I’ll start with a couple of pictures that capture aspects of my life here in Dali, Yunnan Province. I’m leaving for good in seven weeks, so I really ought to do more of this. Yesterday evening, there was a bit of rain and then around 6:45 p.m. we were treated to a rainbow stretching across the width of the lake. Some people in my WeChat took pictures from the lakeshore that put mine to shame. But yeah, spectacular scenery is something I’m going to miss.
Also pictured is a bowl of noodles I eat once a week called zhájiàng miàn (炸酱面). When my wife and I lived closer to the restaurant, I was eating it twice or three times a week. It’s wheat noodles bathed in a brown pork sauce, with some sprouts and greens mixed in. Also, there’s a fixings station where I add cilantro, chives, and ground chili pepper. Wow, is it good! If anyone wants to open a Chinese noodle shop that makes a reasonable approximation of this near Duncan Avenue in Jersey City, I’ll single-handedly keep you in business.
Onto some of the articles I read this week:
If you read one thing I recommend all year, make it this piece about in-groups and out-groups. It’s very long but entirely worth it. In a general election where many of us are going to wonder how it’s possible that Donald Trump will win at minimum 45% of the popular vote, it’s important both to look in the mirror and to wrestle with the tribal nature of Americans’ voting behavior. I came to this by way of Nate Silver’s attempt to explain the decisive movement in Trump’s direction by the Republican electorate over the last few weeks.
In my post about Trump’s emergence as presumptive nominee, I mentioned that the Democratic Party has many advantages in the electoral college. Ed Kilgore explains that if the Democratic nominee carries every state the party has carried since 1992, plus Florida, that’s 271 electoral college votes and it’s all over (270 needed to win). And Florida is looking all kinds of bad for Trump. That’s a Democratic victory WITHOUT Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia, all of which are battleground states President Obama won in at least one of the last two presidential elections.
There are several reporters and commentators that helped me take Trump seriously earlier than most of American media. Charles Pierce, who writes for Esquire and has been a tireless chronicler of the madness in the Republican Party, is one of those authors and here he is on how Ted Cruz paved the way for his vanquisher.
Josh Marshall, another writer I rely on who was in early on Trump being the nominee, has two good ones over at Talking Points Memo about Trump: first, there is no mystery about Trump winning the nomination if you were watching the data this whole time, and second, Trump begins his general election campaign with a blatantly unconstitutional, not to mention economically illiterate, idea about not paying U.S. debts.
Long day of teaching and I still need to make a batch of tomato sauce. We’re having two of our older groups of kids come to the school tomorrow evening for a DIY pizza party. I’ll try to remember to take pictures.
Donald Trump has officially secured the Republican Party’s nomination now that John Kasich, last man standing by a day, has suspended his campaign. Weirdly, that means it’s the Democratic Party’s nomination that is still up in the air, with Bernie Sanders claiming he will contest the nomination if Hillary Clinton needs superdelegates to get her over the top. Unfortunately for Clinton, it looks like she will in fact need superdelegates for a majority.
However, this requires some context. Just the word “superdelegates” riles people up and makes rational conversation difficult, so let’s try to clarify the situation before we look into the future. First, I’ve written before that the superdelegate system needs to be abolished and I stand by that. In addition, I explained the superdelegate math. Here’s the relevant passage:
The superdelegate system, which allows 712 Democratic Party insiders to vote for whomever they want at the convention, accounts for 15% of the 4,763 total delegates. Since a candidate needs 2,382 delegates to win an outright majority, superdelegates could provide as much as 30% of the votes needed to push a preferred candidate over the top.
While it’s unlikely that superdelegates are willing to risk breaking the Democratic Party in two in order to get their preferred candidate on the ballot, their votes would be required to form a majority if a candidate finishes with less than 58.8% of elected delegates. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight wrote a great piece about this in February. Flipping things around, there’s 41.2% – that’s the percentage of elected delegates a candidate could win the nomination with if 100% of superdelegates voted for him or her.
Silver reminded us that superdelegates, wary of going against the will of the voters, are likely to see which way the wind is blowing and support the candidate with a majority of elected delegates. This is exactly what happened in 2008, when Clinton again started the nomination process with a large superdelegate lead only to see that shrink and vanish as Obama won more and more elected delegates.
