“Party Affiliation Ought To Account For Something”: Instead Of Banning Closed Primaries, Just Make It Easier To Change Parties
One of the more difficult demands the Bernie Sanders campaign is regularly making is a future ban on closed Democratic primaries in which independent (and Republican) voters are excluded from participating. It’s unclear how such a ban would work (since state governments, not the national party, usually make these determinations), and the idea is also offensive to many Democrats who think party affiliation ought to account for something in party-nomination contests.
Fortunately, there is a reform available that makes participation in Democratic primaries by independents much easier without abandoning party affiliation requirements: eliminating re-registration deadlines so that independents can become Democrats at the primary or caucus site just before they vote. That’s already the case in some states (notably Iowa). This would deal with the handful of extreme cases (most famously New York, with its re-registration deadline that is 193 days before the primary) where deadlines have often passed by the time voters even form the intention to vote.
Easy re-registration, moreover, could help with problems faced by independents, even in open-primary states. In California, for example, independents will be allowed to vote in the June 7 Democratic primary. But as the Los Angeles Times revealed in April after a study of the situation, hundreds of thousands of Californians who consider themselves independents accidentally registered as members of the American Independent Party, the ancient right-wing vehicle invented by George Wallace for his 1968 presidential run. It’s managed to maintain ballot status largely because of such mistakes.
An update by the Times indicates that the AIP suffered a net loss of about 21,000 voters in the two weeks after its initial report — which got a lot of publicity in California — was published. That leaves 473,000 registered AIP members, with an estimated two-thirds or so having no intention of belonging to any party, much less the wacky Wallace party. Sure, some more AIP members have re-registered since early May, but the deadline for doing so is Monday. That is frustrating for a Bernie Sanders campaign that is desperately relying on independents to play a big role in the kind of overwhelming upset win they need to come within shouting distance of Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates. Instead, Lord knows how many tens of thousands of self-identified Democratic-leaning independents will get their mail ballots or show up at the polls to discover their choices include not Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton but a group of anonymous right-wing schmoes.
Hillary Clinton would be smart to propose same-day re-registration as a counter to the Sanders call for universal open primaries. It’s a way to keep the door open to independents — including those who make mistakes in their original registration — without diminishing the value of calling oneself a Democrat. Most of these indies will probably stick around, just as Bernie Sanders has pledged to do.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 20, 2016
“No, Trump, Most Dangerous Place In The World Is Not Ferguson”: It’s Every Polling Place In America, Come November
I hesitate to bring up facts.
If recent years have proven nothing else, they’ve proven that we have fully embarked upon a post-factual era wherein the idea that a thing can be knowable to an objective certainty — and that this should matter — has been diminished to the point of near irrelevancy.
Donald Trump is the avatar of the era. Not content to rest on his laurels, he recently provided superfluous proof of his supremacy in mendacity. Asked by The New York Times to name the most dangerous place in the world he’s ever visited, Trump replied that “there are places in America that are among the most dangerous in the world. You go to places like Oakland. Or Ferguson. The crime numbers are worse. Seriously.”
You wonder whether it’s worth correcting him. After all, neither Trump nor his followers seem especially interested in truth. But for the record, according to the Citizens Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice in Mexico, which tracks murder statistics around the world, only four U.S. cities make the list of the 50 most dangerous places on Earth. None of them is Ferguson or Oakland.
Trump’s use of those cities, both with high poverty rates and large African-American populations, is, of course, intended as a crude dog whistle to the angry white men he’s courting — some old-fashioned victim blaming and shaming to rouse the rabble. But it got me thinking about this whole concept of the most dangerous place on Earth. If by that we mean the place with potential for the greatest amount of harm to the largest number of people, maybe we should broaden our definition of “danger.”
For example, climate change is sure dangerous, linked as it is to increased risk of fire, flood, famine, drought, freakish storms, high temperatures and resultant illnesses. The World Health Organization says this already contributes to 150,000 deaths a year and that between 2030 and 2050, the death toll could rise to a quarter million a year. A 2015 study in the journal Politics and Policy found the GOP is virtually the only major conservative party in any democracy on Earth still denying this reality — and opposing measures to deal with it.
So the most dangerous place on Earth could be Republican headquarters.
Lead poisoning causes behavioral problems and irreversible brain damage in children and memory loss, high blood pressure, decline in mental functioning, reduced sperm count and miscarriages in adults. The water crisis in Flint, Mich., we now find, was the tip of the proverbial iceberg, with reports that high lead levels have been found in 2,000 water systems serving 6 million people in 50 states.
So the most dangerous place on Earth might be your local water department.
The economic collapse of 2008 wiped out $7.4 trillion in stocks, $3.4 trillion in real estate and 5.5 million jobs, according to a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. It cost the average American household $5,800 in lost income. The effects were felt worldwide amid fears of a global financial meltdown, a Second Great Depression, brought about by too-big-to-fail-banks playing the U.S. economy like a Vegas casino. Some experts say the threat of a relapse endures.
So the most dangerous place on Earth may be Wall Street.
But it isn’t. No, the most dangerous place on Earth is none of the above.
Consider for a moment: To lead America through a world of complex and difficult challenges, the Republican Party offers us Donald Trump. He is pervy, thin-skinned, loud-mouthed and volatile, a preening bully and serial liar who shows little evidence of core values, nor even inner life. Yet, some large percentage of us thinks he should have access to the nuclear codes.
