“What Actually Matters”: Joe Biden Was A Good Vice President. The Democratic Candidates Should Learn From This
It won’t be long now before the political world begins the quadrennial festival of pointless yet momentarily diverting speculation on whom the presidential nominees will choose to be their running mates. So let me suggest a radical idea before that process gets underway: The candidates should choose someone who would actually — are you ready? — do a good job as vice president.
Sounds crazy, I know. But it’s something almost no one talks about when debating this decision. And the guy who has the job now is a good example, believe it or not.
Before we discuss Joe Biden, there’s something important to understand about the “veepstakes”: Almost everything you’ll hear about how the nominees should make their decision is wrong. (I should mention that more detail on what I’m discussing here can be found in an article I wrote for the latest print edition of the American Prospect; the article isn’t online yet, so you should immediately head down to your local newsstand to procure a copy.)
It’s wrong because the choice of a running mate makes little or no difference to the outcome of the election. Should the candidate pick someone who comes from a swing state? No, because it won’t matter — while the nominee might get a boost of a couple of points in their own home state (above what a generic nominee from their party would get), vice presidential nominees don’t bring in any home-state votes.
Should the candidate pick someone who’ll help them unify the party after a contentious primary season? No, because in most cases the party is going to unify no matter what. We live in an era of negative partisanship in which voters’ dislike for the other side is a more powerful motivating factor than their affection for their own party. Republicans are unusually fractured this year, but if they come back together it will be over their shared hatred of Hillary Clinton, not because of a vice presidential nominee. Democrats, on the other hand, will be unified by Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Don’t believe the Bernie Sanders supporters who are saying they’ll never vote for Clinton — almost all of them will, just as the Clinton supporters who said they’d never vote for Barack Obama in 2008 did in the end.
Should the candidate pick someone with an interesting demographic profile? No, because as with all the other considerations we’re discussing, in the end the difference that could make will be minuscule next to how voters feel about the person at the top of the ticket. That isn’t to say it would have zero effect if, say, Clinton picked a Latino as her running mate, but the effect in persuading more Latinos that they should vote for the Democratic ticket will be so small as to be barely worth considering.
All of this is why political scientists who have studied this question have been almost completely unable to locate a significant effect of vice presidential choices on the final outcome of the race. The outlying case is Sarah Palin, who likely cost John McCain a point or two. The other running mate who might have made a small difference is Dan Quayle in 1988. But both of those were picks that went horribly wrong; what you won’t find is a running mate who actually helped the candidate at the top of the ticket in any meaningful way.
So if you’re Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz (I won’t pretend to know what bizarre calculations might be whirring through Donald Trump’s mind), that means you should just pick someone who would actually be good at being vice president, and as long as the person isn’t a political disaster during the campaign, you’ll have done yourself a favor. Which brings us to Joe Biden.
John Harwood (who has really been killing it with these) has an interview with Biden out today, and from Biden’s answers, it’s obvious that he still hasn’t quite made peace with the idea that he’s never going to be president. When asked about his “Goofy Uncle Joe” persona, he said: “if you notice, I beat every Republican in every poll when they thought I was running. You notice that my favorability was higher than anybody that’s running for office in either party.” He also vigorously defended not only his record as a senator but the administration’s accomplishments. Which you’d expect, but what most people don’t realize is that Biden has been an extremely effective vice president.
Thanks to his decades in the Senate, Biden came to the job with a deep understanding of the way the federal government operates, which enabled him to oversee projects that spanned different agencies and different branches. Most importantly, he was in charge of implementing the Recovery Act, which was one of the administration’s great unsung successes. It involved a huge amount of work and coordination, and by every account Biden performed exceptionally well at it. Just the fact that they managed to distribute over three-quarters of a trillion dollars without any major scandals of graft or theft was an extraordinary accomplishment.
And perhaps most critically for a vice president, Biden has kept a strong relationship with the president throughout the last seven years, which many VPs can’t say (most notably, Dick Cheney was hugely powerful in George W. Bush’s first term, but lost favor in the second term). That isn’t to say he hasn’t had some Bidenesque screwups along the way, but he seems to have done about as good a job as President Obama could have hoped.
To what degree Obama knew that would happen when he picked Biden isn’t clear — though as someone from Delaware who had run a couple of weak runs for the White House, Biden didn’t look like electoral gold at the time, so Obama couldn’t have been worrying too much about getting a boost to the ticket. And it can be hard to predict how someone will do in a job they haven’t done before. But if the 2016 candidates take a good look at history, they’ll realize that there’s little to be gained by worrying too much about how their running mate will affect the election’s outcome. Pollsters will tell you that after a running mate gets picked, the candidate will get a bump in the polls for a few days based on all the positive news about the choice, and then the race settles right back down to where it was before.