Superdelegates are part of the game and everyone who’s playing wants to win. Sanders supporters were outraged by the superdelegate system before voting began, and as I’ll explain, now the Sanders campaign is banking on superdelegates to save his candidacy. This might reek of hypocrisy, but I don’t remember Clinton and her campaign disavowing the system back when she had huge support from superdelegates before a single commoner had cast a vote. Now, the Clinton campaign is aghast that the Sanders campaign would try to win the nomination through manipulation of superdelegates. So, yeah, plenty of apparent hypocrisy for everyone.
The only fair way to resolve this issue is for both camps to agree that democratic legitimacy depends on winning a majority of pledged delegates. Every state and territory sends pledged delegates for candidates to the convention based proportionally on their primary or caucus results. Therefore, pledged delegate count is a reasonable proxy for the popular will. Superdelegates, in the imperfect world in which they still exist, should basically be honorary convention attendees, at least when it comes to voting on the nomination. Ideally, and as they did in 2008, superdelegates simply ratify the choice of the public.
At the moment, the Sanders campaign does not agree to these ground rules. Why not? Well, the simple answer is that Sanders is losing pledged delegates by a big and nearly insurmountable margin, so if he wants to win the game, he needs the superdelegates to be seen as a legitimate part of it and then he needs them to back him overwhelmingly. The hypocrisy is distasteful, but hey, you play to win the game.
How is the Sanders campaign rationalizing this about-face? There seem to be two key arguments: 1) contests that Sanders wins are worth more when they come in a row or later in the election season, so superdelegates should reflect those different weights, and 2) Sanders matches up better against Trump in general election polling so superdelegates should get behind the candidate with the best chance of winning in November.
The first argument is stupid and delegitimizing of Clinton voters. Before we hear protests that only Sanders fanatics are saying this, no actually, Sanders’s top strategist, Tad Devine, is making this case. If we really want to get into weighing the different contests based on their perceived legitimacy, well, Sanders has racked up pledged delegates in caucuses, the least democratic process for selecting delegates. Caucuses result in abysmal voter turnout and tend to privilege wealthier people with the ability to spend time at a caucus. This is a cake that the Sanders campaign can’t have and eat, too.
Leaving aside the toxicity of the first argument for the moment, the second argument is the one that deserves serious consideration and is why the superdelegate system exists in the first place. No Democrat wants to lose a winnable election, which 2016 most certainly is even if the Republican opponent weren’t Trump. Both Clinton and Sanders beat Trump in head-to-head polls, but Sanders leads by significantly larger margins. The Sanders camp would argue that Clinton has negative favorability ratings and therefore is the riskier candidate. The Clinton camp would argue that Clinton is a known quantity and she still beats Trump, most voters don’t really know who Sanders is and wait til Trump calls him a communist, and anyway general election polls this far out historically don’t correlate very well with November results.
That superdelegates exist to guide the Democratic Party to its most viable nominee is a compelling argument. If we accept it, then we are putting a close contest in the hands of 712 unelected party insiders who are free to assess each candidate’s case and vote according to their conscience. Though it’s self-serving for the Sanders campaign to now embrace this argument, again it’s part of the game. I maintain that superdelegates should simply ratify the will of the majority, and after they do that this year, the Democratic Party should eliminate the superdelegate system.
That brings us to the state of the race after Indiana. If you take my position and agree that the 4,051 pledged delegates should determine the nomination, it looks like this:
Hillary Clinton has 1,701 pledged delegates, which is 325 shy of the minimum 2,026 needed for a majority.
Bernie Sanders has 1,417, which is 609 shy of the majority threshold.
With 933 pledged delegates still remaining, Clinton needs to win 34.8% to reach a majority and Sanders needs to win 65.2%. Clinton has won 54.6% of pledged delegates awarded so far, while Sanders has won 45.4%.
For the sake of argument, say they maintain the same pace, which is somewhat reasonable since Clinton is expected to do well in California and New Jersey and Sanders is expected to do well in the smaller states such as West Virginia and Oregon. That means Clinton wins 509 more delegates, giving her a total of 2,210, and Sanders wins 424, giving him a total of 1,841. Contest over.
