Nonsense Consensus

Wisconsin Primaries Recap

governor_of_wisconsin_scott_walker_at_joey27s_diner_in_amherst_new_hampshire_on_july_16th_2015_by_michael_vadon_22 — Remember when this guy was thought to be a formidable candidate for president and then he found himself responding to Trump by wondering if we need to build a wall between the U.S. and Canada? Well, he got his revenge yesterday. By Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

The results from yesterday’s primary elections in Wisconsin for both parties are clear, but their ramifications not so much. Ted Cruz won the Republican contest, coming just shy of a majority of the vote. The Wisconsin conservative movement mustered a nearly unified front against Donald Trump on behalf of Cruz, and it worked.

New Yorkers vote in two weeks and Trump looks strong in his home state. He’ll have to clean up there to get back within reaching distance of the pace he needs in order to win an outright majority of delegates.

Conventional wisdom about the race has shifted; savvy election watchers now give the combination of Cruz and the field better odds of emerging victorious at the convention than they give Trump. I agree with Talking Points Memo‘s Josh Marshall that using Cruz to deny Trump the nomination, and then turning around and denying Cruz the nomination, is unlikely to work out well for the Republican establishment. How does the Republican Party snub 70%-plus of its electorate, and if they manage it, how do they mobilize a winning coalition for the general election?

There is a scenario that, while unlikely, worries me a great deal since I prefer the Democratic Party. It goes something like this: the Republican Party nominates Cruz, or even better for the GOP establishment someone like John Kasich, Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney. While this would burn the 45% or more of the electorate that had voted for Trump, the Party goes to the country at large and makes this argument: the Republican Party showed it is now a responsible governing party by vetoing the nomination of a man that alienates an overwhelming majority of Americans and would put World War III on the table through his sheer ignorance of history and foreign affairs. By November, Trump voters reconcile themselves to holding their noses and voting against Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. The fresh face of CruzKasichRyanRomney leads enough moderate and independent voters to say hey, Republicans aren’t so bad anymore, and we don’t trust Clinton and Sanders is a communist so let’s roll the dice because we have no memory of George W. Bush. Republicans come to power with unified control of the government and proceed to govern in exactly the way modern Republicans govern, which a majority of voters actually disagrees with but has difficulty recognizing this reality. When it comes to policy, Kasich and would-be presidents Ryan and Romney share nearly all of Trump’s agenda, and Cruz is even worse! They are simply moderate fronts for a reactionary conservative agenda.

Now, I think it’s more likely the Republican Party melts down this election year than it is the above scenario comes to fruition, but I wouldn’t bet the rent money on it.

On the Democratic side, Sanders notched a solid victory but Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite. As FiveThirtyEight‘s analysts explain, Sanders overperformed compared to the polls but still didn’t achieve the margin he needs to get on pace for a majority of elected delegates. While Wyoming Democrats caucus on April 9th and this is likely friendly terrain for Sanders, the real test arrives on April 19th when New York’s 247 delegates are at stake. Since this is Clinton’s adopted home and has demographic features that lean in her favor, Clinton could spring back into prohibitive favorite position by doing well there.

By that time, Clinton may have lost seven out of the eight previous contests, and she’ll need to combat the narrative that her campaign is reeling. On April 26th, a bunch of mid-Atlantic states that also have friendly Clinton electorates vote, and if she ties or better overall in those contests after winning in New York the math becomes all but impossible for Sanders.

However, Sanders does have momentum, and if that means anything and he can capitalize on it maybe he continues to surprise. I definitely don’t count him out at this point. Now, we’ll have to wait and see what polling of the upcoming states shows. Maybe the ground is shifting, and Clinton really is in trouble. It’s doubtful, but most of us doubted Sanders would even be within striking distance at this point.

This Supreme Court Case Was a Big Deal

antonin_scalia_official_scotus_portrait — Conservatives sure missed this guy yesterday. By Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Supreme Court decided to not destroy public sector unions in a 4-4 decision yesterday. A split decision affirms the lower court’s ruling, which in this case was the Ninth Circuit’s decision to affirm a yet lower court’s ruling that compelling public sector workers to pay fees used to support their union’s negotiation and legal representation shops doesn’t violate those workers’ First Amendment rights. This had been settled law for decades but conservatives have been using the courts to reopen cases they can’t win through legislation, hoping to get the Supreme Court to deliver them victories.

Unfortunately, this strategy had been working. In a series of 5-4 decisions in recent years, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of conservative interests again and again. In 2010, the five conservative Supreme Court justices unleashed unlimited corporate money into our elections in the infamous Citizens United v. FEC decision. In 2012, the conservative faction on the Court weakened an important part – Medicaid expansion – of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, while four conservative justices were ready to destroy the law completely. In 2013, they stripped the Voting Rights Act of one of its most important rules that protected voters in states with a history of disenfranchisement. These are just three of the most high profile cases.

