Year: 2016

GOP Statement On Democrats Proposed 'Temporary' Gas Tax Increase

The Clinton campaign believes that Sanders’ strength and enthusiasm is illusory; that it reflects the peculiar demographics of Iowa and New Hampshire — rural states with few minorities — more than any pro-Bernie tide in the Democratic Party. Nevada, in other words, was a test. If Clinton lost, then it presaged a tighter race in South Carolina and beyond, and possibly one that ended with a Sanders nomination. Now, instead, we have a race that essentially looks like it did in the beginning of the year. Clinton has the advantage, and barring a catastrophic decline with black voters, she’ll march steadily to the nomination. [...] Sanders is still a formidable candidate. He will win additional contests and demonstrate the extent to which he — or at least, his ideology — is the future of the Democratic Party. To that point, Sanders continues to excel with young voters, including non-whites. In exit polls, Sanders won 68 percent of non-white voters under 45. Clinton will continue to have to respond to Sanders’ challenge and reach out to these supporters. Despite a clearer path to the nomination, she cannot be complacent. In all likelihood, this primary season will end with a Clinton who has moved even further to the left, adopting some of Sanders’ approach and even his rhetoric.

If this win is followed by Clinton’s expected victory in next Saturday’s South Carolina primary and the six Southern states of Super Tuesday on March 1, she has a clear path to racking up enough delegates to be the prohibitive front-runner, especially in light of her strong lead among the Democratic super-delegates. The irony is that Clinton might end up making the same argument from delegate math that Obama made in 2008. If Clinton wants to wrap up the primary early, she could soon be in a position to argue that the delegate math overwhelmingly favors her—and Sanders would have to make the same argument that Clinton did in 2008, when Obama took the lead, that every voter needs to be heard from and that he could still conceivably win a majority of votes going forward. The news isn’t entirely bleak for Sanders. He doesn’t have as clear a path out of Nevada, but he has done better in the state than he could’ve been expected to do even a few weeks ago. By all logic, a state where the demographics trend both older and non-white should have been a bigger Clinton blow-out. Even as the Clinton campaign will likely gather force in the Southern states, Sanders can still make a credible showing in other Super Tuesday states like Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. In theory, if he does well enough in those states he can make the race tighter again nationally, especially if the inroads he appeared to make among young Latinos in Nevada can be replicated elsewhere.

Trump didn't win in spite of being a boor, a bigot, and an analog internet troll; he won because he was proudly all those things. For all the diversions (who picks a fight with the Pope, anyway?), he articulated a remarkably clear theory of politics: Other people are screwing you over, and I'm going to stop it. "He's got balls," Julia Coates, a longtime Trump fan, told me as we waited for the real estate magnate to take the stage in North Charleston. "He's got big ones. And that's what we need. I'm tired off all this shit going on." It's the kind of approach that plays poorly among the genteel Southerners who crowd into Low Country town halls in boat shoes and Nantucket red. But he recognized the electorate as something greater—and angrier. If you hadn't voted in decades, Trump was your guy. If you felt betrayed by the people you had voted for, Trump was also your guy. If Trump was a winner, then everyone else is (to use his term of choice) is a loser—including Marco Rubio, who finished third in Iowa and a disappointing fifth in New Hampshire. Now you can add the South to the list of regions that have been less than receptive to his pitch. It's not because he didn't make his message clear. Over the last week, he cast himself as the anti-Trump, a fresh-faced Cuban-American who could lead the party into the future. He toured the state with rising-star Rep. Trey Gowdy; the state's African America senator, Tim Scott; and its Indian American governor, Nikki Haley, who joked that the quartet looked like a "Benetton commercial." Rubio bet the house on the idea that South Carolina was ready for the future and mentioned the Republican front-runner only in passing during his speeches, and never by name. Trump stuck with the past; he went all-in on white identity politics, and like Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush before him, came through unscathed—two divorces be damned.