Clinton Might Not Be the Nominee

A Sanders win in California would turbocharge the mounting Democratic unease about her viability.

 

Photo: Getty Images

By

Douglas E. Schoen

May 31, 2016 6:31 p.m. ET

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/clinton-might-not-be-the-nominee-1464733898-lMyQjAxMTI2NDA1MTAwMzE1Wj

There is now more than a theoretical chance that Hillary Clinton may not be the Democratic nominee for president.
How could that happen, given that her nomination has been considered a sure thing by virtually everyone in the media and in the party itself? Consider the possibilities.
The inevitability behind Mrs. Clinton’s nomination will be in large measure eviscerated if she loses the June 7 California primary to Bernie Sanders. That could well happen.

Opinion Journal Video

Hoover Institution Research Fellow Bill Whalen on the latest Golden State poll and the implications for next week's presidential primary. Photo credit: Getty Images.

A recent PPIC poll shows Mrs. Clinton with a 2% lead over Mr. Sanders, and a Fox News survey found the same result. Even a narrow win would give him 250 pledged delegates or more—a significant boost. California is clearly trending to Mr. Sanders, and the experience in recent open primaries has been that the Vermont senator tends to underperform in pre-election surveys and over-perform on primary and caucus days, thanks to the participation of new registrants and young voters.
To this end, data from mid-May show that there were nearly 1.5 million newly registered Democratic voters in California since Jan. 1. That’s a 218% increase in Democratic voter registrations compared with the same period in 2012, a strongly encouraging sign for Mr. Sanders.
A Sanders win in California would powerfully underscore Mrs. Clinton’s weakness as a candidate in the general election. Democratic superdelegates—chosen by the party establishment and overwhelmingly backing Mrs. Clinton, 543-44—would seriously question whether they should continue to stand behind her candidacy.
There is every reason to believe that at the convention Mr. Sanders will offer a rules change requiring superdelegates to vote for the candidate who won their state’s primary or caucus. A vote on that proposed change would almost certainly occur—and it would function as a referendum on the Clinton candidacy. If Mr. Sanders wins California, Montana and North Dakota on Tuesday and stays competitive in New Jersey, he could well be within 200 pledged delegates of Mrs. Clinton, making a vote in favor of the rules change on superdelegates more likely.
Another problem: In recent weeks the perception that Mrs. Clinton would be the strongest candidate against Donald Trump has evaporated. The Real Clear Politics polling average has Mrs. Clinton in a statistical tie with Mr. Trump, and recent surveys from ABC News/Washington Post and Fox News show her two and three points behind him, respectively.
Then there is that other crack in the argument for Mrs. Clinton’s inevitability: Bernie Sanders consistently runs stronger than she does against Mr. Trump nationally, beating him by about 10 points in a number of recent surveys.
The worries about Mr. Sanders’s strength have stirred the beginnings of a capitulation to him—by the Clinton camp, in league with the Democratic National Committee—at the convention. To placate him, they have already granted Mr. Sanders greater influence over the party platform. Two divisive figures, Cornel West and Rep. Keith Ellison, have been added to the platform committee, ensuring that the party will be pulled further left. In addition to putting Mr. Sanders’s socialist nostrums on display, the platform negotiations are likely to spur an ugly fight over the U.S. relationship with Israel.
Mrs. Clinton also faces growing legal problems. The State Department inspector general’s recent report on Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state made it abundantly clear that she broke rules and has been far from forthright in her public statements. The damning findings buttressed concerns within the party that Mrs. Clinton and her aides may not get through the government’s investigation without a finding of culpability somewhere.
With Mrs. Clinton reportedly soon to be interviewed by the FBI, suggesting that the investigation is winding up, a definitive ruling by the attorney general could be issued before the July 25 Democratic convention in Philadelphia. Given the inspector general’s report, a clean bill of health from the Justice Department is unlikely.
Finally, with Mrs. Clinton’s negative rating nearly as high as Donald Trump’s, and with voters not trusting her by a ratio of 4 to 1, Democrats face an unnerving possibility. Only a month or two ago, they were relishing the prospect of a chaotic Republican convention, with a floor fight and antiestablishment rebellion in the air. Now the messy, disastrous convention could be their own.
There are increasing rumblings within the party about how a new candidate could emerge at the convention. John Kerry, the 2004 nominee, is one possibility. But the most likely scenario is that Vice President Joe Biden—who has said that he regrets “every day” his decision not to run—enters the race.
Mr. Biden would be cast as the white knight rescuing the party, and the nation, from a possible Trump presidency. To win over Sanders supporters, he would likely choose as his running mate someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren who is respected by the party’s left wing.
Where is President Obama in all this? So far he has largely stayed out of the campaign, other than to say that he doesn’t believe Mrs. Clinton compromised national security with her home-brew email server. But with her poll numbers dropping, her legal headaches increasing, the Sanders candidacy showing renewed vigor, and Donald Trump looming as a wrecking ball for the president’s legacy, Mr. Obama and adviser Valerie Jarrett might begin sending signals to the Democratic National Committee and to the vice president that a Biden rescue operation wouldn’t displease the White House.
All of these remain merely possibilities. But it is easier now than ever to imagine a scenario in which Hillary Clinton—whether by dint of legal or political circumstances—is not the Democratic presidential nominee.
Mr. Schoen served as a political adviser and pollster for President Bill Clinton, 1994-2000.