I realize that means the millions of words that will be spilled on the veepstakes will all be for nought. I’m not telling anyone to stop speculating and musing. Go right ahead; I might do some of it myself. But we shouldn’t forget what actually matters about the choice.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, April 19, 2016
“Woe Betide The GOP If You Do”: The GOP Can’t Legitimately Deny Trump The Nomination
No matter how the Republican presidential primary unfolds from here, all the factions of the #NeverTrump movement—the party operatives attacking him; the conservative opinion leaders holding the line against him; the Republican delegates loyal to Ted Cruz after the first ballot at the party’s July convention—face severe conundrums.
Since March, Trump has been the only candidate with a traditional path to winning an outright majority of 1,237 pledged delegates before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. More recently, it became mathematically impossible for John Kasich to win a delegate majority, and Ted Cruz would now probably have to rely on unpledged delegates to clear the victory threshold. But that already forbidding situation became even more challenging Tuesday night after Donald Trump won the New York primary in dominating fashion.
In the aftermath of Cruz’s victory in the Wisconsin primary, when the Trump campaign seemed to be floundering, it was tempting to imagine that Republicans could keep Trump far enough from 1,237 to justify denying him the nomination: Yes, Trump won vote and delegate pluralities, they could say. But he also has relatively high unfavorables within the GOP, and Republican voters are more supportive, in sum, of a Cruz-Kasich ticket, or a Cruz-Marco Rubio ticket, than they are of Trump winning the nomination.
Now that it looks like he’ll be at least close to an outright delegate majority, it’s difficult to see how anti-Trump conservatives can deny him the nomination and avoid accusations that they have rejected the discernible will of the Republican electorate.
No matter how short of 1,237 Trump falls, his argument at the convention will be simple, and completely intuitive: I might not have won in a way that requires the Republican Party to give me the nomination—but I won a moral victory. It’s in your power to deny me the nomination, but woe betide the GOP if you do. This will ring true both to his own supporters, and to GOP voters who perhaps supported a different candidate but are amenable to Trump and believe instinctually that in an election, the person with the most votes should win.
It’s difficult to see how anti-Trump conservatives can deny him the nomination and avoid accusations that they have rejected the discernible will of the Republican electorate.
At 1,000 delegates or even 1,100 delegates, anti-Trump conservatives would have a not-quite-as-intuitive, but still-easy-to-grasp counterargument: Your plurality is real, but it is small, and we can create a ticket that better reflects the party’s preference than any ticket with you at the top. It would be dangerous and debatable, but not facially illegitimate. And there’s a meaningful distinction between the two.
After New York, anti-Trump conservatives are facing a worst-case scenario in which Trump reaches 1,237 in early June, becoming the nominee in Cleveland by acclamation, and a best-case scenario in which Trump arrives in Cleveland with somewhere near 1,200 delegates, and the Republican Party denies him the nomination solely on the basis of elite disdain.
It’s hard to game this race out with any real precision, in no small part because Kasich’s impact on the race is so nebulous. By staying in, Kasich may have denied Trump some delegates in New York, but were he to drop out, he’d free Cruz up to defeat Trump handily in Indiana. Using a conservative simulation, MSNBC’s election savant Steve Kornacki sees Trump entering the convention with 1,199 delegates—nearly 49 percent. Imagine that’s correct, and the dilemmas becomes clear. If unpledged delegates oppose Trump, the question of whether to force a second ballot will be in their hands. #NeverTrump delegates who are pledged to vote Trump on the first ballot will have to ask themselves whether they’re prepared to deny Trump the nomination on the narrowest of technicalities. Anti-Trump conservative pundits will need to weigh the competing imperatives of defeating Trump and running a candidate who enjoys the presumption of legitimacy. If you’re an anti-Trump GOP operative, now’s the time to ask whether its wise to continue attacking him in ways that will damage him in the general election.
In a narrow, zero-sum sense, it doesn’t matter if Trump takes 5 or 15 or 40 percent of the party with him if he bolts the party, since even 5 percent will probably be too much for the GOP to remain competitive in November. But there’s a real difference between defeating Trump in a way that satisfies the majority of the party, and wresting the nomination from him in a way that strikes a majority of the party as underhanded. That difference will matter when it comes time for Republicans to pick up the pieces after this primary. And what they may have lost tonight is a way to convincingly argue that they beat Trump fair and square.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, April 19, 2016
“The Liberal Silent Majority”: A Passionate Vote Counts No More Than One Cast With Quiet Consent Or Even Resignation
A few days before Bernie Sanders lost badly in the New York primary, 27,000 souls filled Washington Square Park, many wildly cheering him on. The political media consensus interpreted the scene as evidence of surging support for the senator from Vermont. It did not occur to them that:
–The crowd almost certainly included many Hillary Clinton supporters just out to hear what Bernie had to say — not to mention some stray Republicans.