So why did the Supreme Court just decide against rewriting law in order to achieve conservatives’ goals? Scott Lemieux, an expert on the Supreme Court and constitutional law, explains the obvious: due to the death of Antonin Scalia in February, the conservative faction on the Court is now one justice shy of a majority. Since many cases in recent years were 5-4 decisions in favor of conservative interests, we’re likely to see 4-4 splits over contentious cases until the vacancy is filled. Scalia would have joined with the conservatives in the public sector union case, and in the alternate reality in which he hadn’t died, public sector unions would have been crushed yesterday.

With the four remaining conservative justices all nominated by Republican presidents, and the four liberal justices all nominated by Democratic presidents, Scalia’s passing brought to the forefront an aspect of presidential elections that is always there but never stressed enough: the president appoints the lifelong members of the Supreme Court. While some Republican senators are wavering on the total obstruction strategy, it’s still unlikely that the Senate will vote on President Obama’s nominee for Scalia’s seat, Merrick Garland. The next president is going to fill that seat, and possibly one or two more. The appointment on the table, and the hypothetical appointments, will determine the course of the Supreme Court for a generation.

It will be interesting to see how the Supreme Court vacancy plays in the general election. There are real and important differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and the type of justice their presidential candidates would appoint are among the starkest. Supreme Court cases are confusing even to politics junkies like myself, so how do candidates leverage the situation to motivate voters? Can the Democratic nominee boil it down to easily understood real life impacts, such as: do you want your health insurance policy to cover reproductive health? do you think corporations shouldn’t be able to spend as much money as they want on elections? do you think everyone should be able to vote with as little hassle as possible? do you think women should be able to decide what to do with their own bodies? do you think LGBT citizens should be able to marry whomever they want? do you think people who get benefits from union representation should help fund those unions?

These are just a few of the issues that are going to be contested in the future. If you answered “yes” to the above questions, whether the nominee is Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party’s candidate will appoint justices that side with you.

Weekend Links

rainbow farm — My colleague and I on the roof of a house owned by a Chinese couple who have a small plot of land between Dali Old Town and Erhai (the lake).

With the weather so nice here during spring, though it gets very windy in the afternoons, we’ve decided to hold at least one outdoor event for the students at our school this semester. A Chinese couple has been kind enough to offer us the use of their space, and it’s about as good as we’re going to find. There’s a patch of flat land covered in grass that should be big enough for games and a picnic. It’s actually a challenge to find such places in urban China sometimes. Unless you have access to a school, there are few sports fields that are open to the public. Many parks just aren’t big and open enough, and the few that are suitable tend to be covered in signs telling you not to step on the grass.

Crazy week in politics, though they’re probably all going to be crazy going forward.

Find my election numbers crunching of the Republican race here and the Democratic race here.
So, this is literally true: Donald Trump retweeted an image juxtaposing an unflattering image of Ted Cruz’s wife with a flattering image of Trump’s own wife, the latter one taken a long time ago. When you read the text overlaying the images, it’s clear that the only conceivable purpose of this is to insult a woman’s looks. The Party of Lincoln, everyone!
Josh Marshall reminds us that Trump’s women bashing doesn’t play well outside of his base, and links to a good article by Franklin Foer about Trump’s misogyny. I’m not kidding here, if Trump and Hillary Clinton are the nominees, what’s the over/under on number of days it takes after the general election begins on July 29th before Trump calls Clinton a b-word or c-word or something similarly awful? A week? A month? If anyone wants to bet that it takes more than a month, I’ll send you my bank account information now so you can just go ahead and wire me the money.
As if the Republican race weren’t already in the gutter, the National Enquirer – published by a friend of Trump – has a story suggesting Cruz has had five mistresses. Gary Legum, author of the linked piece, after providing relevant details about the situation, goes on to make a good point: the Republican Establishment still has no idea how to play gutterball with Trump.
If not moderate John Kasich insists on staying in the race even though he’s mathematically eliminated from winning a majority of delegates before the convention starts, a Cruz-Kasich two front war to deny Trump a majority would have to look like this.
Bernie Sanders could win big in the state of Washington today, which awards 101 delegates. If he doesn’t win at least 70% of them, while also doing well in Hawaii (25 delegates) and Alaska (16 delegates) which also go today, he’ll be in worse position than he was going into the weekend.
Ending on a no politics but sad note: Garry Shandling passed away at the age of 66. Go here to see Conan O’Brien’s touching opening monologue tribute to the late comedian. The Larry Sanders Show, Shandling’s masterpiece, is AWESOME. If you haven’t watched it and have the money and the time, buy the DVDs.