Now, let’s entertain the Sanders campaign contention that the 712 superdelegates should have the final say. A candidate needs 2,382 total delegates for a majority. Clinton would need 172 superdelegates (24%) to put her over the top, while Sanders would need 541 (76%). Are 76% of superdelegates going to find Sanders’s electability argument persuasive? And this isn’t a vacuum; remember, many Democratic Party members are wary of Sanders’s tenuous links with the Party, both rhetorically and financially.
Like in Michigan before, Sanders just pulled off a surprising victory in Indiana. Maybe more surprising victories await, but it’s hard to see him winning substantial majorities in California and New Jersey, which look and behave a lot more like New York where Clinton won big, than they do Washington state, where Sanders won big.
The takeaway? Superdelegates are not going to entertain Sanders’s electability argument unless he wins a majority of pledged delegates. Many are already ambivalent towards him. Also, there’s the precedent of 2008 when superdelegates supported Clinton by a wide margin but many switched to Barack Obama when it became clear he would win the majority of pledged delegates. That contest was even closer than this one and the candidate behind was the one many of the superdelegates preferred, yet they still refused to put her over the top. No way they do that for Sanders. If his campaign wants to win, it’s going to have to do something it hasn’t managed to do yet, which is carry large diverse states with more than 65% of the vote.
This makes one wonder what exactly Sanders is after, and calls back to mind the first argument we identified that his campaign is using to woo superdelegates. Sanders wants to win, of course, and I respect that and am genuinely happy about the good influence he’s already had on Clinton’s campaign. But what exactly does he gain by suggesting that primary votes in the South don’t really count because they happened early and those states never go for the Democrat, when he’s relying on states like Idaho and Kansas that held contests over a month ago and never vote for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate either? Or what good does it do when his strategist says that contests count more when a candidate wins a lot of them in a row or they come later in the process, like Clinton didn’t just win five out of six primaries in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast?
Do Sanders and his campaign staff actually believe this stuff? Are they just undisciplined? Or are they actually trying to tear the Democratic Party apart? These aren’t rhetorical questions.
Fortunately, we have a rich cultural vocabulary we can use to discuss the 2016 Republican nomination contest. Back in January, I wondered if the Republican “establishment” – whatever that means anymore – would be able to chase down their Frankenstein’s monster. With Ted Cruz dropping out after getting clobbered in Indiana yesterday and Donald Trump’s victory now inevitable, we’re at the “Iceberg right ahead!” stage of the process. They can turn the ship’s wheel as hard as they want and shut down the engines, but it’s too late – the iceberg is right there, and there’s no avoiding it now.
Donald Trump is a disaster for the Republican Party, and frankly, it’s been a long time coming. As Josh Marshall explains, the Republican Party has been building up a mountain of “nonsense debt” and “hate debt” for decades and Trump is that debt come due. Having built a movement around obvious claptrap such as the working classes pay no taxes, African Americans just want free stuff, Obamacare is setting up death panels in order to kill useless grandmas, Obamacare is making us give sluts free birth control, the IRS is targeting conservative groups, legalizing gay marriage means conservatives have to preside over gay marriages, Democrats are coming for our guns, immigration is destroying the country, and so on, no wonder a misogynist, racist know-nothing has emerged as the democratically elected leader of that movement.
Staff at FiveThirtyEight did a preliminary autopsy of the #NeverTrump movement and find that in retrospect, there just weren’t many good options for derailing a front-running Trump. Marco Rubio seemed like a plausible candidate the establishment could rally around, but then Chris Christie made a fool of him in New Hampshire and Rubio couldn’t even carry his home state of Florida. Nobody ever knew or cared who John Kasich was. Jeb Bush had all the money in the world but was the brother of a man who belongs on Mount Failmore. A total of 17 candidates ran for the nomination, representative of a supposedly deep Republican bench, but none of them knew how to play the game Trump was playing. Ted Cruz won in Wisconsin, giving hope to NeverTrumpers, only to find that increased publicity meant most Republican voters came to the same conclusion as former Speaker John Boehner: Cruz is “Lucifer in the flesh.”
