Year: 2016

Harry Enten says Sanders overperforms in Caucauses, and he doesn't gain momentum from his caucus wins, and he is about to run out of caucuses to win.

The problem for the Sanders campaign is that there are only two caucuses left on the Democratic primary calendar. [...] Now, I know what some of you are thinking: How do we know that Sanders’s big wins this week aren’t a sign that something more fundamental about the Democratic race has changed? We don’t, necessarily. But look at the calendar: Sanders also outperformed his delegate targets in Colorado, Kansas and Maine earlier this month, and he still went on to suffer big losses on March 15. And that was after his shocking Michigan victory. Moreover, Sanders greatly underperformed his delegate targets last Tuesday in Arizona, which held a primary and has a more diverse electorate. Most likely, Sanders will need to find another way to make up ground on Clinton in the delegate race. Wyoming (April 9) and North Dakota (June 7) are the only remaining stateside caucuses. The rest of the stateside races are primaries. Sanders has exceeded his delegate targets in just three stateside primaries. He’s matched them in three and underperformed in 15. Given that Sanders is still so far behind in the delegate count, he needs to outperform his delegate targets by a lot. How likely is that? Well, he’s behind by about 6 percentage points in Wisconsin, according to FiveThirtyEight’s weighted polling average. That’s not a huge deficit, and it wouldn’t shock me if Sanders won Wisconsin given that the black population there is below 10 percent. (To match his delegate target in Wisconsin, he needs a net gain of 10 delegates there.) Sanders, though, will likely have more difficulty in later primaries in April, such as Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania, where African Americans make up more than 10 percent of the state’s population. Sanders had a strong week, and this has been a crazy year in politics. But there’s nothing in the recent results to suggest that the overall trajectory of the Democratic race has changed. Clinton was and is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination.

Jonathan Chait on why the GOP Elites hate Trump: “First, they recognize that his deep unpopularity among the general public makes him a historically awful nominee. Second, his egomania, lack of interest in policy, and history of off-the-reservation statements and behavior give them justifiable reasons to doubt he will stay committed to their agenda even if somehow elected. And third, they find his persona repellant.” “That last factor — the visceral loathing for the man himself that pulsates among his opponents — has become the highest-order question in the Republican race. Other Republican candidates, who began the race defining themselves on their own personal and ideological terms, now define themselves in relation to Trump’s persona.”