Election Numbers Crunching: Democratic Edition

donkey_28equus_asinus29_at_disney27s_animal_kingdom_2816-01-200529 — Sometimes it’s hard to say whether the Democratic Party is run by actual donkeys or not. Though to be fair to donkeys, they probably wouldn’t defend the superdelegate system. By Raul654 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday we saw that Donald Trump is the only Republican candidate left with a realistic chance of achieving a majority of delegates before the convention. As complicated as figuring that out was, the Democratic Party’s nomination contest is even more of a mess. Let’s deal with the most confusing aspect right at the top: superdelegates.

First, let’s be clear that superdelegates are an abomination and an affront to democracy. The Democratic Party should be embarrassed that this undemocratic relic still exists. The Democratic National Committee should have disposed of the superdelegate system after 2008, when the Barack Obama – Hillary Clinton contest involved way too much time and energy arguing over what was the proper role of superdelegates. There’s a simple way to end this nonsense and that’s just get rid of it. It is not a good look for a political party claiming to be against plutocracy to be giving plutocrats an opportunity to override the will of the voters. I swear, it seems like DNC officials sit around trying to think of ways to lose elections sometimes.

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.

The nightmare scenario is something like this: Clinton wins 49.9% of elected delegates, Bernie Sanders wins 50.1%, and superdelegates hand the nomination to Clinton. If we thought trying to convince staunch Sanders supporters that the Democratic Party is their natural home was difficult before, wait until the Party Establishment steals the nomination from him!

This all stinks. Now we’re treated to the spectacle of Sanders suggesting he may try to overtake Clinton through superdelegates if he can’t do it with elected delegates. Of course, it was Sanders and his supporters complaining about the superdelegates back in the fall of 2015 when Clinton enjoyed a huge superdelegate lead before a single vote had been cast. Now they may try to use superdelegates to steal the nomination from Clinton! A system that encourages your members to look like a bunch of hypocrites is really not an ideal system.

All that said, it is unlikely that superdelegates will go against the majority of elected delegates. Though it’s clear they overwhelmingly support Clinton, it looks like voters are going to save them from having to boost her from behind Sanders. The race is definitely not over, but Clinton is in good position to achieve a substantial majority of elected delegates. Here’s the math (thanks to FiveThirtyEight):

Hillary Clinton has won 1,233 elected delegates, which is 57% of delegates awarded so far. That leaves her 793 shy of a majority of elected delegates and 1,149 shy of a majority of all delegates (elected and superdelegates). To win a majority of elected delegates and claim the will of the Party’s electorate she needs to win 42% of the remaining elected delegates. To win a majority of all delegates without needing a single superdelegate, she needs to win 61% of remaining elected delegates.
Bernie Sanders has won 929 elected delegates, which is 43% of delegates awarded so far. That leaves him 1,097 shy of a majority of elected delegates and 1,453 shy of a majority of all delegates. To win a majority of elected delegates and claim the will of the Party’s electorate he needs to win 58% of the remaining elected delegates. To win a majority of all delegates without needing a single superdelegate, he needs to win 77% of remaining elected delegates.

Clinton is not far off the pace she needs to take the superdelegate question off the table entirely, and she is in a commanding position to win a majority of elected delegates. Sanders is way off the pace needed to win the nomination without substantial help from superdelegates, and he’s in a tough but not impossible spot with respect to a majority of elected delegates.

Sanders could still overtake Clinton in elected delegates, but it will be a difficult task. Since the Democratic Party’s nomination process awards delegates proportionally, he’ll have to win 58% of remaining delegates to reach a majority of elected delegates. Clinton has big polling leads in delegate-rich states like New York, California, and Pennsylvania. Even ties in those states would hurt Sanders. Blowing Clinton out like he did in Utah and Idaho helps, but he needs to be more competitive than he’s been so far in populous, diverse states.

Who knows? It could happen, like when Sanders surprised everyone by winning in Michigan. There’s time now for people in the remaining states to digest information and think more critically about how the candidates might match up against a probable Trump candidacy. At the very least, Sanders supporters are making sure he will stay in the race and be in position to demand concessions at the convention in July.

Election Numbers Crunching: Republican Edition

marco_rubio_-_caricature — The ghost of Marco Rubio could haunt the campaign trail all the way to the Republican Convention in Cleveland this July. By DonkeyHotey (Marco Rubio – Caricature) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

The process through which we Americans nominate candidates for president is extraordinarily complicated, as 2016’s election is making excruciatingly clear. Comprehensive, readable results can be found at Real Clear Politics‘ “Election Central: 2016” page. I’ve put their delegate tables into an Excel spreadsheet in order to analyze the current state of both parties’ contests. Following are the results, which include Tuesday’s primaries and caucuses.

