“Bernie Sanders Has A Turnout Problem”: So Far, The Uprising Looks Pretty Limited
In order to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency, you have to amass 2,382 of the 4,763 delegates who will attend the party’s convention in July. The three contests that have taken place in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada have allotted only 118 of those delegates, or 2 percent. And yet to listen to journalists, pundits, and analysts, the end of the Democratic race is in sight. If Hillary Clinton succeeds in beating Bernie Sanders in South Carolina this coming Saturday, they will declare that she has delivered a crushing blow, leaving him face-down on the canvas, his vision doubled and ears ringing as his weakened arms struggle to raise him up for Super Tuesday, when the final, gruesome pummeling will be administered.
If that’s what they say, will it be unfair? You bet. There’s still a long way to go, most Democrats haven’t voted, and South Carolina won’t change that no matter what happens. But Sanders doesn’t have a lot of time to prove that his already remarkable campaign more resembles Barack Obama’s in 2008 than Howard Dean’s in 2004.
No analogy is perfect, but those are roughly the two paths facing Sanders: an extraordinary run that challenges conventional wisdom and the political establishment, confounding expectations by bringing in huge numbers of small donors, and exciting young people to get involved in politics for the first time, and then wins; or a campaign that does all those things, and then loses.
On Sunday, the day after Clinton won the Nevada caucuses, Sanders was candid about why he fell short. Here’s what he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press:
Well, what happened is over the last five weeks, Chuck, we came from 25 points down to five points down. As I understand it, we actually won the Latino vote yesterday, which is a big breakthrough for us. But the voter turnout was not as high as I had wanted. And what I’ve said over and over again, we will do well when young people, when working-class people come out. We do not do well when the voter turnout is not large. We did not do as good a job as I had wanted to bring out a large turnout. …
Again, I wish we had had a larger voter turnout. But by the way, we did phenomenally well with young people. I think we did well with working-class people. But remember, we were taking on a candidate who ran in 2008. She knew Nevada a lot better than we did, she had the names of a lot of her supporters. So I am proud of the campaign that we ran. Obviously, I wish we could have done a little bit better. But at the end of the day, I think she gets 19 delegates, we get 15 delegates, we move onto the next state.
Sanders is right: The Democratic Party in Nevada is estimating the turnout for the caucuses at around 80,000. In 2008, the last contested caucuses, just under 120,000 Nevadans turned out. In other words, turnout was down by about a third.
Caucuses are, of course, ridiculous and anti-democratic. They make voting even harder than it is in primaries, so rather than expressing the will of the voters, they express the will of a relatively small group of highly motivated voters who happen to be willing and able to attend a long meeting in order to state their preference. While 80,000 Democrats attended the caucuses, 530,000 Nevadans voted for Barack Obama in 2012. If the number voting for the Democratic candidate this November turns out to be in the same neighborhood, it would mean that only one in six or seven Democratic voters actually participated in the event to choose that candidate.
And it’s true that for many people inclined to vote for Sanders, like young people, caucusing may be particularly difficult. That’s a big part of the reason that Hillary Clinton was able to win the Iowa caucuses by a hair: The older people and frequent voters who were more likely to support her were more likely to caucus.
But in Iowa, turnout was down, too. Around 171,000 Iowa Democrats caucused this year, but in 2008, that number was 236,000, meaning it dropped by 27 percent. And in New Hampshire, which Sanders won easily, turnout this year was just over 250,000; in 2008 it exceeded 288,000. That’s a smaller decline (13 percent), but still a decline.
You might say that it’s a high standard—after all, 2008 was an unusual campaign, one that got Democratic voters energized in ways they had never been before. And that’s true. The problem for Sanders is that he needs to duplicate that excitement in order to win. His campaign is predicated not just on doing well with young voters or new voters or any other kind of voters. It’s predicated on expanding the electorate, both in the primaries and in the general election, so much that he overcomes the advantages more traditional politicians have.
More so than Obama or even Dean, Sanders is counting on a revolution, not only to help him defeat a primary opponent who has more of the traditional advantages of an establishment favorite, but also to govern once he wins the White House. When Sanders is challenged on how he’ll be able to push his ambitious policy plans through a recalcitrant Congress, he responds that he will lead a powerful uprising of the citizenry that will force politicians to accept change. So far though, the uprising looks pretty limited.
Sanders has already accomplished something remarkable. The fact that a frumpy 74-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont has turned what was supposed to be a walk in the park for Hillary Clinton into a genuinely competitive race is positively historic. But unless he really can expand the electorate, it may not be enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, February 24, 2016
“Too Late To Catch Him?”: Trump’s Remorseless Delegate Math Means Rubio and Cruz Are Screwed
The story of Donald Trump’s doomed campaign has been replaced by the story of his inevitability as the Republican nominee.
