Delaware Dem

Tuesday Open Thread [2.23.16]

Cracks in the GOP Wall: Both Illinois Senator Mark Kirk and Maine Senator Susan Collins say the President has a duty to nominate a replacement for the late Justice Scalia and it is the duty of the Senate to conduct hearings and to vote up or down. But Sens. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Rob Portman of Ohio have to act unconstitutionally, and it may cost them their seats, according to new polling from PPP:

-Strong majorities of voters—58/35 in Ohio and 57/40 in Pennsylvania—think that the vacant seat on the Supreme Court should be filled this year. What’s particularly noteworthy about those numbers—and concerning for Portman and Toomey—is how emphatic the support for approving a replacement is among independent voters. In Ohio they think a new Justice should be named this year 70/24 and in Pennsylvania it’s 60/37. Those independent voters are going to make the difference in these tight Senate races, and they have no tolerance for obstructionism on the vacancy.

-Voters are particularly angry about Senators taking the stance that they’re not going to approve anyone before even knowing who President Obama decides to put forward. By a 76/20 spread in Pennsylvania and a 74/18 one in Ohio, voters think the Senate should wait to see who is nominated to the Court before deciding whether or not to confirm that person. Toomey and Portman are out of line even with their own party base on that one—Republicans in Pennsylvania think 67/27 and in Ohio think 63/32 that the Senate should at least give President Obama’s choice a chance before deciding whether or not to confirm them.

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Monday Open Thread [2.22.16]

Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wonders if Clinton is once again inevitable:

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 that is the end result of a Clinton v. Sanders primary, I’d say, to most everyone except the Sanders diehards or anti-Hillary forces, that that is a successful result. A more liberal, more progressive, more campaign tested Hillary is a better nominee than a complacent inevitable coronated Hillary running to the middle. The latter is something most of us feared as approached 2016, that the lack of a credible primary would hurt Hillary. Well, that fear has been avoided.

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Clinton and Trump Victory Thread [2.21.16]

Jeet Heer says Hillary’s decisive victory in Nevada gives her a clear path to the nomination:

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.

Tim Murphy says this is really happening: Trump is going to be the nominee.*

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.

*-I stick with my prediction of Cruz through a brokered convention.

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Saturday Open Thread [2.20.16]

Politico says the campaigns are flying blind in Nevada: “There have been only two public surveys in Nevada this week, and pollsters warn that the caucuses — a system only recently implemented in the state and typically attended by very few Nevadans — are nearly impossible to predict. That’s frightening for those wondering whether Clinton can sustain her Nevada firewall or whether Sanders’ momentum can bring a surge of young voters to the caucuses.”

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The Weekly Addresses

In this week’s address, President Obama discussed his upcoming trip to Cuba, a visit that will further advance the progress we’ve made since he announced the new chapter of U.S. – Cuba relations more than a year ago. Meanwhile, Governor Markell highlighted the commitment Delaware has made to investing in alternatives to incarceration.

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Friday Open Thread [2.19.16]

Donald Trump was caught in a lie on live television.

“For months, Donald Trump has claimed that he opposed the Iraq War before the invasion began — as an example of his great judgment on foreign policy issues,” BuzzFeed reports. “But in a 2002 interview with Howard Stern, Donald Trump said he supported an Iraq invasion.”

Watch him squirm on CNN when confronted with his lies.

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