On the Republican side, a candidate needs 1,237 delegates to win an outright majority on the first ballot at the convention. There are 2,472 delegates available; 1,633 delegates have been awarded in contests so far, though one of the millions of reasons this is so complicated is that not all of those are bound to a particular candidate. There are 839 delegates remaining for allocation, which is 34% of the total number of delegates. Now, let’s break down each candidate with significant delegate totals:

Donald Trump has won 739 delegates and needs 498 more for a majority, which is 59% of the remaining possible delegates. So far, Trump has won 45% of delegates awarded, so he’s actually pretty far off the pace needed to win a majority.
Ted Cruz has won 465 delegates and needs 772 more for a majority, which is 92% of the remaining possible delegates. So far, Cruz has won 28% of delegates awarded, so he’s way off the pace.
John Kasich has won 143 delegates and needs 1,094 more for a majority, which is 130% of the remaining possible delegates. So far, Kasich has won 9% of delegates awarded, and he literally cannot achieve a majority on the first ballot at the convention.
Marco Rubio has won 166 delegates, which is 10% of the total delegates awarded. He dropped out of the race, but many of his delegates can become unbound depending on the rules of each state. This could be very important, and you can read the details here.

If we assume that Rubio supporters in remaining states will mostly go to Cruz or Kasich, members of the Republican Establishment who want to deny Trump the nomination can spin the above numbers as good news. Cruz, Kasich, and Rubio delegates amount to 47% of the total awarded. If this pace continues, that would be enough to deny Trump a majority. And if that happens, you can talk me into anything happening at the convention: unbound Rubio delegates voting for Trump to push him over the top in order to stop a potential Republican civil war, Cruz and Kasich making a deal to win on the second ballot with Cruz at the top of the ticket, Trump’s campaign manager assaulting and sexually harassing delegates on the convention floor – really, anything.

Now, to rain on the Republican Establishment’s parade for a moment, many of the remaining contests are winner-take-all, which means Trump can get on pace for a majority by taking delegate-rich, winner-take-all states like Wisconsin (42 delegates), Pennsylvania (71 delegates), and California (172 delegates). Trump leads in the most recent polls conducted in each state, but those polls include Rubio and some even include Ben Carson. So, they’re outdated, and the whole thing is such a mess I won’t even hazard a guess about which way those electorates are leaning right now.

Just for fun though, let’s add New York to the mix, which awards 95 delegates proportionally. If Cruz and Kasich don’t break the 20% vote threshold there, they will not win any delegates, meaning Trump could grab all 95 and he’s currently way ahead in the New York polls. If we give Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, California, and New York to Trump, that’s 380 delegates. That would leave him 118 delegates shy of the majority threshold, which is only 26% of delegates in the other remaining states!

Trump still has a viable path to an outright majority. It may be time for the Republican Party to repay its “nonsense debt” – a phrase coined by Josh Marshall in this piece that explains what’s happening to the Republican Party. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Stay tuned tomorrow for crunching the Democratic Party’s nomination contest numbers.

Is Moderate John Kasich a Moderate if His Proposals are Indistinguishable from Those of Trump and Cruz? An Investigation

governor_of_ohio_john_kasich_at_new_hampshire_education_summit_the_seventy-four_august_19th2c_2015_by_michael_vadon_08 — If you rearrange the letters in “moderate” you can get “moat deer” and “dream toe.” By Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s hear from the man himself. Speaking last month at my alma mater, the University of Virginia, and as noted by The New Yorker‘s Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Ohio Governor John Kasich and candidate for the Republican Party’s nomination for president had this to say: “…of course I’m not a moderate, I’ve been a conservative all my life…”

Surely a man who has fewer delegates at the moment than Marco Rubio has got is not worth writing about, one could argue. This is a fair point. Rubio’s campaign perished in the Florida swamps last week, yet he still has the same mathematical chance of achieving a majority of delegates as does Kasich: zero percent, goose egg, nada, the ol’ donut. Hell, you and I have the same chance as Kasich, unless you happen to be Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

Kasich is the last establishment man standing, and as such, his “plan” is to go to the Republican Party’s convention in Cleveland this July and hope that the party decides to self-immolate and hand its nomination to a guy who finished a distant third in delegates. This “plan” can only work if Cruz and Kasich succeed in denying Trump a majority, and it’s far from clear they can do any such thing. If they somehow manage it, AND one of them proceeds to capture the nomination, what are the chances of Trumpolini telling his blackshirts to stand down? The man has already passively aggressively threatened riots if this happens. Since he would need Trump’s voters to win the general election, Kasich almost certainly has no path to the presidency if he acquires the nomination through a brokered convention.

Kasich is worth thinking about, though, because he appeals to voters in a way that would make him a formidable candidate in a general election – again, if he were able to get there without precipitating a Republican civil war. He talks about civility and pragmatism, and claims to be running a campaign on behalf of all Americans. This works in American politics, and it’s scary because it masks an agenda that is indistinguishable from those of his rivals. If we blindfolded a voter, and Trump, Cruz, and Kasich’s platforms were soft drinks poured into three different cups, the voter would be unlikely to tell the difference after tasting each one.

