Thursday Open Thread [5.5.16]

NEW JERSEY—Monmouth–Clinton 60, Sanders 32
NATIONAL—Morning Consult–Clinton 51, Sanders 38
NATIONAL—NBC/SurveyMonkey–Clinton 54, Sanders 40

But Bernie is winning!!!! Right! Right??? Hillary’s got a 30 point lead in New Jersey, 20 point lead in California, but Bernie will be the nominee!!! Because I want it to be so!!! Damn all those other voters who constitute the majority of the party. They are corrupt corporate whores!!!

U.S. Justice Department officials Wednesday notified bigoted North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory that House Bill 2 violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act.

The department gave state officials until Monday to address the situation “by confirming that the State will not comply with or implement HB2.” The letter says HB2, which pre-empted Charlotte’s anti-discrimination ordinance, violates Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination in education based on sex. If that determination is upheld, North Carolina could lose millions in federal school funding. During the current school year, state public schools received $861 million in federal funding.

Jim Nelson writes that President Obama will go down in history as one of the greatest presidents of all time. Here is the part of his argument that resonated with me.

Being the first black president of course secures a certain legacy. But what now feels distinctly possible is that, just as Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed, over time he may be judged less for the color of his skin than for the content of his character. That character came across every time haters or Trumpers or birthers tried to pull him down into the mud or question his American-ness. He just flew above it all. And, luckily, he took most of us with him. He was the Leader not only of our country but of our mood and disposition, which is harder to rule. At a time when we became more polarized, our discourse pettier and more poisoned, Obama always came across as the Adult in the Room, the one we wanted to be and follow…

With Obama, each thoughtful step of the way, from his soaring acceptance speech (“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep…”) to his epic speeches on race and religion, his responses to the shootings in Tucson and Newtown, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the opening of Cuba (“Todos solos Americanos!”), and countless other momentous occasions, he knew how to speak to our better angels at a time when it was hard to locate any angels.

If you have any doubts about that, you’ll want to listen to the President.

Markos says no, the superdelegates will not be bailing Bernie out.

Hillary Clinton will end the contest with the most pledged delegates, and it won’t even be close. It was closer in 2008—and it wasn’t close back then, either. Best case scenario for Sanders at this point is that he splits the delegates through the end of the contest, but he’ll likely lose even more ground. So whether Clinton needs the superdelegates to get her a majority of all delegates is irrelevant. Obama needed the supers to get him a majority, too, and no one called it a “contested convention” because that would’ve been stupid and asinine.

[…] It’s undemocratic for a party elite to ignore the will of the voters and substitute their preferences for that of the party base. It was bullshit when Clinton made these arguments in 2008, and it’s bullshit today [when Sanders makes them]. You can rail against the establishment all cycle and sue the Democratic Party. It was good politics! It won him lots of votes! But then don’t expect that very same establishment to bail you out. If you go to war against them, you must beat them on the electoral battlefield. And it can be done! Because Barack Obama did it in 2008. And if the supers wouldn’t bail out Clinton that year, when Clinton was on the losing end, why would they turn on her this year, when she’s on the winning end?

Bernie’s insistence that the process is “rigged” and that he expects a contested convention are exasperating, especially when you consider, and Bernie admits himself, he will need the “rigged” super-delegates to make the convention contested. And it is all the more exasperating because it would be overwhelmingly anti-democratic.

There are some things that you Bernie Supporters need to accept and accept now. And as self proclaimed members of the reality based community, this should come easily to you.

Bernie Sanders has lost the nomination.

He is losing by over 3 MILLION VOTES.

He is losing by over 300 pledged delegates.

There is no possible way in any universe that he can catch up to Hillary Clinton in any of those metrics.

That means, when all the votes are counted on June 14 after the conclusion of the primary in the District of Columbia, Hillary will be leading in pledged delegates and popular votes and whatever super delegates are not already committed will commit to Hillary, and she will be the nominee. There is no scenario in which Bernie will be leading in popular votes and pledged delegates, so there is no scenario where he will be the nominee.

As an Obama supporter in 2008, I distinctly remember being deeply frustrated by Hillary’s refusal to concede, but that was a MUCH closer contest than this one. What Bernie and his supporters are showing by this refusal to accept reality, and what Hillary is NOT showing, is a basic contempt for the voters who are choosing Hillary over him. You all cannot possibly believe that more people like Hillary and voted for her rather than for Bernie. To justify it, you call all of Hillary’s voters corrupt corporate whores. And that reveals your purity and self righteousness. You are right and everyone else is wrong, so how can it be that you are losing and she is winning??!!?? The only explanation you can find if conspiracy theory and saying the process is rigged.

Bernie is so zealously convinced of the righteousness of his cause that, process and democracy be damned, he’s going to heroically carry on to the convention floor, to argue that the loser of the primary must be made the nominee no matter what the majority of the party says. Bernie and his supporters have had had quite a bit of latitude extended to him, not only by Hillary, who continues to patiently wait him out rather than risk alienating people she’ll need in November, but also by the media.

But you are using that latitude to embarrass yourself and tarnish Bernie’s career.