So, what does Trump’s victory mean for the general election? In the modern U.S., with its polarized electorate overwhelmingly attached to one or the other of two ideologically coherent parties, we can’t count Trump out completely. Most Republicans, establishment-types and the base, are likely to stand by Trump or at least not bash him, and vote for him in November. Last August, when I first predicted that Trump would win the nomination, I wrote that Trump would have a 30 to 40% chance of winning the general election. At the moment the betting markets put his chances at the low end of that range. This isn’t tooting my own horn as much as it is to say that Trump, though a historically weak nominee, can still win. (Okay, it’s a little bit of tooting my own horn.)
Much more likely than a Trump general election victory is the Trumptanic scenario. The Democratic Party has many advantages heading into the 2016 general election irrespective of the identity of the Republican opponent. Now we know the Democrat (still overwhelmingly likely to be Hillary Clinton) will face Trump, who enjoys unheard of disapproval ratings from women and minority groups. Female voters tend to make up a significant majority of general election voters. If that holds and Democrats can get minority groups out to vote – basically, recreate the Obama coalition – we’ll be looking at a landslide in which Democrats hold the presidency and take back the Senate.
To quote Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack, “This is bad.”
And with that, here’s the Bob Dylan song that inspired the title to this post:
If women can still vote on November 8, 2016, the Republican Party is doomed. Sad! Soldiers at Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan with the 87th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion performed a skit depicting the women’s suffrage movement, Aug. 24. This month marked the 93rd anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote. Congress passed the 19th Amendment was on June 4, 1919 it was then ratified Aug. 18, 1920. (Photo by 1Lt. Amanda Cookman, 87th CSSB) By 1st Lt. Amanda Cookman (https://www.dvidshub.net/image/1008171) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Some of the articles I read this week:
Hillary Clinton has adopted more liberal policies during her campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination in response to a strong Bernie Sanders challenge and a liberal shift among Democrats. Pressure from the grassroots is how change happens. Some people may call this flip-flopping, but we can also call it democratic responsiveness to the will of one’s supporters. For example, better that Clinton has publicly promised to protect and expand Social Security than otherwise, whatever her personal feelings.
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe (D) restoring the voting franchise to 200,000 Virginia citizens is a good example of how politicians tend to enact policies under pressure from their supporters, even if we think those politicians are centrist hacks. Change often ends with a political leader rather than begins with him or her. As Scott Lemieux explains, “In the end, presidents lead coalitions.”
On a related note, while trying to engage political opponents is good, Sanders supporters would do better by focusing on pressuring the party that shares their interests rather than pretending that the Tea Party is full of closet democratic socialists.
However, in doing so, Trump has alienated the largest voting force in American politics: women. Conservatives like to minimize these problems Republicans have with certain voting groups by railing against “identity politics” (let’s briefly mention two problems with this: first, it’s a category error to conflate interests and identity, and second, it’s a blatant double standard that somehow it’s bad for Democrats to appeal to certain groups based on their interests, such as reproductive health, while it’s okay for Republicans to appeal to certain groups based on their interests, such as discrimination against LGBT citizens). Josh Marshall puts it in terms of “political bilingualism” in which the two likely candidates, Trump and Clinton, speak mutually unintelligible politics. The problem for Trump is that his language is understood by fewer and fewer people. Trump’s going to need a repeal of the 19th Amendment in order to win the general election.
Ed Kilgore interviews an expert on the Republican nomination-process and learns that it’s possible to thwart Trump if he doesn’t reach the majority threshold of 1,237 first ballot-pledged delegates, but hey, who knows at this point.
If you agree with the argument below, please sign my petition. You don’t have to sign up for anything – name and email address are enough to log your signature. After 150 signatures, the petition will get a public spot on the website for all visitors to see. If somehow it gets to 100,000 signatures by May 26th, the White House will respond.
After today’s primaries, it’s a near certainty that the presidential nominees for both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are going to be people who want to do stupid shit abroad. Any Republican nominee will re-establish torture as official American policy, antagonize Russia, threaten war with Iran, and re-commit large numbers of American troops to our misadventures in the Middle East. Hillary Clinton’s poor foreign policy instincts (Iraq War!) are well-known, though we may hope her experience as Secretary of State in President Obama’s administration has had some moderating influence on her worst tendencies.