So if you really want to know the most dangerous place on Earth, it’s simple. It’s every polling place in America, come November.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, May 22, 2016
“Consolidating The Same Old GOP Vote”: Is Trump Leading An Intra-Party Coup Rather Than A Political Realignment?
If you want to make a case that Donald Trump can win the presidency in November without huge “black swan” events like another 9/11 or Great Recession, and you don’t buy dumb polls suggesting Trump’s actually very popular among Latinos, then you are driven to one of two intersecting theories. The first is the famous “missing white voters” hypothesis, which suggests that Mitt Romney left millions of votes on the table in 2012, and Trump’s just the guy to bring these voters to the polls. And the second is the theory beloved of some Democratic lefties that as a “populist” Trump’s going to win former Democratic, white, working-class voters alienated by Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street ties.
Politico has, however, done some number-crunching from the GOP primaries and concluded (tentatively, at least) that Trump’s base of support backs neither of the theories of an expanding GOP:
While Trump’s insurgent candidacy has spurred record-setting Republican primary turnout in state after state, the early statistics show that the vast majority of those voters aren’t actually new to voting or to the Republican Party, but rather they are reliable past voters in general elections. They are only casting ballots in a Republican primary for the first time.
If that’s true, then what the Trump candidacy represents is not some realigning event that could change our understanding of the general-election landscape, but simply an intra-party coup that overthrew the dominance of the business-as-usual and conservative-movement Establishments without necessarily adding to the total number of people prepared to vote Republican in November.
Now even if you don’t believe Trump is God’s gift to Democratic GOTV efforts, it’s pretty safe to say he places a cap on the GOP share of minority voters. So at best the general-election polls showing a tightening Trump-Clinton race may be about as good as it gets for the mogul, showing that he’s consolidating the same old GOP vote without materially adding to it.
On the other hand, the Politico analysis could be wrong. But it helps expose the tenuous reasoning behind Trump-can-win scenarios that rely on hoary ideas about hidden majorities and transpartisan “populist” winds that blow up the existing party coalitions. If the typical Trump supporter is someone who has voted for GOP presidential candidates monotonously since the Reagan Administration without necessarily buying into the party’s economic orthodoxy, then that should be terrifying to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but not so much to Democrats.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 17, 2016
“Virtual Walls And Rhetorical Deportations”: Adapting What Trump Actually Said Can’t Cover Up Reality
One of the reasons that so many people underestimated the possibility of Donald Trump’s rise in the Republican Party is that we zeroed in on his policy proposals and actually took them seriously. If you remember, during the primary debates there was a lot of ink spilled on the nuanced differences between Rubio, Cruz and Trump on illegal immigrants. None of that ever mattered. What Trump was communicating to his supporters didn’t have anything to do with all of that. His message has always been emotional – not thoughtful or logical.
That’s what makes the comments by Rep. Chris Collins – the first member of Congress to endorse Trump – so fascinating.
The first member of Congress to endorse Donald Trump for president doesn’t envision one of Trump’s main campaign promises – a wall at the Mexican border – ever becoming a reality that stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
“I have called it a virtual wall,” Rep. Chris Collins said in an interview with The Buffalo News.
“Maybe we will be building a wall over some aspects of it; I don’t know,” the Clarence Republican said of Trump’s proposed barrier to keep illegal immigrants and drugs from crossing the southern border.
Collins, who has become one of the presumptive GOP nominee’s main media surrogates, also cast doubts on another central Trump campaign promise: the candidate’s vow to deport the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants.
“I call it a rhetorical deportation of 12 million people,” Collins said.
He then gestured toward a door in his Capitol Hill office.
“They go out that door, they go in that room, they get their work papers, Social Security number, then they come in that door, and they’ve got legal work status but are not citizens of the United States,” Collins said. “So there was a virtual deportation as they left that door for processing and came in this door.”
Collins added: “We’re not going to put them on a bus, and we’re not going to drive them across the border.”
Collins went on to say that Trump wouldn’t necessarily agree with this interpretation of his proposals. In other words, they are Collins’ way of adapting what Trump actually said in a way that allows him to support the candidate. I wonder if anyone finds that as interesting as I do. I suspect that it is pretty common in campaigns that are fueled primarily by emotions rather than workable policies. In other words, it is rampant in the world of post-policy Republicans.
So beyond assuming virtual walls and rhetorical deportations, why does Collins support Trump? Here’s what he said:
“I’m comfortable with his judgment as a CEO, and I’m comfortable with his 60,000-foot level vision for America,” Collins said, noting that many of the details in Trump’s proposed policies are yet to be worked out.
Oh my! He’s comfortable with Trump’s judgement and vision, but pesky “details” about things like rounding up and deporting millions of people can get worked out later. Rep. Collins’ approach to politics is why I wrote this the other day:
That might be what this campaign comes down to – a contest between someone who is trying to reflect our feelings of anger and fear and someone who is determined to tackle the challenges we face as a country.
Donald Trump’s judgment and vision are those of a narcissistic bully let loose on the national stage. Using words like “virtual” and “rhetorical” can’t cover up that reality.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 19, 2016
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