It’s a sea change indicative of his constant ability to defy expectations. He placed second in the nation’s first contest in Iowa, went on to dominate in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and won Nevada’s GOP caucus on Tuesday night.
But it’s not Trump’s past wins that foretell doom for any Republican candidate trying to stop this phenomenon. It’s the fact that a week out from Super Tuesday, Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win most of the remaining voting states—and their delegates—across the country. To clinch the nomination before the Republican convention, Trump needs 1,237 committed delegates. Before Nevada, he had 67 delegates, and Ted Cruz was in second place with 11.
Here’s how the math works.
On Super Tuesday alone, the only states that Trump currently risks losing, according to Real Clear Politics averages, are Arkansas and Texas. And both of those states have Cruz leading by surmountable percentages (note, though, that polling in both states is not always frequent or entirely current).
Even if Trump comes in second in Texas, he could still win.
Texas is a state that is typically proportional in its delegate allocation but has what the website Frontloading HQ calls a “trigger,” which creates a condition in which the state becomes winner-take-all. This would happen if a candidate wins a majority of the vote. Should this overwhelming victory not happen for Cruz, and, say, Trump comes in second in a proportional setting, the senator from Texas must cede a portion of the 155 delegates in play, thereby essentially handing the contest and the nomination to Trump. If Cruz can’t win his home state, he has little chance throughout the rest of the spring.
The Republican primary contest has long had what Sam Wang, a Princeton University professor and neuroscientist, refers to as a “deadline problem.” Wang, who runs the Princeton Election Consortium, posited on Feb. 11 that the Republican field needed to get smaller in a hurry, setting two specific deadlines to try to defeat Trump.
The first deadline is Feb. 29, at which point Wang thinks there need to be only two alternatives to Trump prior to March 1 voting. The second is March 14, when Wang thinks there can be only one other option besides Trump.
The issue is that many of the states leading up to March 8 fit the model of Trump’s South Carolina victory, in which he captured about a third of the vote but still managed to get all the delegates due to proportionality rules.
Even after Jeb Bush dropped out of the race following his defeat in South Carolina, Trump still faces four opponents before March 1. Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Cruz will all try and see if they can win their respective home states (where all of them except Rubio are leading). Ben Carson has stubbornly stayed in the race despite finishing fourth at best in most states. But he could be out if his campaign contributions dry up in the coming weeks.
This means that unless everyone but Rubio and Cruz quits in the next week, Trump can’t be caught.
“Any talk of stopping Trump is highly unrealistic,” Wang told The Daily Beast. “Nearly all analysts, including data pundits, are blinded by the peculiarity of Trump’s campaign.”
Wang said he thinks Rubio has no chance of locking up the nomination anytime soon because the field is too divided for him to corral a lot of delegates by Super Tuesday. And if the senator loses his home state of Florida, which polling suggests he might, there isn’t enough time to make up the delegate difference before the Republican convention in July.
Josh Putnam, a political science professor at the University of Georgia who runs Frontloading HQ, told The Daily Beast that the only scenario that would allow a Trump defeat in the primary is a one-on-one matchup.
“If only Trump is winning, then no one can catch him in the delegate count,” Putnam said. “The only play in that scenario would be for opponents to either drop out or play to keep Trump under the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination on the first ballot at the national convention.”
One state that could slow Trump’s speeding train is Ohio, whose winner-take-all contest could keep him shy of the delegate count necessary to clinch the nomination. Trump sits atop the polls there, narrowly beating Buckeye Gov. Kasich.
Even in a situation in which Trump, Rubio, and Cruz are the last three standing, as conventional wisdom would suggest, the road still looks rocky for Cruz and Rubio. An Economist/YouGov poll taken last week showed Trump with 46 percent of the vote, Rubio with 28 percent, and Cruz with 26 percent. An earlier NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found Trump leading in the same circumstance.
Also, as saliently noted by Sahil Kapur in a Bloomberg Politics piece, as of January, Trump had a higher share of Republican voters who would consider voting for him than Mitt Romney had in 2012 around the same time. This suggests the mythic establishment lane has been almost entirely consumed by the singular Trump lane.
Rubio, the presumed second-place candidate at this point, cannot merely rely on absorbing Bush’s supporters either, as ideologically those supporters could just as easily go with Kasich as Rubio. In fact, the only way the Florida senator could catch the frontrunner is to siphon off some of Trump’s support, which seems unlikely. In a January NBC poll, 51 percent of Trump supporters said they were absolutely sure of their choice, while only 26 percent said the same for Rubio.
Wang says the question of Trump’s “ceiling” in terms of national polls is worthless. The real question is just how high his delegate count can go.