There are probably many good reasons for him not to do this, but I’d like to see President Obama give a speech in which he tries to establish a new foreign policy doctrine based on his “don’t do stupid shit” principle. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a fantastic profile of President Obama and his foreign policy for the April issue of The Atlantic. From the article, in a section about what to do about Syria:
Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.)
“Don’t do stupid shit” is a critique of generations of American foreign policy consensus that prescribes military action as the logical response to all crises, be they manufactured like Iraq in 2003, or real like Libya in 2011. The principle suggests that Americans be realistic and self-aware about what we can and cannot influence abroad, and be prudent about the use of force, which should only be deployed when there is a “direct threat.” I would very much like to see President Obama publicly state and clarify this doctrine before his presidency ends. With any luck, it would go down as one of those transformational statements about American behavior in the larger world, constraining would-be military adventurists and becoming a benchmark by which future presidents are judged. If you agree, please click the link below and sign the petition:
Mid-Atlantic (plus Rhode Island), come on down! You’re the next Super Tuesday! By Grayshi, Roke (Own work, also File:BlankMap-USA-states.PNG) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
This coming Tuesday, April 26th, is the third time during this presidential nomination cycle that a bunch of states rich in delegates will vote on the same Tuesday. There will be one more “super” Tuesday on June 7th, when the big prizes of California and New Jersey (don’t snicker) are up for grabs for both parties’ candidates. What happens in two days will influence the shapes of both races going forward, so let’s go ahead and see what’s likely to happen and what it all means.
First, the region that votes on April 26th is the Mid-Atlantic (Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, with Connecticut included depending on who you ask, plus Rhode Island). This region has structural, geographic, and demographic features that favor both parties’ front-runners. Structurally, both parties in all five states are holding primaries. So far, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have done very well in primary elections compared to their performances in caucuses. On the Democratic side, the fact that these are closed primaries – meaning only registered party members can vote – leans even more heavily in Clinton’s favor. Clinton has been dominating with people who tend to be registered Democrats, which kind of belies the “no enthusiasm for Clinton” trope, at least among the Party’s base, but that’s a subject for a different post.
Geographically, the region favors Trump because of its ties to New York City and the dread “New York values” so reviled by Texan Ted Cruz. Republican evangelical voters in these states may give Cruz some support, but overall his brand is toxic in the Mid-Atlantic. Cruz’s doubling down on support for North Carolina’s discriminatory LGBT law and past arguments that sellers and users of sex toys are criminals are unlikely to make his brand less toxic there. Increasingly desperate #NeverTrumpers may strategically vote for Cruz or with their conscience for John Kasich, but with Trump poised to win at least a plurality in each state, let’s predict he wins a majority or better of the delegates at stake, with a “big but” explained in the next paragraph.
One more structural note on the Republican side. Amazingly, most delegates Pennsylvanians send to the convention will be directly elected, but without voters knowing which nominee those delegates prefer. This is nuts and favors the much more organized Cruz campaign. Trump is guaranteed 17 delegates if he’s the overall winner, but 54 delegates will not be bound to any nominee. If Trump and his supporters think the process is rigged now, wait until they get a load of Pennsylvania. With such an undemocratic process that is by no means guaranteed to correlate with actual Pennsylvanians’ preferences, Trump may not get as big of a delegate haul as he deserves.
On the Democratic side, Clinton enjoys a big demographic advantage in addition to her structural ones in the region. Bernie Sanders has not done well in states with denser and/or more diverse populations. His most recent victory was in Wisconsin, which is 86% white. This Tuesday’s whitest state, Pennsylvania, is 82% white; meanwhile Maryland, the most diverse of the five states, is 58% white. Maybe the demographics don’t doom Sanders in all five states, but given Clinton’s polling leads and the cultural affinities with New York where she just won big, let’s predict Clinton goes five-for-five.
