Delaware Dem

Tuesday Open Thread [2.9.16]

Ed Kilgore says New Hampshire has a long history of Primary Night Surprises.

The Granite State has a long tradition of thumbing its nose at the preferences of Iowa, its first-in-the-nation twin. The last time the New Hampshire Democrats voted for the same candidate in a competitive primary was in 2000 with Al Gore; you have to go back to 1992 to find a similarly harmonious early-state outcome for Republicans. But high-impact results in New Hampshire go all the way back to 1952, when voters there were first allowed to directly vote for candidates rather than just delegates. President Harry Truman’s ambitions for a second full term expired when he lost to crowd-pleasing Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. (Truman’s successor Dwight D. Eisenhower, meanwhile, began his climb to the White House by beating “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft.)

In 1964 Republicans surprised probably even themselves by giving a write-in candidacy on behalf of ambassador to South Vietnam (and former Massachusetts senator) Henry Cabot Lodge a victory over Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater. In 1968, Democrats showed that meeting expectations could matter as much as order of finish, as President Lyndon Johnson was all but pushed out of a reelection race by a shockingly narrow victory over Gene McCarthy. The same thing happened to 1972 Democratic front-runner Ed Muskie, who underperformed in a win over eventual nominee George McGovern (one of two consecutive long-shot Democrats to be lifted into contention by New Hampshire, the other being Jimmy Carter in 1976). The reverse phenomenon occurred in 1992, when Bill Clinton became the “comeback kid” with a better-than-expected second-place finish immediately following the Gennifer Flowers scandal.

That said, Hillary will not win in New Hampshire tonight. If she does, the primary is over. What is important is the margin. If the margin is 15-30 points as the polls suggest, Bernie gets the win and momentum. If the margin is in single digits, Hillary gets the “win” and momentum.

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Fundraising Totals

The news regarding fundraising for the various federal and statewide offices has trickled out over the past month, and I decided to put together one post where we can find that information and see the schedule of upcoming campaign finance reports.

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Monday Open Thread [2.8.2016]

DR Tucker \at the Washington Monthly:

The suggestion that most Sanders-supporting progressives will refuse to vote on November 8 if Sanders isn’t the Democratic nominee defies all logic. Sure, there may be a few disgruntled Bernie-backers who will either skip the polls or pull the level for presumptive Green Party nominee Jill Stein if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, but ask yourself: considering the stakes involved, do you honestly believe that the folks who have been attracted to Sanders’s message would, in essence, concede the election to whichever radical from last night’s debate wins the GOP nomination?

Remember the nonsensical “PUMA” movement in 2008? The idea that large numbers of Clinton supporters would actually refuse to vote for Barack Obama in the general election was laughable—and the idea that most Sanders supporters will throw a tantrum in the event the Vermonter is vanquished is just as silly.

[…] To accept the premise that most Sanders supporters would go on a general-election strike if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination is to accept the right’s premise of progressive irrationality. In order to buy the idea that the “Bernie or Bust!” movement is real, one would have to believe that most Sanders supporters:

* are unmindful of the importance of the United States Supreme Court, US District Courts of Appeal, and US District Courts, and the judges appointed to each division;

* are perfectly willing to allow a situation whereby a Republican President, Republican House and Republican Senate are finally in a position to obliterate Obamacare;

* would have no problem with four years of nothing being done to stem the bloody tide of handgun violence;

* would give the Christian right the opportunity to reinstate coathangers as the only reproductive option for women facing unplanned and unwanted pregnancies;

* would tolerate a Republican president fomenting a culture of racial and religious intolerance;

* would ignore the prospect of the GOP gutting President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and successfully sabotaging the 2015 Paris climate agreement; and

* would gamble on the idea that a Republican president could be thrown out of office in 2020 in favor of, presumably, Democratic presidential nominee Elizabeth Warren.

In other words, to buy this idea, one would have to buy absolute absurdity.

Members of the progressive family are simply having an argument over who will be the best individual to lead the country into the next decade. Yes, the language in this argument is sometimes raw, crude, personal. However, does anyone really believe that at the end of the primary, the progressive family will not set aside its differences and come together?

Indeed, those Sanders supporters who say they will not vote for Hillary are the type of voter that have never voted for the Democratic nominee in the first place. They vote Green, Working Families, Socialist, Communist or not at all. So if you want to see how large their numbers are, look at prior vote totals for those parties.

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Upcoming Democratic Debates and Forums

The New Castle County Democratic Committee will be holding a “Candidate Forum Night” for the positions of Insurance Commissioner and Lt. Governor. The Forum will be on February 17, 2016 at 7 pm at the Local 74 Executive Banquet & Conference Center, 205 Executive Drive, Newark, Delaware 19702. During this forum there will be an interactive question and answer session with the audience. Meanwhile, the News Journal and WHYY have formed a coalition with various community groups to hose four debates for the candidates for Wilmington Mayor.

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Saturday Open Thread [2.6.2016]

Booman says we are in for a long primary, even if Clinton becomes the inevitable nominee in March:

Even if Clinton rips off a bunch of big victories in a row and seems like the inevitable nominee, it’s pretty unlikely that Sanders will concede because he’ll have all the money he needs to keep campaigning. And I don’t think he really set out to win this thing at the beginning, so he’s not quitting just because he realizes that he won’t be nominated. He’ll want to keep hammering home his points and gathering delegates for the convention.

A long campaign will be painful, but 2008 showed there can be important upsides. The more states the two campaigns organize, the more work they’ll have done in advance of the general election. The more the country is focused on the differences between Clinton and Sanders, the more they’ll be focused on their messaging and values and the less they’ll be focused on the messaging and values of the Republicans.

It’s true that some feelings will get hurt and some bitterness will result. It’s not cost-free to have an extended contested nomination, and the eventual nominee will get wounded. But, even here, some of Obama’s worst vulnerabilities were old news by November precisely because they’d been hashed out in the winter and spring.

As long as the process doesn’t leave the nominee underfunded, it’s probably not a problem to have a long primary season.

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Friday Open Thread [2.5.2016]

Dylan Matthews has his winners and losers. Winner: Bernie and Hillary. Losers: Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Wall Street.

On some level, the Democratic primary process is now zero-sum, with any gains to Sanders hurting Clinton and vice versa. And that’s true in a narrow sense. But both candidates gave very strong performances that emphasized their respective strengths. Regardless of who won in relative terms, both clearly succeeded in making the most compelling case for their respective candidacies.

For Clinton, that meant giving her strongest performance to date on foreign policy. She’s still well to the right of the Democratic Party as a whole on these questions. But she also is actually well-versed in them, whereas Sanders’s comments on foreign policy appear limited to a) praising the foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration, and b) hammering Clinton for her vote for the Iraq War. […]

Sanders clearly won on domestic policy. Clinton clearly won on foreign policy. And both gave excellent performances that offered compelling substantive grounds for supporting them. It feels perverse to label either a loser.

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