Delaware Dem

Monday Open Thread [3.7.16]

Some thoughts on the Democratic debate last night:

Rick Klein: “The race for the Democratic nomination may be effectively over, or at least well on its way. But the populist fire that’s being stoked by Bernie Sanders’ campaign isn’t dying down -– at least if Sanders has anything to do with it.”

“Clinton and Sanders have kept the campaign about substance, for the most part, even if the same ground has been tread repeatedly. Given the noise being generated by the GOP these days, the passion on the Democratic side may be a welcome dynamic.”

Mark Halperin: “The usual rhythms of Clinton versus Sanders—feisty, crotchety, substantive, exasperated but respectful—were replicated in another one-on-one debate.”

Vox’s Dara Lind has the winners and losers from the debate: Bernie and Hillary are both winners, along with Flint, Michigan, the site of the debate, and whose water crisis was the subject of much of the first part of the debate. The losers were Don Lemon for his dumb questions about racism, and the entire Republican Party, for looking horrible in comparison to the substantive reasonable rational adult Democrats.

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Sunday Open Thread [3.6.16]

Matt Yglesias‘ says Bernie Sanders lost last night even though he won 2 states last night. Why?

Kansas and Nebraska combine to offer 58 delegates while Louisiana carries 51. Clinton’s margin of victory in her state was much bigger than Sanders’ in either of his states, so it is entirely possible that when all is said and done she will have won more delegates than he did.

More to the point, with every passing election that Sanders does not alter the fundamental demographics of the race it becomes clearer and clearer that he is drawing dead in this campaign. We’ve seen time and again that Sanders can beat Clinton in states that have overwhelmingly white Democratic parties.

His problem is that there aren’t enough white Democrats to make this strategy work.

So far, Clinton has won every contest in a state where the African-American share of the population is over eight percent (she’s also won Iowa). The Sanders campaign has characterized these as “red states” and it’s true that so far that’s mostly meant southern states. But Virginia isn’t red, and Massachusetts isn’t in the South. The problem for Sanders is that Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Indiana are still outstanding with black population shares over 8 percent. California’s African-American population is on the small side, but due to giant Asian and Hispanic populations it’s one of the least-white states in the union.

Two months ago, the Sanders campaign happily conceded that they had no path to victory without improving their standing with nonwhite voters. But over the past couple of weeks they’ve retreated to proclaiming themselves happy with wins in low-population overwhelmingly white states. That’s fine on a level of pure spin, but there’s no path to victory here.

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Saturday Open Thread [3.5.16]

Ed Kilgore on the primaries and caucuses we have today and tomorrow: the Louisiana primary, the Maine caucuses, the Nebraska Democratic caucuses, the Kansas caucuses, the Kentucky Republican caucuses, and the Puerto Rico Republican primary.

On the Democratic side, FiveThirtyEight gives Hillary Clinton the same 99 percent plus chance of winning Louisiana as it gave her in South Carolina, which isn’t surprising because it has a similar African-American majority in its primary electorate and Clinton’s carrying that demographic by a similar 5-1 margin in recent polls. In much-whiter Kansas and Nebraska, Sanders is favored, though not overwhelmingly; even though these are technically closed caucuses, they are like Iowa in that independents and Republicans can change their affiliation at the caucus site. Maine is assumed to be big-time Bernie Country. He could use some bragging rights about now, though any loss in the caucus states will be cited as a sign of waning strength.

Anyone wanting to follow returns from all these events is going to have to be patient. Probably the first returns to come in on Saturday will be from Kansas Republicans, who end their caucuses at 2 p.m. CST. Kansas Democrats begin caucusing at 3:30 p.m. CST. Kentucky Republicans (expecting a low turnout in an unusual caucus arranged strictly for the convenience of former presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul) will end their voting at 4 p.m. local time (EST and CST). Nebraska Democrats and Maine Republicans will caucus at locally determined times ranging from mid-morning to early evening. In Louisiana polls will close at 8 CST. On Sunday Maine Democrats will spread their local caucuses around from 1 to 9 p.m. EST, and in Puerto Rico polls will close at 3 p.m. EST. Then we all have to wait two more days until four more Republican events and two more Democratic primaries are held.

Sanders will win the three caucuses and Hillary will win the Louisiana Primary.

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Friday Open Thread [3.4.16]

Matt Yglesias says that, no matter what happens, the Republican Party is headed to disaster.

The bottom line is that the Republican Party is now on track for a major disaster. One possibility is that Trump will eek out a narrow victory against a divided field in the face of dogged opposition from his own party’s elite. Far too many anti-Trump things have been said at this point to take them all back, and the divisions inside the party will hurt Trump badly in the general election.

For Democrats, this is fun to watch. But more than fun to watch, it’s a key reason why Democrats, though they should avoid complacency about Trump, can also confidently view him as a weaker-than-average nominee. Presidential candidates who run at the head of a united party have no guarantee of victory, but candidates who run without the wholehearted support of their party’s prominent leaders and mid-ranking professional staffers tend to lose.

But the alternative is also disastrous.

If the Republicans running against Trump actually did cooperate with some explicit or implicit alternative in mind, then they could assemble an anti-Trump majority and hand the nomination to their champion. But instead they are all running independent, entirely uncoordinated campaigns and simply hoping to work out the nomination via a chaotic convention floor fight of the sort we haven’t seen for two generations.

Nobody knows who or what would emerge from that, but one guarantee is that it would leave Trump and his supporters enraged and demoralized at what they will see as an underhanded theft of a nomination they earned.

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