“Under Republican rules, it is possible to win a majority of delegates with as little as 30 percent of the vote, if conditions are right,” Wang said, using South Carolina, where Trump took all 50 delegates with only 33 percent of the vote, as an example. “That involves a split field, which is why I have been so focused on that. At Trump’s current level of support, about 35-40 percent, his delegate ceiling is above 50 percent,” meaning, according to Wang’s model, that even if Trump garners 35 percent of the popular support, he can still earn at least half of all the national delegates available.
As for Rubio, the blunt question is, what state can he win on Super Tuesday? He led by a small margin in Minnesota and could see an opening in Colorado. But otherwise his chances look bleak.
In the fantasy scenario where Rubio is viewed as a possible foil for Trump, is it possible to still be a viable contender if you don’t win a state before March 15?
As Nevada’s caucus began, Rubio was getting ready to test this hypothesis with a slew of new endorsements in hand. But in an election where facts don’t matter and Trump is drowning out the noise, it’s going to take more than an impressive posse to catch the frontrunner—as Tuesday night’s results showed.
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, February 24, 2016
“Unlike Anything Ever Tried In American History”: The ‘GOP Gamble’: Voters Won’t Care About Court Blockade
As far as Senate Republicans are concerned, the fight over the Supreme Court vacancy is now officially over. They’ve declared themselves the winner.
Every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel responsible for evaluating judicial nominees in detail, met in private this morning with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Soon after, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a longtime committee member, told the Associated Press the GOP group came to an agreement: there would be no hearing, no vote, and no confirmation of any nominee, regardless of merit or qualifications.
A partisan blockade, unlike anything ever tried in American history, is the only course the Republican majority is willing to consider. Period. Full stop.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), another member of the Judiciary Committee, said today he wouldn’t even speak to a Supreme Court nominee if he or she showed up at his office. Soon after, McConnell and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the same thing.
So, is the fight over an unchosen, unknown nominee finished before it begins? Well, maybe.
President Obama and his team are no doubt aware of the developments on Capitol Hill, though it’s unlikely West Wing officials are going to simply quit, telling each other, “Well, we tried.”
What’s probably going to happen is that the president will nominate a qualified official for the high court; he’ll encourage senators to do their job while honoring the constitutional process; and then Democrats hope for the pressure to change the politics.
The next question, of course, is whether such pressure is going to exist.
Last week, a Fox News poll found a clear majority of Americans agreeing that the Supreme Court’s vacancy should be filled this year, not next. This week, a Pew Research Center survey found similar results.
In the high-stakes battle over replacing Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, a majority of Americans (56%) say the Senate should hold hearings and vote on President Obama’s choice to fill the vacancy. About four-in-ten (38%) say the Senate should not hold hearings until the next president selects a court nominee.
Of course, while independent and Democratic voters agree on senators doing their duty, the same poll found that 66% of GOP voters want the blockade to continue – and those are very likely the only voters Senate Republicans care about right now.
It sounds cynical and undemocratic, but by all appearances, GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill just don’t buy into the notion that there will ever be a public backlash against them – on practically anything. Cycle after cycle, their antics are rewarded, even after a government shutdown, a debt-ceiling crisis, and a complete unwillingness to govern on practically any issue.
Periodically, someone will say, “The public won’t stand for this,” to which Republicans respond, “Of course they will. Voters don’t pay much attention anyway.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 23, 2016
“Pressed Against The Back Edge Of Their Own Sword”: When Will Republicans Start Recognizing How Screwed They Are?
For months and months, movement conservatives and elected Republicans—along with a non-trivial contingent of political commentators and data journalists—promoted as conventional wisdom an idea that was really much more akin to wishful thinking. That idea, boiled down to its essence, was that the very weirdness of the Donald Trump phenomenon—his undisguised bigotry, his total lack of governing experience, the unanimous (if not always vocal) opposition of Republican elites to his candidacy—would sooner or later doom him.
When Trump not only didn’t collapse, but built a commanding nationwide polling lead—which he is now converting into a substantial delegate lead—the conventional wisdom took a turn. Once the candidate field dwindled down to a two-or-three person race, the new thinking went, Trump would hit a ceiling. Even if he never exactly collapsed, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz could slug it out to the GOP convention and conspire to deny Trump the nomination. Alternatively, a single challenger might defeat Trump outright.
In this latter scenario, Trump is assumed to be vulnerable from both directions. In a head-to-head against Cruz, he would succumb to the consolidation of the religious and ideological right, along with a meaningful segment of the Republican mainstream. Alternatively (and preferably, as far as most Republicans are concerned), Rubio would emerge and defeat Trump in the blue and purple states of the Northeast, the Rust Belt, and the West.
For a moment after Rubio’s unexpected (but very narrow) second-place finish in the South Carolina primary Saturday night, you could mistake his shiny mien for a glimmer of hope that Trump’s reckoning was at hand. Or, if not at hand, clearly visible in the middle distance.