Now, the math behind the delegate counts is what ultimately gives these analyses and predictions any meaning. Let’s start with the Republican contest (thanks FiveThirtyEight), where a candidate needs to reach 1,237 delegates for a majority. So far, 1,712 of the total 2,472 delegates have been awarded to specific candidates. It’s estimated that almost 200 of the delegates could officially be “unbound” for the first ballot at the convention, which confuses the analysis and is going to be a subject of ongoing intrigue. For our purposes, let’s take FiveThirtyEight‘s numbers at face value and run the numbers:
Donald Trump has won 846 delegates, which is 47.1% of the total so far. He needs 391 more delegates for a majority, which is 58% of remaining delegates up for grabs, 172 of which are at stake on Tuesday.
Ted Cruz has won 544 delegates, which is 30% of the total so far. He needs 693 more delegates for a majority, which is 102.8% of remaining delegates.
John Kasich has won 149 delegates so far, which remarkably is both still behind Marco “Not Even in the Race Anymore” Rubio’s delegate count and means if he won every single delegate remaining (674), he’d still be behind Trump!
The last time we did this analysis, Trump needed a 59% pace to win an outright majority on the first ballot. He’s more or less in the same position he was a month ago, but with less margin for error now with fewer delegates remaining. Cruz joins the Kasich Club in being mathematically eliminated from winning an outright majority on the first ballot at the convention. That’s unless he convinces most of the unbound delegates to commit to him AND he does much better in the remaining races than he’s done to date, neither of which are likely. I’d say Trump is likely to get 58% or better of the delegates on Tuesday, but again, Pennsylvania’s rules really confuse the situation.
Cruz may be more competitive in Indiana with its 57 delegates at stake on May 3rd, but he’s drawing dead. The best he can hope to do is deny Trump a pre-convention majority while convincing unbound delegates to withhold the boost Trump would need to get to 1,237. Trump appears very likely to be within striking distance of 1,237 with the help of unbound delegates should he fall short of a majority.
If we take it as a given that legitimacy is important for whomever becomes the Republican nominee, I don’t see how the Republican Establishment denies Trump the nomination if it happens he’s the clear delegate winner but just shy of a majority. During the modern nomination era, it’s a singular occurrence that two candidates who are ALREADY non-viable in terms of reaching a majority are even still in the race. Usually, once candidates reach this loser milestone (if not before), they drop out and rally behind their preferred remaining candidate, or in the case of only one left standing, they throw their support behind that person for the sake of party unity. The situation really shows the notable degree to which a large proportion of the Republican Party loathes Trump. Tuesday’s contests should only exacerbate this problem.
Relying on FiveThirtyEight again, how do things look on the Democratic side? Like last time, let’s ignore the superdelegates since it’s unlikely they will go against the candidate who wins a majority of elected delegates. Please refer to that previous piece if you want to know my stance on superdelegates; long story short, get rid of them. Without superdelegates, there are 4,051 elected delegates, which means a candidate needs to win 2,026 in order to claim democratic legitimacy.
Hillary Clinton has won 1,443 elected delegates, which is 54.4% of delegates awarded so far. She needs to win 583 more for a majority, which is 41.6% of the remaining 1,400 delegates.
Bernie Sanders has won 1,208 elected delegates, which is 45.6% of delegates awarded so far. He needs to win 818 more for a majority, which is 58.4% of the remaining delegates.
Sanders, in spite of his string of victories in the seven contests before he lost big in New York, has gained no ground on Clinton over the past month. That doesn’t mean he should drop out. In fact, he’s much more viable at the moment than any of his Republican counterparts. The problem for Sanders is the math and the likely outcomes in remaining states. Let’s look at the following scenario.
Let’s be generous and suppose that Sanders takes half of the 384 delegates at stake on Tuesday (Clinton is likely to do better than 50%, but for the sake of argument). If he does, that increases his delegate count to 1,400, but reduces remaining delegates from 1,400 to 1,016. Sanders would need 626 of the remaining delegates to reach a majority, which then would be 61.6% of remaining delegates. Even under this rosy scenario where Sanders ties in the Mid-Atlantic, he goes from needing 58.4% of remaining delegates beforehand to needing 61.6% in future contests.