–It included tourists who, on a pleasant spring evening, happened on an exciting event and hung around.
–Some attendees were Bernie backers who had neglected to register as Democrats in time for the Democratic primary.
–The numbers at Washington Square were dwarfed by the battalions of working-class New Yorkers juggling two children and three jobs. These mostly Clinton voters were unable to attend any rally.
This last group is the subject here. It is the silent liberal majority.
Richard Nixon popularized the term “silent majority” in 1969. He was referring to the Middle Americans appalled by the Vietnam-era protests and associated social chaos. They didn’t demonstrate, and the so-called media elite ignored them.
Today’s liberal version of the silent majority is heavy with minorities and older people. Its members tend to be more socially conservative than those on the hard left and believe President Obama is a good leader.
Obamacare has brought medical coverage to 90 percent of the population, with the greatest gains among Latinos. Thus, a politician who repeatedly complains that this is “the only major country that doesn’t guarantee health care to all people as a right” sounds a bit off.
Many political reporters belong to the white gentry that has fueled the Sanders phenomenon. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they know where they’re coming from. But some don’t seem to know about the vast galaxies of Democratic voters beyond the university and hipster ZIP codes.
In so many races — including those of the other party — reporters confine themselves to carefully staged political events and a few interviews with conveniently placed participants. From the atmospherics, they deduce the level of support for a particular candidate.
It can’t be repeated often enough that a passionate vote counts no more than one cast with quiet consent or even resignation. Here are three examples of political analysts forgetting this:
Commenting on the lively debate in Brooklyn, columnist Frank Bruni concluded that the Sanders camp is “where the fiercest energy in the party resides right now.” How did he know? “It was audible on Thursday night, in the boos from the audience that sometimes rained down on Clinton.”
So, how many people were booing? Three? Four? Who were they? They possibly could have been Hillary people trying to summon sympathy for their candidate (which the booing undoubtedly did).
The day after the packed Sanders rally in Greenwich Village, CNN looped videos contrasting that massive turnout with the much smaller group listening to Clinton in the Bronx. That’s as deep as this story went.
Early this month, New York magazine posted a piece titled “In the South Bronx, Bernie Sanders Gives Clinton Cause for Concern.” The reporter’s evidence was a sizable and “raucous” Sanders rally headlined by a handful of black and Latino celebrities.
We await the magazine’s follow-up analysis on how Clinton won 70 percent of the Bronx vote. Someone must have voted for her.
This is not to chide the Sanders campaign. Its job was to create an impression of mass support for its candidate — and job well-done. Rather, it’s to remind the media that there’s a huge electorate outside the focus of managed campaign events. And silent majorities, by their very nature, tend not to get noticed.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, April 21, 2016
“People’s Legislative Power”: Arizona’s Nonpartisan Redistricting Plan Is A Slam Dunk At The Supreme Court
In a significant victory for election reform advocates, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s redistricting plan, which had been challenged by Republicans.
The case comes just a year after the Court’s liberals, plus Justice Kennedy, upheld the legitimacy of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, which had been created by ballot initiative. That case was controversial, since the Constitution specifically requires districts created “by the legislature” of each state, not by an independently constituted commission. Justice Ginsberg, writing for the Court, said that the “people’s legislative power” was close enough. Not surprisingly, the Court’s more literalist wing was outraged.
It’s perhaps surprising, then, that today’s case, Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, was decided 8-0. On the one hand, the case may represent a consensus on at least some aspects of election law—and is thus very good news for electoral reform activists. On the other hand, since it basically defers to a state decision, it’s not a robust test case.
The facts of the case are straightforward. Despite being independent, the five-person Redistricting Commission is still divided among Democrats, Republicans, and ostensible independents: two, two, and one, respectively, with intricate appointment procedures. In April 2012, the two Democrats and one independent modified three districts, and the two Republicans voted against, arguing that the new plan favored Democrats.
Contrary to what you might expect, however, the Supreme Court has never said that partisan gerrymandering is against the law. If the districts disadvantage minorities, a redistricting plan might violate what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. And if they contain wildly different populations, the plan might violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. But it’s not actually against the law to be craven, manipulative, and duplicitous.
Given that, it’s not surprising that the petitioners lost—though it is surprising that they lost unanimously.