Washington Post: “[Trump] will be up against a different kind of challenge: a battle-tested adversary — and a general-election electorate that is broader and more diverse than the voters who have dominated the Republican primaries and caucuses. Republican contenders were constrained in attacking the front-runner by their fears of alienating Trump’s passionate supporters, while Democrats say they will have no such qualms in taking him on. Clinton, moreover, is a known figure to voters — for better or worse — by virtue of having been on the national stage for nearly a quarter-century as a first lady, senator, presidential contender and secretary of state.”

First Read: “Many have said that because Trump surprised the political world in the GOP primary race, he can do the same in a general election. And while anything is possible in politics, do remember that he led in almost every Republican poll starting last summer. It was just that many in the political world didn’t believe the polls. But those same polls show Trump being the big underdog in a race against Clinton.”

Roll Call asks how bad the Senate outlook is for the GOP now: “Pretty bad, according to many of the party’s own strategists. Republicans can afford to lose only a net of three Senate seats to hold their majority, and the party is already defending seven states — Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Florida, and Iowa — that President Barack Obama won twice. With Trump, though, many Republicans become despondent. One Senate campaign veteran last month estimated that the party had a 75 percent chance of losing the majority. Another put the odds at 80 percent.”

Erick Erickson: “The Republican Party is on the verge of nominating the least popular politician in American presidential history. Ironically, the party’s voters are doing it to spite its own leaders, but its leaders prefer Trump to the other guy … The result will be Clinton winning in November. Trump cannot build a meaningful coalition outside of blue collar white voters, white supremacists, and internet conspiracy theorists. The rest of the voting public no more wants Trump than herpes.”

From RAND, not Rand Paul:

Attempts to gauge the outcome of a presidential election more than half a year out clearly need to be accompanied by disclaimers that such estimates are relatively weak predictors of eventual outcome. […] With that caveat, it is interesting to note that from our December baseline to the March survey, the gap between the percentage of voters choosing Republicans or Democrats has grown. Our previous survey results suggested that as of early January, 46.7 percent of voters would vote for a Democrat and 43.1 percent would vote for a Republican in the upcoming presidential election. […] In March, our results indicate that 53.0 percent of voters will vote for a Democrat, and 37.9 percent will vote for a Republican in the upcoming presidential election, suggesting that the Democratic candidates are pulling ahead of the Republicans in the national vote.

The Upshot:

[Trump] would begin that matchup [with Hillary] at a significant disadvantage. Yes, it’s still a long way until Election Day. And Mr. Trump has already upended the conventional wisdom many times. But this is when early horse-race polls start to give a rough sense of the November election, and Mr. Trump trails Mrs. Clinton by around 10 percentage points in early general election surveys, both nationally and in key battleground states. He even trails in some polls of several states where Mitt Romney won in 2012, like North Carolina, Arizona, Missouri and Utah.

Josh Marshall:

Donald Trump sewed up the GOP nomination Tuesday despite the clear dangers he poses to his party in November. Polls show him deeply vulnerable against Hillary Clinton, and he could cost Republicans the Senate and, according to some analyses, put their House majority in peril.

But the longer term threat Trump poses to the GOP is in some ways more vexing. After a Trump drubbing, the party could very well be in the exact same position it found itself in in 2008 and 2012, re-litigating a core question: Is the GOP losing because its candidates aren’t conservative enough — or because it’s banking on a narrow, white constituency that is being eclipsed by a growing minority population?

“There was hope there would be some clarity in this election. My fear is that by nominating Trump we may not have that clarity,” says Republican strategist Brian Walsh. “There were some Republicans who were saying when it was between Trump and Cruz that we would rather lose with Cruz, and at least put to rest this false narrative that we lost because the nominee wasn’t conservative enough.”

Brian Beutler:

On the eve of the presidential election in late October 1964, Ronald Reagan pleaded with voters to “preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth” by voting for Barry Goldwater, rather than “sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” His speech was called “A Time for Choosing,” and a few days later voters chose to deal Goldwater a huge, embarrassing, landslide defeat. Nevertheless, things worked out okay enough that 20 years later (just 980 off the mark), Reagan was able to declare it morning in America.

From the early days of this year’s presidential primary, Ted Cruz deployed Reagan’s failed entreaty repeatedly—always to imply that his opponents have failed the public somehow. The aftermath of President Obama’s reelection was, in Cruz’s telling, a time for choosing, and Marco Rubio disgracefully chose amnesty. More recently, Cruz described Tuesday night’s Indiana primary as a “time for choosing,” suggesting that those who chose Trump over him would be welcoming the darkness…

That means a time for choosing is now, fittingly, upon Cruz—along with a whole array of conservatives who have either vowed to oppose Trump’s candidacy through November, or who’ve implied in their critiques that Trump is unfit for office. Their decisions will help determine what the Republican Party looks like after Trump, and whether the conservative movement comes out of the 2016 election diminished or extinct. And nobody’s choice will matter more than Cruz’s.

.@POTUS with Little Miss Flint pic.twitter.com/vAWKsHDdKV

— Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) May 4, 2016