In fairness, Kasich doesn’t want to round up and deport undocumented immigrants, so a true-believing Trump voter might spit out the Kasich soft drink. And to be fairer still, Kasich seems to support some kind of limited amnesty program for undocumented immigrants, though I cannot find a detailed proposal anywhere. On the candidate’s own website, for example, immigration is not even one of his issues. That seems like a strange oversight for a man seeking the nomination of a party that represents voters incensed over undocumented immigrants. Certainly a man of high character wouldn’t be hiding his views on the very issue his party’s base is most passionate about, would he?

Anyway, at best, Kasich is not terrible on immigration. The same can’t be said of his other policies. In Ohio, he has made life miserable for thousands of women seeking reproductive healthcare services. He wants to do the same for women on a national level if he becomes president.

His federal tax plan, like the one he’s enacted in Ohio, severely cuts taxes for top earners. In Ohio, he shifted the tax burden to the working class through higher sales taxes. He wants to eliminate the estate tax, just like Trump and Cruz.

On climate change, Kasich displays all the courage of his immigration convictions where he acknowledges a human component in climate change but refuses to do anything about it. In fact, he suspended a renewable energy program in Ohio that had saved Ohio consumers $230 million in six years.

On education, Kasich favors giving money to unaccountable, underperforming charter schools at public schools’ expense.

Finally, Kasich’s budget proposal would pay for his tax cuts for the rich and higher defense spending by drastically cutting just about every federal program in existence and devolving their responsibilities to the states through unaccountable block grants that effectively reduce funding available for welfare programs.

As always, it doesn’t matter what’s in a candidate’s heart. Look at his or her policies and his or her record. Due diligence on Kasich proves we should take his word for one thing, at least: he’s no moderate. Make no mistake, he’s another radical conservative whose policies are designed to prove government doesn’t work by destroying it.

An Open Letter to Sanders Supporters

bernie_sanders_2820033841412_24d8796e44_c029 — I’d be super happy to vote for this guy, but he’s probably not going to be the nominee. Nick Solari [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Bernie Sanders Supporters,

There are many good reasons to prefer Sanders to Hillary Clinton. He critiques the current system in a way that proves he understands the economic security issues that so frustrate many Americans. A system in which a person can work a forty-hour week and not get paid anywhere near enough to pay rent (forget about buying a home), buy health insurance, make car and car insurance payments, purchase a cable and internet package for the home, maintain a healthy diet, or save for his or her children’s education without going into perpetual debt is a rotten system indeed. It isn’t fair and it’s terrible and the Democratic nominee for president is almost certainly going to be a person who raked in 10 times the yearly salary of the average person in the bottom 50% of the United States’ income distribution just for delivering a single speech.

The progressive Democrat’s case against Clinton is compelling. She’s never been a trusted friend of labor. Her healthcare policy is not nearly as ambitious or as just as Sanders’, and the same goes for her education policy. On foreign policy, she still buys into the consensus that brought us the Iraq War and considers Henry f’ing Kissinger a wise elder statesman. She exhibits the same instincts that drove the Left nuts about her husband’s presidency: always looking to appeal to the Reagan Democrat, like she did recently when she inexplicably praised Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s HIV/AIDS epidemic record despite the fact that the Reagan administration’s response to the emerging crisis was to ignore it and make disgusting jokes about gay people. Sometimes Clinton behaves as if going after the vote of some goober in Alabama is her path to the presidency, rather than mobilizing the Obama coalition. Let’s not dance around it: Clinton makes it hard sometimes to support and trust her.

The delegate math is what it is; members of the Democratic Party are showing a strong preference for Clinton, although Sanders has made this race much more competitive than most people thought possible just three months ago. Sanders shouldn’t and probably won’t drop out before the convention. He could still win but it’s now extremely unlikely; the fact that he didn’t repeat his Michigan performance in Ohio or Illinois all but closes off his path to the nomination.

Sanders and his supporters should proudly make their voices heard at the convention in Philadelphia this July. Clinton and her supporters cannot and should not ignore the 40% of the Democratic Party’s electorate that prefer the vision of a democratic socialist. The Clinton campaign needs to combine her message of preserving and strengthening the accomplishments of the Obama era with the more galvanizing appeal for a more just society represented by Sanders. Fairly and sometimes not so fairly, Clinton is viewed as a status quo figure. And in 2016, it’s clear that about half the general electorate is sick and tired of the status quo. Clinton needs the Sanders wing if she wants to transcend the politics-as-usual label.

Make Clinton earn your support, and then vote for her in November. There are huge, fundamental differences between how the Democratic Party would govern and how the Republican Party would govern. If you don’t believe me, take it from Noam Chomsky.