This problem for Sanders is nicely illustrated by the updates in FiveThrityEight‘s delegate targets for each state for each candidate. Based on state profiles, the targets are numbers for each remaining state that the candidates have to hit in order to get on track for a majority of elected delegates, given they hit their targets in all other future contests. They’re reasonable numbers based on the current state of the race; for example, Sanders could have used a landslide in New York where his FiveThirtyEight target was 125, or 50.6%, of the total 247 delegates at stake. With no polling indicating a Sanders landslide in New York, they arrived at the more modest majority target. Sanders ended up only getting 108 delegates in New York, or 43.7%, which now means his targets in upcoming states have to go up. With polls showing consistent Clinton leads in California, do we really think he’s going to hit the target of 239 (50.3%) out of 475 delegates? And that assumes he gets 189 (49.2%) of 384 delegates on Tuesday. I’d say 173, or 45%, is the most he’s going to get in the Mid-Atlantic.
This is why a contest that so far has been 54% Clinton to 46% Sanders is pretty much out of reach for Sanders. That 8% difference doesn’t seem like a lot, but when you factor in how states are likely to vote and the delegates remaining, it’s nearly impossible for Sanders to make it up. He’s not finished and I hope he keeps going, but if I were in his campaign, I’d get to work on a strategy for influence within a Hillary Clinton general election campaign and presidency, based on delivering votes for the Democratic Party in November.
Thank you, New York, for sharing your values with Ted Cruz. By dronepicr (Central Park New York skyline) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Here are some articles I read this week (update below):
One of the many myths that Americans believe about our politics is that politicians don’t keep their promises. Professor of political science Timothy Hill explains at FiveThirtyEight that elected officials tend to keep most of their promises.
In a response to a comment about “An Open Letter to Sanders Supporters” I mentioned that progressive defenders of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party need to get constructive about how the Bernie Sanders faction can leverage its size and energy for actual influence within the Democratic Party. For now, let me outsource that to James Downie at The Washington Post.
Sanders probably would have done better in New York – but he still wouldn’t have won – if the state had reasonable deadlines for voter and party registration. Scott Lemieux argues that New York needs to change its policies on these matters. Lemieux also notes that even with more reasonable deadlines, closed primaries are justified and the special snowflakes too pure to soil themselves by identifying with a major party need to get over themselves.
Ed Kilgore, who now writes at New York Magazine, finds Republicans saying exactly what I’ve always feared about Sanders – he’s exactly who they are dying to run against. I may disagree with Republicans about most policies, but I’ll give them this: they know how to exploit weakness and win elections. I don’t doubt for a second that by the end of the summer Sanders’ favorables would be underwater after a sustained red-baiting attack. All the general election polls that show Sanders running stronger than Clinton against all comers are really quite meaningless and won’t correlate with November until American voters start paying attention in July after the conventions.
Update: I pressed “publish” before I read about Prince’s unfortunately young death at the age of 57. Via Jesse David Fox at Vulture, start, continue, or end your own rabbit hole appreciation of the man and his music with this awesome guitar solo during George Harrison’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction:
The Democratic Party’s chances at keeping the White House this November are looking good at the moment, so that means it’s time for deficit scolds to jump out of hiding and scare us all into thinking the federal debt is coming to eat our children.
The first real “boo!” of the election season is last week’s Time cover story by James Grant. The Time cover does some basic arithmetic and tells us that every American man, woman, and child would have to pay $42,998.12 to pay down the U.S. debt. If we follow Time‘s lead and analyze information as if we were children, that means infants had better start polishing up their resumes. Stop soiling your diapers and get a job!
The article begins poorly when Grant makes the trite observation that if America were a household it would be in bad credit trouble. The United States of America is not a household. It is a society that has granted its federal government the authority to create and regulate the money supply. How many of you have a legal dollar printing press in your home?
For a good rundown of just how wrong are Grant’s premises and why the federal debt is nothing to fear, read Jeff Spross’ article at The Week. Paul Krugman reminds us that Grant is wrong on his signature issue of inflation, is a gold bug, and increased and well-targeted deficit spending now would likely improve the country’s long-run fiscal outlook.
I’ll leave the economic and journalistic criticisms of Grant’s article to the above experts and two more here and here. If I can add any value to the discussion, it may be on the political side. Polling consistently shows that a majority of Americans are worried about the federal debt in the abstract. This makes sense, right? Most Americans understand that carrying debt can be bad because if they have too much and can’t pay back some of it then the bank or a repo person comes and takes their house or their car. We always hear all Republican candidates for president talk about the federal debt in existential terms because demagoguing the issue can work.
