Bernie got a pyrrhic victory in West Virginia last night, considering the exit polls.
Bernie Sanders got 62% in West Virginia among those who want less liberal policies than the Obama Administration pic.twitter.com/BSxr6LTUcd
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) May 10, 2016
These are voters who are nominally Democrats or are unaffiliated and who vote Republican at all levels, but are just too lazy to change their party registration. They voted for Bernie last night in large numbers, probably because the GOP race is over and they wanted to screw over coal-hating Clinton.
Bernie gained 5 delegates over Hillary last night, winning the count 16-11. Hillary’s lead in the pledged delegate count is now 286. She has 1716 pledged delegates and Bernie has 1430. If you add in Super Delegates, Hillary’s total delegate count increases to 2239, just 144 shy of the clinching number of 2383. Bernie has 1469 total delegates once his 39 Super Delegates are factored in.
Hillary Clinton won the nonbinding “beauty contest” primary in Nebraska last night, 53% to 47% over Bernie. Nebraska allocated its delegates already pursuant to a state party caucus in March, so the win in Nebraska does nothing really.
Next up are primaries in Oregon and Kentucky next week. There has been no polling of Kentucky since last June, but given that it has some affinity for coal as well, Kentucky should be Sanders territory.
Meanwhile, we got a new poll out of Oregon yesterday that was somewhat surprising since you’d expect the Pacific Northwest to be Sanders territory too, and given how liberal Portland is, but:
OREGON—DHM Research–Clinton 48, Sanders 33
NATIONAL—NBC/SurveyMonkey–Clinton 53, Sanders 41
Speaking of polling, yes, we had three new Quinnipiac University polls out yesterday in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio that showed close 1 to 2 to 4 point races between Trump and Clinton and Trump and Sanders in each, with Trump actually leading Hillary by 4 in Ohio. I am ignoring them, not because I don’t like the results. But because they are not realistic.
Without fail, the voting population has gotten less white for decades. According to Pew Research Center, 2016 will again follow that trend and be “the most diverse in U.S. history.” Yet, Quinnipiac assumes that the white vote will increase in 2016.
In order to estimate the results of a general election match-up, Quinnipiac has to estimate the composition of the general electorate. In November 2012, 79 percent of the electorate in Ohio was white — but Quinnipiac’s polling sample is 83 percent white in the state. In Florida, Quinnipiac’s sample is two points whiter than in 2012; in Pennsylvania, it’s three points whiter. And if the sample is more white, that almost necessarily means that it’s less non-white.
On the one hand, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Clinton has a comfortable edge in the battleground states. Quinnipiac, for good measure, has been pretty tough on the Democrats over the last few cycles. You can see some sign of that in the racial composition of the surveys. In Florida, for instance, Quinnipiac’s registered voters are 69 percent white, 11 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic. The official data from the Florida secretary of state (since voters are asked their race when they register to vote) is 65.7 percent white, 13.3 percent black and 14.8 percent Hispanic. Similarly, the census’ current population survey in 2014 found that 64.3 percent of registered voters were white, 15.2 percent were black and 17.9 percent Hispanic.
I guess you can look on Quinnipiac as what would happen if Trump got his missing white voter to turnout while at the same time not seeing an increasing minority turnout. It would be the best case scenario for Trump: increasing the white vote, holding the GOP together and decreasing minority turnout. That scenario is highly unlikely. We have already seen astronomical increases in Latino and African American registration, so it is likely that whatever increase in white vote occurs, it will be matched by the minority vote. But, if that Quinnipiac is Trump’s best case scenario, and he only leads in one swing state, than I am rather encouraged.
Donald Trump selected a white supremacist to be a delegate for him in California. Trump now says it was a database error, as in his database of white supremacist supporters got accidentally merged with a list of potential delegates. (I’m not sure that is a good excuse, Donald).
Politico on Paul Ryan’s predicament: “So here’s the House speaker’s play, according to multiple people in Ryan’s inner circle: he wants Trump to understand where he is coming from. Ryan wants to try to steer the party’s national political dialogue — as embodied by Trump’s barbed rhetoric — in a better direction. He wants an open line of communication between his operation and Trump’s. He isn’t going to try to extract policy concessions from Trump — he understands they are unlikely to ever agree on trade or immigration — but he wants some recognition that Ryan has 247 members of the House that need to be re-elected, and they can’t do so while wincing through the general election in November.”
“It might work, it might not. Ryan could endorse Trump at some point — but there are no guarantees. His posture: at least I tried to make things work.”