There have been reports that 10%, or maybe 30%, or who really knows at this point how many Sanders supporters there are who claim they will not support Clinton in the general election under any circumstances. We won’t have a good grasp on this question until if and when Clinton secures the nomination. Some say they want to wage a write-in campaign for Sanders, or sit out the election, or vote for Donald Trump. Any of these options – and especially voting for Trump over the Democratic candidate – is cutting off one’s nose (and ears, and arms, and legs) to spite one’s face.

Many Sanders supporters, and many libertarian types on the Republican side, complain about only having two major parties from which to choose. There is an entire academic literature I’ll get into in a future post about why the American system produces two major parties, with each party comprised of competing but somewhat compatible factions. The short explanation is that we don’t have four or five competitive parties like proportional representation parliamentary systems do because we do not have a proportional representation parliamentary system. Brilliant insight, I know, but it is what it is. This is really the only point over which I lose my patience with Sanders supporters and libertarians. They talk about the need for more competitive parties but they are ignorant of which they speak.

I’m well aware that “vote for the lesser of two evils” is not an inspiring message. But if you stop for a minute and think about the differences between the Democratic and Republican parties rather than your grievances against Clinton, you will see that the choice between them is no choice at all. Maybe there are some “cross-pressured” voters out there who want to criminalize all abortions but also want strict environmental regulations, or think the federal government should have no role in providing universal education but should maintain Social Security, or think that single-payer healthcare is a good idea but we should have extremely low or no income taxes, or think that LGBT people should have the right to marry whomever they want but we should ban Muslims from entering the country. If these voters exist then they definitely don’t have a party that reflects their positions.

I’ll wager free subscriptions to this blog that Sanders supporters hold all or most of the following positions: equal access to reproductive health services across the country for women and their families, effective environmental regulations that take climate change seriously, universal education, strong Social Security, truly universal healthcare, appropriate income tax levels to maintain the government services demanded, a universal right to marry whomever they want, and a just immigration policy. That would make them Democrats.

As explained previously, I know what I’m talking about here because I was that special voter whose vote was as pure as the driven snow back in 2000. Since I was living in Virginia, my Ralph Nader vote didn’t cost Al Gore the election. But if I’d been living in Florida, I would have been one of the 97,488 voters there that essentially handed the election to George W. Bush. I regret that vote to this day, and I believe that if you sit out the election, or write in a candidate not on the ballot, or vote for the Republican, and the Republican wins, you will regret your vote, too.

Requiem for a Rubiobot

senator_of_florida_marco_rubio_at_marco_rubio_at_the_derry-salem_elks_lodge_in_salem_nh_by_michael_vadon_02 — Turns out Rubio’s candidacy was the joke. Sad! By Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Give Jeb Bush credit for something. He saw the writing on the wall and got the hell out before his home state of Florida could make a fool of him. Another Florida man, Marco Rubio, was not so wise. He and his media enablers blundered on in the vain hope that Rubio’s “accomplishments” and “moderation” might prevail, at least in his home state. Winning in Florida would give Rubio his rationale for staying in the race until the convention when he could try to steal the nomination if Donald Trump hadn’t secured an outright majority of delegates.

Instead, Rubio finished a distant second to Trump. The latter won all of Florida’s delegates with a plurality of the vote, because the state’s Republican Party had decided to make it a winner-take-all contest. Now, Rubio has decided to drop out of the race. His campaign will go down as a textbook case of how not to win a major party’s nomination.

Rubio is the second emptiest suit in American politics (Reince Priebus, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, has a lock on the emptiest suit title). Some have tried to compare him to Barack Obama, another person who ran for president while a first-term senator, claiming that Democrats can’t have it both ways when they point to Rubio’s lack of experience and accomplishments. Maybe that’s fair, but then it’s fair to point out that Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review and Rubio had a 2.1 GPA in high school. I wasn’t the greatest high school student either, but I’m not a big enough idiot to think I’m qualified to be president of the United States.

Rubio’s demise is good news for Democrats and the people whom were burned by Rubio’s rising star. While barely different from any of the other Republicans running for president in policy terms, and worse on some like a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body and on foreign policy, Rubio scared Democrats. He seemed poised to take advantage of the same playbook that Karl Rove used to run George W. Bush into the White House. Americans have a vague, not altogether unreasonable sense that the two major parties ought to alternate running the executive branch. Rubio’s empty suit was ready to be filled with the same compassionate conservative, uniter-not-divider nonsense that sold Americans on Bush, who proved to be a budget-destroying warmonger and generally incompetent president. Handing over the keys to Republicans in 2016 would be the same mistake the country made back in 2000.

