Tuesday Open Thread [5.10.16]

A new Miami Herald poll in Florida’s Miami-Dade county finds Hillary Clinton trouncing Donald Trump in a general election match up, 52% to 25%, with 23% undecided. Key finding: One-fifth of Republicans said they back Clinton.

A new CNN/ORC poll shows that 57% of Americans disapprove of “bathroom bills” that require transgender people to use restrooms that correspond with their birth gender, while 38% approve.

Bernie Sanders will likely get a good win in West Virginia, based on the demographics. Harry Enten:

Just two West Virginia polls have been released in the last month, but both showed Sanders with a modest edge. The FiveThirtyEight polls-only model forecasts a 7-percentage-point Sanders win, while the polls-plus model gives him a 3-point edge.

West Virginia also looks like a strong state for Sanders demographically, with few nonwhite voters. A demographic model my colleague Nate Silver released in late April projected Sanders to carry the state by 15 percentage points. That would be his biggest win in a primary outside his home state of Vermont and its neighbor New Hampshire. (He’s had bigger wins in caucuses.)

Sanders’s West Virginia strength rests in large part on the state’s lack of racial diversity. It is 93 percent non-Hispanic white, the third-highest share of any state. The only other states where at least 90 percent of the population identifies as non-Hispanic white are Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Sanders won each of those by at least 20 percentage points. Meanwhile, Clinton’s strongest supporters have been black voters, and just 3 percent of West Virginia’s population is non-Hispanic black.

Demographics rather than ideology have really determined the outcome in primaries this year.

I see some are taking a Washington Post headline as gospel from God and are concern trolling Hillary as a result. The reality is Donald Trump has already reneged on his supposed tack to the left. He “backtracked on his remarks about raising taxes on wealthy Americans, saying the rich might simply get a smaller tax cut than he originally proposed,” Reuters reports. Said Trump: “I’m not talking about a tax increase. I’m talking about a tremendous tax decrease, OK? I’m not talking a raise from where they are now; I’m talking about a raise from my low proposal.”

Trump is going to do this all election long. Trump says one thing that sounds like a complete departure from not only his past proposals and statements and carved in stone GOP orthodoxy, have some idiots in the press go nuts over it, declaring that Trump is now the GREAT LIBERAL CANDIDATE, and then Trump takes it all back later in the day. Let’s not fall for it time and again.

Meanwhile, even if Trump did try to go left on some issues and renege on his extreme positions, the Clinton campaign is not going to let him. Patrick Caldwell:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign isn’t going to let Donald Trump quietly walk back the more extreme positions he took in order to secure the Republican nomination. On Monday, as Trump begins distancing himself from his earlier tax plan now that he’s the presumptive GOP nominee, the Clinton campaign organized a press call to rip the plan as a massive giveaway to the top 1 percent. “This is the most risky, reckless, and regressive tax proposal ever put forward by a major presidential candidate,” said Gene Sperling, the former director of the National Economic Council, speaking for the Clinton campaign.

Trump’s campaign hasn’t exactly been known for its depth of policy details. But one of the few comprehensive plans that Trump put forward was a scheme to cuts taxes drastically. Released last fall, Trump’s tax plan would slash rates across the board, but with most of the benefits accruing to the rich and uber-rich, as the top income tax rate would drop from 39.6 percent to 25 percent.

“We still think facts and numbers matter and should in this campaign,” Sperling said. He pointed to independent analyses of Trump’s plan showing that it would cost anywhere from $9 trillion to $12 trillion over the first decade. Most of the benefits of these tax cuts would go to the wealthy. According to the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, $3.5 trillion, or 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, would go to people earning more than $1 million dollars per year. The Tax Policy Center found that 40 percent of the money in Trump’s tax cuts would go to the top 1 percent, with the bottom 60 percent of the country getting 16 percent of those tax cuts. […]

The Clinton campaign isn’t ready to let him to ditch his stances. “The only thing one can do is look at the black and white of his paper and not be fooled by his shifting comments,” Sperling said. […] In the middle of the call, as luck would have it, Trump took to his favorite communication medium to stick by his tax plan:

I am lowering taxes far more than any other candidate. Any negotiated increase by Congress to my proposal would still be lower than current!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2016

A must watch.

“House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), the Nos. 2 and 3 members of leadership, have both fallen in line supporting Trump as the party’s standard bearer this fall,” the Washington Post reports. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), the No. 4 leader as chairman of the House Republican Conference, is siding with Speaker Paul Ryan, “saying that she is not ready to support Trump due to some of the more controversial statements he has made with regard to religious liberty and minorities.”

Another must watch.

The President’s greatest legacy might be the destruction of the Republican Party. Dan Roberts explains in The Guardian:

Yet one thing Trump supporters and Democrats agree on is the extent to which the party of Lincoln has been twisted out of recognition by its loathing for the current occupant of the White House. Amid bitter recriminations over Trump’s successful exploitation of this mood, many are wondering if the president’s greatest legacy may be the desolation of the Republican party, which did so much to frustrate his own time in office but may take decades to recover once he leaves.

Politico: “A week after vanquishing his sixteenth and final Republican rival en route to the party’s nomination, Trump is still in battle mode. From hitting the media for apparently misrepresenting his policy proposals to defending his personal and pointed attacks on the Clintons, the Manhattan real-estate mogul is throwing everything against the wall. And rather than reaching out to unify a GOP that is deeply divided over his candidacy, he dismissed the very idea as irrelevant.”

Donald Trump says the U.S. will never default because the U.S. can always print more money. Literally, it is true, we can print more money, but that devalues the currency and causes skyrocketing inflation, that would collapse the economy.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) told NBC News that the GOP should continue to wait on Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination but if Republicans lose the presidential election, they should confirm his quickly.

Said Flake: “I think Republicans are more than justified in waiting. That is following both principle and precedent. But the principle is to have the most conservative, qualified jurists that we can have on the Supreme Court, not that the people ought to decide before the next election. I’ve never held that position. If we come to a point, I’ve said all along, where we’re going to lose the election, or we lose the election in November, then we ought to approve him quickly. Because I’m certain that he’ll be more conservative than a Hillary Clinton nomination comes January.”

D (Clinton) gains on R (Trump) on the Iowa Electronic Futures Market