Wednesday Open Thread [5.25.2016]

There was a Democratic Presidential Primary last night in Washington State. Yeah, I didn’t know about it either. And the reason why is it is nonbinding. All the delegates from Washington were already awarded pursuant to the Democratic Caucus held there in March, which Bernie won going away by 73%. But guess what, Hillary won last night 54% to 46%, continuing a trend of winning primaries in states that held caucuses earlier in the year. Further proof that caucuses are undemocratic and must be destroyed immediately upon the conclusion of this primary, in every state that holds them. Now, you will not hear me complaining that Bernie doesn’t deserve the delegates he won from caucuses. Rules are rules and he won those delegates in those caucuses fair and square, but I will say that if one of his reforms to the process that Bernie pushes after this primary is over is not the elimination of caucuses, then Bernie is a fraud.

During a Tuesday night rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Donald Trump bashed the state’s Republican governor, Susana Martinez, who has yet to embrace the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. “We have got to get your governor to get going,” Trump told the crowd, according to the Washington Post. “She’s got to do a better job. Okay? Your governor has got to do a better job. She’s not doing the job. Hey! Maybe I’ll run for governor of New Mexico. I’ll get this place going. She’s not doing the job. We’ve got to get her moving. Come on: Let’s go, governor.”

I suppose that will end the talk of a Trump-Martinez ticket.

Ron Brownstein:

Even from its first flurries, it’s already clear that a presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will radically accelerate the ongoing transformation in the identity of the two major political parties.

One of the key trends in modern American politics is what I’ve called the class inversion—the shift since the 1960s of working-class whites from the Democratic Party to the Republican, and the parallel movement of more white-collar whites from the GOP to the Democrats since the 1980s. A Clinton-Trump race that could prove more competitive than many expected threatens to finally uproot the last vestiges of the class-based political alignment that defined U.S. politics from Franklin Roosevelt through the 1960s.

John Sides:

Here’s a quiz question for you: What percentage of Democrats identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual? Here’s another: What percentage of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year?

Got your answers? Now keep reading.

It’s pretty well known that Democrats and Republicans like each other less than they used to. And it’s pretty well known that being a Democrat or Republican can bias how we view virtually everything, including objective facts such as the state of the economy.

Now new research illuminates a key source of partisan animosity: Our internal pictures of the opposite party are terribly inaccurate. When asked about the groups historically associated with each party, we think these groups make up a vastly larger fraction of each party than they really do. In other words, we think each party is essentially a huge bundle of stereotypes — and this tendency is particularly pronounced when we’re characterizing the opposite party.

The research, by political scientists Doug Ahler and Gaurav Sood, can be tidily summarized in this graph. It shows people’s average guesses for what percentage of each party is in each group, as well as the true percentage.

You know what will bring unity among Sanders and Clinton supporters: the sacking of DWS. And it looks like some Democratic Senators are actually contemplating sacking her BEFORE the convention, which will give Bernie a literal scalp to crow about.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are discussing whether Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz should step down as Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairwoman before the party’s national convention in July. Democrats backing likely presidential nominee Hillary Clinton worry Wasserman Schultz has become too divisive a figure to unify the party in 2016, which they say is crucial to defeating presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump in November.

Wasserman Schultz has had an increasingly acrimonious relationship with the party’s other presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, and his supporters, who argue she has tilted the scales in Clinton’s favor. “There have been a lot of meetings over the past 48 hours about what color plate do we deliver Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s head on,” said one pro-Clinton Democratic senator.

A senior Senate Democratic aide said, “There’s a strong sentiment that the current situation is untenable and can only be fixed by her leaving. There’s too much water under the bridge for her to be a neutral arbiter.” Another Democratic senator who supports Clinton said Wasserman Schultz will hurt her chances of rallying the liberal base in the fall.

“We need to get this figured out and come together,” said the lawmaker. “Hillary’s got the nomination. She needs Bernie’s energy. It’s time for her to accommodate. It’s time to pick hard-nosed people to cut through things and figure out a deal. “They need to know this is their party,” the lawmaker said, observing that if Wasserman Schultz were to be replaced as party leader, young liberals may become more enthusiastic about the ticket.

So since it appears we are going to have to live through the Vince Foster conspiracy theories again, Vox provides a good run down (and Berners, just because there exists an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory doesn’t mean it is true or that you should embrace it).

Michael Lind with a different perspective on realignment. Long read, but worth it:

Today’s Republican Party is predominantly a Midwestern, white, working-class party with its geographic epicenter in the South and interior West. Today’s Democratic Party is a coalition of relatively upscale whites with racial and ethnic minorities, concentrated in an archipelago of densely populated blue cities.

In both parties, there’s a gap between the inherited orthodoxy of a decade or two ago and the real interests of today’s electoral coalition. And in both parties, that gap between voters and policies is being closed in favor of the voters — a slight transition in the case of Hillary Clinton, but a dramatic one in the case of Donald Trump.

During the Democratic primary, pundits who focused on the clash between Clinton and Sanders missed a story that illuminated this shift: The failure of Jim Webb’s brief campaign for the presidential nomination. Webb was the only candidate who represented the old-style Democratic Party of the mid-20th century — the party whose central appeal was among white Southerners and Northern white “ethnics.” Even during the “New Democrat” era of Bill Clinton, white working-class remnants of that coalition were still important in the party. But by 2016, Webb lacked a constituency, and he was out of place among the politicians seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, which included one lifelong socialist (Bernie Sanders) and two candidates who had been raised as Republicans (Hillary Clinton and, briefly, Lincoln Chafee).

On the Republican side, the exemplary living fossil was Jeb Bush.

Greg Sargent:

The sky-is-falling chorus let out a sustained wail this weekend, as new national polls showed the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tightening. One survey suggests part of the reason may be that Bernie Sanders supporters are reluctant to back Clinton — raising the stakes around the question of what Sanders will do to swing his followers behind her if and when she wins the nomination, and whether he’ll draw this battle out all the way to the convention floor.

But Sanders himself knows he enters the post-voting phase of the primaries with a weak hand. This was made perfectly clear in an important exchange on CNN’s State of the Union.

“She screams and drives me crazy.” — Donald Trump, quoted by Time, saying he “can’t listen” to Hillary Clinton’s attacks against him. Good, keep it up Hillary.

Taegan Goddard says Barack Obama is the Democrats’ Reagan:

As we near the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, it’s pretty clear he’ll leave a considerable legacy behind. In fact, not since Ronald Reagan has a president so dramatically put his mark on both his party and country. That Obama was able to accomplish so much despite almost universal opposition from Republicans, makes his record even more impressive.