Meanwhile, Tuesday’s elections couldn’t have gone better for Trump. The Los Angeles Times has a readable compilation of the results. Trump won in Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. Missouri is too close to call at the moment but he’s leading there. Though Trump lost in Ohio, John Kasich’s win there is actually a strategic victory for Trump, as election numbers crunching guru Sam Wang explains at The American Prospect. In fact, as matters stand now, Trump winning three and probably four out of the five contests, Kasich winning the one in Ohio, and Rubio dropping out is the best possible outcome for Trump. The vote-splitting strategy that Mitt Romney and other GOP establishment types have advocated in order to deny Trump an outright majority of delegates suffers greatly from an unviable Rubio candidacy.

It is certainly Trump’s nomination to lose now. Perhaps the only line of attack left to Republicans is to point out that Trump likes his steaks well done.

Weekend Links

IMG_20160209_164710 — Gratuitous photo of me chilling with a friend’s dog during my visit home last month.

Today was the first day of classes at our English training school here in Dali, Yunnan Province. This semester I have three classes, each two hours. I am exhausted tonight. It usually takes me two weeks to get back into teaching shape. Teaching English as a foreign language to kids, you’re on your feet pretty much the entire class playing games, using the whiteboard, presenting new words and language patterns, and giving kids attention when they have group or individual tasks. That means I was on my feet and on mentally, switching between English and Chinese, for six hours. Cry me a river, I know, but wow do I feel like having a beer and watching some TV.

On American politics, where else can we start but with Donald Trump and what went down in Chicago? This BBC report has the story and raises some fair questions. It’s obviously not ideal that violence erupted yet again and that Trump felt compelled to cancel his rally. This just seems bad on both sides, though I haven’t gone through the reporting or footage in any depth. But, in true both-side-do-it fashion, there is an element of “why are you making us look like racists by protesting our racist rhetoric and making us get into fights with you” going on here.

I’m conflicted about the effectiveness of these Trump protests. For one thing, I doubt they have any influence over the direction of the Republican nomination contest at this point. Trump’s core supporters are locked in and every other candidate understands they need those voters to win the nomination outright or steal it from Trump at the convention and still have any chance in the general election. If anything, the protests probably encourage Trump supporters to close ranks and feel that Trump must be saying something right. After all, from their perspective, Trump’s speeches and his supporters’ behavior at his rallies are making all the right people angry. This Trump thing is more tribal than it is anything else.

For all we know, the clashes may be encouraging Republicans repulsed by Trump to default to their tribal allegiance. Still, I don’t mean to suggest that protesters should sit idly by and let Trump’s movement go unchallenged. Really, there are no good options here.

Some links:

It’d be nice if a gift for clairvoyance, or profound political acumen, explained my getting this Trump movement right back in August of last year. Alas, there was no secret. It was just understanding what motivates a large and enthusiastic plurality of Republican voters. This information’s been hiding in plain sight for decades, and has been lit up in neon since a certain president with a certain skin color took office in 2009. Also, I should credit professor of law Paul Campos, whom I read over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, for pointing out in July 2015 that Trump needed to be taken seriously, likening his candidacy to Ronald Reagan’s.
Campos again, writing at Salon about the bill of goods the Republican elite has been selling the base since Reagan. Read the whole thing after you pick your jaw up from the floor:

Here are the numbers: between 1945 and 1974, per capita GDP in the U.S. grew from $17,490 to $27,837. That is an impressive improvement, but it pales in comparison to what has happened since: in 2014, per capita GDP was $55,185, i.e., almost exactly double what it was in 1974. In terms of economic output, the country is twice as rich per person now as it was then.

Where has all this money gone? The answer ought to shock anyone who cares about either economic opportunity or increasing inequality. The average household income of the bottom 50% of American households was $25,475 in 1974, and $26,520 in 2014. In other words, half the population has gotten essentially none of the extra $10 trillion dollars of national wealth that the American economy has generated over the past forty years.

Josh Marshall with a reliably useful take on the most recent Republican debate.
Also at Marshall’s site TPM, here’s an article reminding us that Trump has been encouraging his supporters to get violent. I don’t know how we would read his comments any other way, or why we would think his supporters would hear or read them any other way.
Hillary Clinton does make it hard sometimes. In trying to find something nice to say upon Nancy Reagan’s passing, she just completely made stuff up about Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s HIV/AIDS record. They basically couldn’t have had a worse record. Clinton has retracted and apologized, and it’s plausible that she misspoke, but this was bad. Read Dan Savage’s appropriately outraged take on this, and listen to the embedded audio if you can stomach listening to Reagan’s administration and the press laugh and joke about the burgeoning epidemic. And yes, it’s as bad as I just made it sound.
Ending on a somewhat lighter note, here’s Jonathan Chait on the top-notch advice Marco Rubio has received in the past several weeks. Hopefully Rubio’s admirers’ will start cursing Trump with their wisdom.

Enjoy the weekend. Time for that beer and some idiot box.