But after brief scrutiny, and for several reasons, this second-best fantasy falls apart. First, and most obviously, this is still at best a three-man race between Trump, Rubio, and Cruz. If it never dwindles into a two-man race, then the most Republicans can hope for is a contested convention this summer. After attempting but failing to destroy Cruz’s candidacy a month ago, establishment Republicans are now pressed up against the back edge of their own sword. The Texas senator is in the race, and has no incentive to drop out—especially not before Super Tuesday, when a number of Bible Belt states (and his own) will hold their nominating contests. Trump, it should be noted, just routed the field across almost every GOP demographic, including evangelicals, in South Carolina.
Second, John Kasich is still in the race, too, and has a much more natural appeal than Rubio with the nominally moderate, working-class white voters who will determine the winners of blue- and purple-state primaries in the coming month. Indeed, in states like Ohio, Michigan, and Massachusetts, Kasich is poised to rival or outperform Rubio in the race for second place. But that brings us to the most important point.
The very idea that Trump will encounter resistance outside the South is based on a simplistic and doubly inapt conception of “moderation.” The first premise is that, by promising to appeal outside of the Republican Party’s typical constituencies, Rubio is by definition more moderate than Trump; the second is that appealing to the center in a general election is no different than appealing to “moderate” Republicans in a GOP primary.
If this race is proving anything, though, it’s that what constitutes “moderation” to elite conservatives (relative dovishness on immigration aimed at swing voters in a general election) isn’t what constitutes moderation among Republican voters (restrictionist immigration policy paired with heterodox support for redistributive social policies). The big flaw in the assumption that Rubio (or anyone, really) can make up ground against Trump in blue states is that “moderate” voters are actually Trump’s ace in the hole.
New #Massachusetts Poll#GOP@realDonaldTrump– 50%@marcorubio– 16%@JohnKasich– 13%@tedcruz– 10%@RealBenCarson– 2%
— ECPS (@EmersonPolling) February 22, 2016
This appeal very likely extends to nominally moderate Republican voters in the interior West and California, where Republicans will cotton to Trump’s anti-immigration absolutism.
Tuesday night’s Nevada caucus will be an important test of GOP faith. Does Trump have a ceiling? Can Rubio further consolidate the field? Is Cruz’s end beginning? The polling on all of these questions should chasten the right. And in a way, the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries already revealed how prohibitive Trump’s odds of becoming the GOP nominee have become. Trump lapped the field in a moderate state, and then he did almost as well in a state that should have been fairly hostile to his mix of feigned religiosity, anti-Bushism, and unflinching hawkishness.
If Trump prevails once again, perhaps the conservative establishment will set aside its contrived obsession with whose second- or third-place finish was the most inspiring, and accept that peering past the behemoth in front of them won’t make him disappear.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, February 23, 2016
“Republicans Still Love Gitmo”: Don’t Want To Admit They Were Wrong To Support The Cuban Prison In The First Place
The Republicans have a strange emotional attachment to keeping the prison at Guantanamo Bay open for the foreseeable future. As an explanation, I kind of discount actual fear that the inmates might escape from a super maximum security prison in the United States. I know they fan that fear whenever the subject of closing Gitmo comes up, but I believe this is just a tactic.
Maybe they just don’t want to admit that they were wrong to support the Cuban prison in the first place. That certainly seems to animate the most vocal opponents who also are the most notorious neoconservative members of the Senate.
Take a look at how they’re responding to the administration’s just-announced plan to close the notorious facility:
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the armed services committee, all but rejected a plan he himself has urged the administration to submit. McCain has shifted his positions on Guantánamo from the Bush to the Obama administrations, but has positioned himself as the last gasp of Obama’s ambitions to win congressional support.
McCain, while pledging to look at the plan in hearings, termed it “a vague menu of options, not a credible plan for closing Guantánamo, let alone a coherent policy to deal with future terrorist detainees,” and said Obama had “missed a major chance”.
Senator Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican on the armed services committee, preemptively rejected the final proposal in a statement.
“The president is doubling down on a dangerous plan to close Guantánamo – a move that I will continue to fight in the Senate,” Ayotte said.
Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican and war veteran, dismissed the plan as a “political exercise”. Cotton, a rising star in GOP national security circles, received significant media attention for declaring Guantánamo detainees “can rot in hell” last year.
Then there’s Marco Rubio, who is already criticizing the plan on the campaign trail, saying that not only shouldn’t the prison close, but we should never give the property at Gitmo back to a “communist dictatorship.”
I don’t expect Congress to act on the president’s plan. Maybe Obama will act after the November election when he’s truly a lame duck. What are they gonna do? Impeach him?
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 23, 2016
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