However, polling also consistently shows the following: Americans are deeply confused about the nature of the federal debt, oppose practically every spending-side policy that might reduce the debt, and overwhelmingly support the very revenue-side policy for addressing debt that Grant and his ilk take off the table, which is raising taxes on the rich. At best, deficit scolds like Grant and Republican candidates for president are deeply confused themselves about the federal debt and the solutions majorities of Americans support in order to address it. At worst, deficit hysteria is cover for an agenda that majorities of Americans actually oppose: tax cuts for the rich and cutting programs such as Social Security, Medicare, etc.
We’re going to hear a lot of deficit nonsense from Republicans during the general election. Remember that whether their motivation is a sincerely held but wrong idea about the deficit, or a cynical manipulation of opinion in order to enact an unpopular agenda, the U.S. government is not like a household and the federal debt is really not a big deal. The country faces many challenges. The Monster of Krakow is not one of them.
Do you want Ted Cruz in your bedroom? Do you want to turn back the clock to 1905, when this picture was taken? TrusTed 2016! By Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons
In 2007, Ted Cruz’s Texas solicitor general office argued that the use of sex toys was tantamount to “hiring a willing prostitute or engaging in consensual bigamy” in an effort to maintain the state’s ban of “marital aids.” Cruz and Texas lost the case but not before exposing conservative Christian views on sex for all the world to see. Read the linked articles for succinct descriptions of the case and relevant laws and legal precedents. Here are some of the “best” parts of Cruz’s argument:
“There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.”
“The morality-based interests behind the statute’s prohibition on commerce in obscene devices include discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex and the pursuit of sexual gratification unrelated to procreation …”
“But even assuming that Appellants had articulated a right sufficient to satisfy the first prong of the Glucksberg test [establishing a right as fundamental], they could not show that the right to promote dildos, vibrators, and other obscene devices – or, indeed, even to use those devices in private – is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition, and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’.”
This is why liberals have no patience for myths that the Republican Party cherishes liberty and personal responsibility.
Both parties believe the federal government has roles to play in the lives of its citizens. For example, Democrats think the government can interfere in people’s lives to make it less likely they will die of curable diseases or go bankrupt fighting them; Republicans think that the government can interfere in people’s lives in order to make them criminals for selling or using dildos.
Well, at least an American theocracy run by Cruz would ban this scene from the seminal (ha, see what I did there?) Wayans brothers film White Chicks (2004). I have no interest in explaining why I’ve seen this film, and it probably goes without saying, but this is not safe for work:
View from my window here in Dali, Yunnan Province on a recent morning.View from our school this morning.
Some links for the weekend:
New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote a few good pieces recently. Here he is on the stakes of the 2016 election for the environment, the pragmatic tradition of African American voters given that the American system almost always requires compromise and gradual, incremental change, and the questions New York Democrats – and really, all Democrats and Democratic Party-leaners – need to consider when voting in this year’s primaries.
Also in New York Magazine, reporter Gabriel Sherman has a fascinating article on Donald Trump’s campaign. Sherman deserves a Pulitzer just for the fact-checking technique he uses in this paragraph alone:
Trump is cheap, and proud of it. Indeed, Lewandowski’s bonus for winning New Hampshire was a paltry $50,000. It’s part of Trump’s central argument: He will run the government like a business. (Though, truth be told, there are few businesses that operate the way his does: Trump’s company is primarily a marketing vehicle at this point, licensing his name to other firms’ developments.) “I don’t spend much money,” he told me. “In New Hampshire, I spent $2 million” — actually $3.7 million — “Bush spent $48 million” — actually $36.1 million — “I came in first in a landslide, he came in sixth” — actually fourth. “Who do you want as your president?”
Bernie Sanders apparently does not know what he’s talking about when it comes to the policies behind some of his signature rhetoric. That’s a problem if you want to be the grown-up in the room come November. Though, not knowing what they’re talking about rarely seems to be a problem for Republican candidates. Anyway, while I’m fine with Sanders as the nominee, his coming up empty on policy makes it a bit harder to Feel the Bern.
Nonsense Consensus 