful leader reclaiming what you lost from domestic newcomers and foreign adversaries. They're just categorically different, not just in policy terms, but in language, manner of acting in public, concept of leadership. Everything. They're mutually incomprehensible, seemingly indifferent to what folks on the other side of the divide even think. Think about it this way. Can you imagine Trump and Clinton actually debating or discussing a specific issue? Let alone engaging in a formal debate? What worries Republicans profoundly and has Democrats what I would call cautiously ecstatic is that if both candidates are doubling down on these portions of the population - Clinton's chunk looks significantly larger than Trump's. The biggest driver in November may turn out to be gender. But seen through a racial prism, which seems more likely: that Trump will significantly drive up the white vote or that Clinton will significantly drive up the minority vote? Trump seems dramatically less popular with Hispanic voters than Romney and it is difficult to see him making up much of that ground. Remember too that there are fewer white voters in 2016 than there were in 2012.