Sanders Makes Things Interesting; Broken Record Stays Stuck on “In the General Election, Vote the Party Not the Specific Candidate”

Senator_of_Vermont_Bernie_Sanders_at_Derry_Town_Hall,_Pinkerton_Academy_NH_October_30th,_2015_by_Michael_Vadon_a_15 — Do you want a socialist to take your money and give it to some selfie-taking hipster so that he can major in “Urban Gardening Aesthetics in the 21st Century” for free? I like Bernie Sanders a lot, but the Republican attack ads write themselves. By Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

As if the 2016 presidential nominating contests weren’t already interesting enough, candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination Bernie Sanders went out and pulled off an extremely surprising victory in Michigan on Tuesday. For some perspective, Josh Marshall at TPM compares it with the early contests of the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton battle in 2008. Harry Enten at FiveThityEight writes that we’ve only seen one upset of this scale before, and that was back in 1984.

Since Clinton won in a landslide in Mississippi on the same night and therefore netted more delegates, both writers agree that Sanders is going to have to repeat this performance elsewhere before we can say the ground has shifted in this race. But the fact that Sanders won a contest he was predicted to lose big is a fact, and last week’s conventional wisdom may not apply anymore. Sanders wouldn’t win states with African American populations above 10%, and then he did. My own archive is full of posts suggesting the inevitability of a Clinton victory, though I’ve usually been careful to mention caveats.

So far I’ve mostly limited my commentary about the Democratic Party’s race to pointing out that whoever wins is going to be far more preferable to whoever wins the Republican contest. That’s because we elect members of political parties to office, and those elected leaders staff the government with members of his or her party to conduct the people’s business. The Democratic Party has proven itself relatively competent to run local, state, and national governments since the early 1990s. The Republican Party has proven itself the opposite of competent. And it’s full of racists.

It’s possible to enthusiastically endorse a party while tepidly supporting certain of its candidates. That’s where I am with Hillary Clinton. I’ve mocked people for saying they don’t want to support Clinton because they just don’t trust her. I’ve reminded readers that electing a president is not some kind of psychodrama in which the players are obligated to make us feel warm and fuzzy. The truth is, I don’t love Clinton either, but the thing about living in a democratic republic is that you don’t have to love your elected officials or the political party they represent. I’ll happily leave the love and loyalty oaths to the reactionary fascists supporting Donald Trump.

Trump-rally — Look at this picture, read about what Trump supporters actually believe, and then let’s talk again about how the *SNL* parody of Trump voters is over the top. ( Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP)

Elections, especially presidential elections, have very real consequences. A poor woman who can no longer get her birth control prescription covered; a woman who is forced to bring her rapist’s child to term; a working class family that no longer qualifies for health coverage under Medicaid; workers who deserve much better than the scandalous federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour; members of communities victimized by National Rifle Association-endorsed gun policies; African Americans disproportionately imprisoned for committing the same nonviolent crimes as white people; law-abiding immigrants who pay taxes but do not have legal documentation and would be rounded up and deported, leaving American-citizen children behind – these people don’t care about enthusiasm levels for specific candidates. They care about whether the political party in power is going to actively work to make their lives miserable or make their lives better.

I’ll outsource the basic argument for why a privileged white guy might support Clinton to John Cole at Balloon Juice. Here’s the gist:

In my opinion as a white single male with a degree of financial stability, beyond agita and heartburn, I have very little at stake in this election. I’m not going to be drafted, my insurance won’t be lost if ACA is repealed, I won’t have to worry about losing my ability to get pap smears or mammograms or basic health services if PP is closed down, I won’t have to worry about feeding my children, I won’t have to worry about the right to control my body, I won’t have to worry about getting shot in the street for walking while white or be found dead in a jail cell after failing to signal a lane change. These are not and will not be concerns for me, ever.

For women and minorities, these are things they worry about EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

Sanders can be trusted to take these concerns just as seriously as Clinton would. The issue for Cole, and for me, is electability. If Sanders wins the nomination I will work to make his political revolution a reality. Perhaps the median voter is ready to put a democratic socialist in the White House, but if Sanders is the general election candidate, his core supporters had better be ready to deal with all of the red-baiting that tends to be very effective in American politics. For guys like Cole and I, Clinton seems the safer bet. Up until Michigan, several crucial bases of support for the Democratic Party – minority groups and women – seemed to overwhelmingly agree.

If Sanders continues to make inroads with those groups as the primary contests move away from the South, and he maintains his lock on younger voters and progressives, he can actually win. Sanders or Clinton, I know what I think about the issues and which political party better represents my values, and that will lead me to support whoever wins the Democratic Party’s nomination. In the meantime, it’s certainly healthy for American democracy that a centrist Democratic insider is facing a strong challenge from a populist outsider.