Posts by Delaware Dem

All networks and the AP called it the second the polls closed. Exit polls show Hillary winning 84% of the African American voters, which makes up 67% of the primary vote in South Carolina. Hillary won across all age groups, young and old, though young voters (i.e voters under 30) made up only 13% of the vote in South Carolina, which is the lowest of all contests so far. Update: Wow. Updated exit poll has Clinton up 87-13 among black voters, up 53-47 among white voters. Implies a 75-25 victory for Clinton.

Donald Trump is now against the First Amendment protections for a free press: "We're going to open up those libel laws. So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected." Once more into the Fascist breach.

...he's got a large, overflowing even, Delaware leadership team. But the Delaware Presidential Primary is late this year: April 26. I am now taking bets on the fact that Kasich will not be in the race by then.

Taegan Goddard on last night's disaster of a GOP debate: "The runaway winner of this debate was the Democratic party. If there are many more nights like this one, the Democratic nominee will have a much easier time in November. It was a truly pathetic mess."

Chez Pazienza says the political press needs to grow a pair when it comes to Trump.

Nobody is willing to openly admit what most of us have been able to see for months: that if Donald Trump is the best the Republican party can do, and if he winds up becoming the nominee for president, we’re fucking doomed. The political press just keeps right on plugging along, pretending that while this is an unusual and surprising election season there’s nothing completely offensive and undeniably dangerous about it. Donald Trump is calling immigrants rapists and killers, he’s for banning all Muslims from entering the country, and he’s regularly encouraging his rabid followers to rough up protesters, and yet as a whole our nation’s political media is covering Trump’s rise as if it’s something to marvel at -- or to hardly notice at all -- rather than something to be utterly ashamed of. The job of the political press is to hold candidates accountable -- but our political press for the most part isn’t doing a damn thing when it comes to Trump. On Sunday, MSNBC correspondent Katy Tur tweeted out a depressing but not all that surprising incident that happened on the trail. She claims that at a campaign rally, Trump worked the audience by going after the media -- not at all the first time he’s done it -- and that led to the angry crowd hurling insults and threats at the press covering the event. According to Tur, at least one guy in the audience turned toward her and shouted, “You’re a bitch!” while another flipped the press gaggle off. In response to this, Chuck Todd fired off a tweet accusing Trump and his nutjob acolytes of engaging in “outrageous and dangerous behavior,” and saying that the “campaign rhetoric” needs to be “ratcheted back.” Trump singles out Katy Tur, accusing her of saying something negative about him, then whips the crowd into a frenzy against her until people are basically ready to tear her head off, and that’s just “campaign rhetoric?” No, it absolutely isn’t. It’s the frightening ravings of a would-be fascist dictator, one who refuses to behave decently or responsibly and who all the admonition in the world won’t stop. Remember, this is the same guy who responded to a protester being punched at a rally in November by agreeing that “maybe he should’ve been roughed up.” [...] Eventually, some member of the media is going to get hurt when Trump singles them out for a scathing rebuke. Back in January, he tore the head off a poor camera operator in the middle of a Trump rally for the unforgivable sin of not moving the camera to show the size of the crowd. (As if the people covering the rally work for Trump and are therefore required to take orders from him.) When Trump went after him, the crowd followed suit and launched into the same kind of mass tirade Katy Tur was on the receiving end of. And yet, again, not only does the media not take steps to protect its own people, it otherwise behaves as if Trump isn’t a threat to the public and America as a whole. Granted, the easiest way to correct itself on both counts would be to simply stop covering Trump, but given his status as ratings and page-view catnip that’s just never going to happen. Barring that then, the political media should be willing to take a stand and at every turn portray Trump as he is: a dangerous, megalomaniacal demagogue.

I have been thinking something for a while, but have been unwilling to put it into digital print, or say it out loud, but I think I will now. American politics has faced dark and dangerous and chaotic elections before. 1968 brings to mind a very good example. Then you had two political leaders, RFK and MLK, assassinated, and protesters and supporters of candidates beaten. It could happen again. This is not a prediction, or a "Round them up" hyperbolic call to arms that I am infamous for. It's just a gut feeling I have that something violent is going to happen to change this presidential race Either a protester is killed at a Trump rally by a mob of Trump supporters, maybe even upon Trump's orders, or maybe Trump himself will be shot at or assassinated.

The Republican Party as we have known it is now officially dead. Flatline. The new party created by Trump in its stead must be called the Nationalist Party from now on. Politico: “Suddenly, [...] it is Trump’s new alliance of angry populists that is ascendant — and on the precipice of dominance.” Washington Post: “The rise of Donald Trump has baffled the so-called establishment of the Republican Party. It’s become just as confounding to the libertarians, conservatives, and ‘constitutionalists’ who used to be called the “Tea Party.” While Cruz had spent the days before these caucuses pre-spinning a loss, the size of the Trump victory challenged notions about who, exactly, was a conservative.” Amanda Carpenter on CNN was realistic about the end of her party:

"I'm really struck in thinking about what a Donald Trump nomination would actually mean," she said. "I really think it's the end of the Republican Party. It's a natural effect. We've watched what's happened by a lot of people who have wanted to save power so badly they didn't listen, didn't listen, didn't listen to the grassroots. They didn't listen in 2010, they didn't listen in 2014 even though we won those midterm elections. Nothing changed."

Vox has a nice chart and list of all the Democratic Party's superdelegates. The point of this post is not for Sanders' supporters to harass these people, or to suggest that superdelegates are a problem. As we saw in 2008, superdelegates all eventually went along with the pledged delegate leader (Obama), including Hillary herself (who as a Senator was also a superdelegate). But I thought it would be neat to know who they are.