First, while Republicans alleged that the plan was designed to benefit Democrats, there was significant evidence in the record that showed it was actually designed to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act. (The plan was ratified before the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.) In particular, it seems those concerns swayed the one independent member of the commission.
Second, the population deviations in the Arizona plan were around 4 percent. That’s well below the 10 percent threshold the Court has adopted when applying the Equal Protection clause. True, that variation was all on one side—Republican-leading districts were generally more populous than Democrat-leaning ones. But that’s not necessarily illegal, and anyway the variation can be explained by the need for the plan to conform with the Voting Rights Act.
Third, while part of the Voting Rights Act was held unconstitutional in 2013, in Shelby County, that doesn’t corrupt Arizona’s motives in complying with it back in 2012. At the time, the redistricting commission was trying to obey the law, not stack the decks.
Does this unanimous decision represent a new dawn for election reform? Not quite.
To be sure, the unanimity does suggest that the redistricting commission is now a fait accompli. No one dissented, or even wrote a separate concurrence, to protest its existence. One wonders if Justice Scalia might have done so, but Chief Justice Roberts, certainly, is not likely to question one of the Court’s recent precedents; he is particularly committed to the legitimacy of the Court and its decisions. On the contrary, he has now joined an opinion upholding the commission’s decision—and one that tends to favor Democrats.
On the other hand, the thing about unanimous decisions is that they tend to signal, at least retroactively, that these cases were relatively easy ones. They are precisely not the ones that indicate a lot of movement on key issues.
For example, while the Religious Right cheered a religious freedom case decided unanimously by the Supreme Court last year, the reason it was unanimous is that it was an old school, religious-liberty-as-shield-against-the-government case. That case involved a prison inmate wanting to grow a half-inch beard; no third parties were involved, no harm was done, and the prison’s safety rationales were ludicrous. That’s why it was uncontroversial.
While much of the Court may not like the context of the commission’s decision, that question is now settled, and what’s left is a far-fetched constitutional claim against a reasonable, and well-documented, state agency decision.
And, as usual in unanimous decisions, Justice Breyer’s opinion tends toward the minimalistic. No wild statements of law or policy here; this opinion was generated to build consensus, and it did so.
Still, this is a significant step forward for election reform. The Arizona Redistricting Commission is an innovative idea, with an elaborate attempt to minimize partisanship and increase accountability. There were constitutional grumblings last year when the Supreme Court decided “the legislature” could also mean “the people,” but as a matter of policy, the commission is an important model for how to improve the messy, dirty redistricting process. On it rides many hopes of democracy advocates.
And today, it won a ringing endorsement from a unanimous court.
By: Jay Michaelson, The Daily Beast, April 20, 2016
“Not Even Their Own Voters”: Republican Blockade Failing To Persuade American Mainstream
The Washington Post observed this week that Democrats “are winning the Supreme Court fight over Merrick Garland. Big time.” Dems aren’t exactly succeeding in convincing Republicans to end their unprecedented Supreme Court blockade, but the party has apparently fared pretty well in the court of popular opinion.
The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll started asking an important question soon after Justice Antonin Scalia passed away in February:
“Recently, a Supreme Court Justice passed away leaving a vacancy on the court. President Obama has nominated a new person to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Would you prefer the U.S. Senate vote this year on the replacement nominated by President Obama or leave the position vacant and wait to vote next year on the replacement nominated by the new president or do you not have an opinion one way or the other?”
When the question went to the public just a few days after Scalia’s death, Americans were closely divided: 43% said they’d like to see the Senate vote this year on the Supreme Court’s vacancy, while 42% said they’d prefer to see the vacancy filled next year by a new president.
A month later, in March, the numbers shifted a bit in the Democrats’ favor. This month, in a poll that was in the field last week, they shifted even more. Now, a 52% majority of Americans want a vote this year, while 30% want to leave the seat vacant until next year.
What was a one-point advantage for the White House’s position in February is a 22-point advantage now. A closer look suggests even Republican voters are starting to shift away from their own party’s position.
At least for now, there’s no evidence to suggest Senate Republicans care at all about public opinion. GOP leaders very likely expected their blockage, which has no precedent in the American tradition, would be unpopular, but they decided to go with it anyway. I doubt poll results like these shock anyone.
But if you’re one of the vulnerable Senate Republican incumbents worried about your re-election prospects, and you were counting on the vaunted GOP Messaging Machine to win over the American mainstream on your party’s Supreme Court gambit, the latest evidence serves as a reminder: Republicans aren’t persuading anyone, not even their own voters.
That may not be enough to convince GOP senators to act responsibly towards a compromise nominee, but it should be enough to make some senators very nervous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 21, 2016
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