Donald Trump’s “behavior in recent days — the political threats to the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan; the name-calling on Twitter; the attacks on Hillary Clinton’s marriage — has deeply puzzled Republicans who expected him to move to unite the party, start acting presidential and begin courting the female voters he will need in the general election,” the New York Times reports.
“But Mr. Trump’s choices reflect an unusual conviction: He said he had a ‘mandate’ from his supporters to run as a fiery populist outsider and to rely on his raucous rallies to build support through “word of mouth,” rather than to embrace a traditional, mellower and more inclusive approach that congressional Republicans will advocate in meetings with him on Thursday.”
A new Morning Consult poll finds that if a candidate running for elected office said they support Donald Trump, 38% of voters said they were “much less likely” to support them and 11 percent said they were “somewhat less likely.”
Among those who identified as independents, roughly one-third (34%) said they were much less likely to support a Trump-backing candidate, while 40 percent said they were more likely to support a candidate who opposed him.
Dave Wasserman says Paul Ryan may want to lose the House this year if he has any hope of a political future:
Imagine this scenario in 2017: Democrats keep the White House and Senate, leaving Speaker Ryan and House Republicans as the only backstop against an unpopular President Hillary Clinton, who owes her election to a disastrous GOP nominee. Ryan might face no choice but to cut deals with Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer to avert a shutdown or default – or to simply keep himself in power.
Ryan’s national ambitions are a mystery, but if he were to desire to run for president in 2020 or 2024, pitching that kind of record to the same GOP voters that nominated Trump would likely be about as practical as trying to convince a brick wall to crumble. Losing the House majority in 2016 – though still an unlikely prospect – would relieve him of that nightmarish burden.
Today’s GOP voters are already extremely contemptuous of their own politicians and their suspicion would likely only metastasize under a Clinton administration. That’s why Ryan — or for that matter Marco Rubio or anyone who has partaken in bipartisan legislative efforts — might be better off starting a new party altogether than subjecting themselves to a hostile national GOP primary electorate that openly rejects their “inclusive” and “optimistic” brand of conservatism.
Matt Yglesias on the real reason Bernie Sanders will enthusiastically endorse Hillary Clinton:
As Bernie Sanders’s odds of winning the Democratic Party nomination have shrunk toward nothingness, talk has naturally turned to party unity. Sanders is promising to do everything in his power to keep Republicans out of the White House, but also suggesting that concessions may be needed from the Clinton camp to spur enthusiasm on the part of his voters.
The reality, however, is that nobody is better positioned to make the case to Sanders voters than Sanders himself. And Sanders already has all the reasons he could possibly need to give Clinton his full-throated support.
Thanks to the primaries, Sanders has emerged as a substantial factional leader inside the Democratic Party — someone whose statements and tweets will garner media attention, whose email list will be coveted and envied by other Democrats in Congress, and whose support or opposition to a measure will matter to a national constituency. That gives him, potentially, considerably more influence over national affairs than he’s had in his previous 25 years in Washington. But essentially all of that influence hinges on Clinton winning the election in November.
That, rather than anything to do with platform concessions or “lesser of two evils” talk, is why Sanders will almost certainly do everything in his power to boost Clinton this fall. He’ll do it because it’s the right thing for Bernie Sanders.
That’s exactly right. If Trump wins, Bernie or his policy concerns really don’t have a future, as all Democratic attention will be diverted to preparing for the Second Civil War. Further, there may be some resentment among over half the party.
Jonathan Cohn writes that: Hillary Clinton Is A Progressive Democrat, Despite What You May Have Heard.
If Sanders is the standard by which you’re going to decide whether a politician is a progressive, then almost nobody from the Democratic Party would qualify. Take Sanders out of the equation, and suddenly Clinton looks an awful lot like a mainstream progressive — firmly on the left side of the American ideological spectrum and maybe on the left side of the Democratic Party’s, as well.
One reason it’s easy to miss this is that Clinton’s domestic policy agenda doesn’t include one signature idea or position that’s going to dominate the headlines or get activists excited. Instead, it’s a series of proposals that, together, would fortify the social safety net, strengthen regulation of industry, and bolster public services. To the extent these programs require new spending, the money would largely come from new taxes on the wealthy.
The White House announced yesterday that Obama will be the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima.
…on May 27, the President will visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, a site at the center of the city dedicated to the victims of the atomic bombing, where he will share his reflections on the significance of the site and the events that occurred there. He will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. Instead, he will offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future.
In making this visit, the President will shine a spotlight on the tremendous and devastating human toll of war….
The President’s time in Hiroshima also will reaffirm America’s longstanding commitment – and the President’s personal commitment – to pursue the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.
As the President has said, the United States has a special responsibility to continue to lead in pursuit of that objective as we are the only nation to have used a nuclear weapon.