Clinton Will Build Her Biggest Lead on March 15. Sanders Will Erode It After That.

Posted on March 3, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/03/clinton-will-build-biggest-lead-march-15-sanders-will-erode.html 

By Gaius Publius, a professional writer living on the West Coast of the United States and frequent contributor to DownWithTyranny, digby, Truthout, and Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius, Tumblr and Facebook. Originally published at at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.

Don’t question the lizard. The lizard knows.

I’m keeping this short to put a very simple idea into your head. Because of the way the Democratic Party voting calendar is structured this year, Clinton’s largest lead will occur on March 15. After that, most of Sanders’ strongest states will vote.
What this means is simple:

• Hillary Clinton will grow her lead until the March 15 states have voted.

• Bernie Sanders will erase that lead — partly or completely — after March 15.

• How much of Clinton’s lead he will erase depends on your not buying what the media is selling — that the contest is over.

• In most scenarios where Sanders wins, he doesn’t retake the lead until June 7, when five states including California cast their ballots.

March 15 is the Ides of March; a good way to remember the date. The message — gear up for a battle after the Ides of March, and don’t let the establishment media tell you what to think. They won’t be right until the last state has voted.

If you want to stop reading here, this is all you need to know.
The Data
Now the data. One of the best data-stitians I’ve come across is a diarist at Daily Kos named MattTX. Matt is very good, professionally good, at this stuff. In a long, carefully-reasoned diary, “How Bernie Sanders can win the Democratic nomination,” he lays out six scenarios for the race, in five of which Bernie Sanders wins the nomination (the other is a current baseline with no momentum). He presents them in a parallel fashion, and each presentation differs only in changing a small set of assumptions. Once you understand how to read the first one, you can read the others easily.
The first three scenarios are “static” — they assume that the national polling remains fixed throughout the race. He then runs the numbers on each state race for the following assumptions:

• The polling stays fixed at Clinton 49%–Sanders 42%, a 7-point Clinton lead.
• The polling stays fixed at Clinton 45%–Sanders 45%, a dead heat.
• The polling stays fixed at Sanders 47%–Clinton 44%, a 3-point Sanders lead.

Then he looks at what “momentum” looks like in a number of recent presidential contests (it actually can take a number of shapes) and chooses a momentum pattern associated with Obama’s win over Clinton in 2008. (Click here to see that chart.)
His final three scenarios are “dynamic” variations of his static ones, with shifting momentum off the current baseline. In each of these, Sanders wins, each time overcoming the bulge in the Clinton lead that comes on March 15. In the narrowest of these winning scenarios, the March 15 bulge is quite large, +184 delegates for Clinton.
Note that the data in Matt’s piece was run prior to South Carolina’s results, so Sanders has some additional ground to make up. Still, Sanders is right to “take it to the convention.” Most of his strength comes after most of Clinton’s, and Sanders could easily surprise in his states, just as Clinton will surprise in some of hers. Again, we won’t know who has the lead for good until after California and four additional states vote in early June.
Bottom line — What looks bad for Sanders supporters on March 1 will look worse a few weeks later. But stay heartened. Whatever the result through March, this isn’t over until June, after Sanders’ best states have voted as well.
(Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you’d like to help out, go here; you can adjust the split any way you like at the link. If you’d like to “phone-bank for Bernie,” go here. You can volunteer in other ways by going here. And thanks!)

Matt Taibbi: It's Too Late To Turn Off Trump

Election 2016

Taibbi interprets the “Trump phenomenon” as a rather damning indictment of an American culture guided by worship of the superficial.

By Dartagnan / Daily Kos

December 14, 2015

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/matt-taibbi-its-too-late-turn-trump

September 15, 2015, Donald Trump, 2016 Republican presidential candidate, speaks during a rally aboard the Battleship USS Iowa in San Pedro, Los Angeles, California
Photo Credit: Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

At some undefined moment over the past two weeks a light bulb suddenly came on over the talking heads in our corporate media as it dawned on them that Donald Trump was saying things that were really not so nice and kinda scary.  Why it took them nearly half a year to reach this epiphany has not been satisfactorily explained or even examined,  but as Matt Taibbi takes note in Rolling Stone, a good bet is that it had something to do with ratings, a factironically acknowledged by Trump himself. Citing the moral quandary posed to big TV execs by continuing to profit from coverage of someone who could at any day float the idea of, say, ethnic cleansing to his adoring fanbase, Taibbi sees this as an uncharacteristic problem for CNN and all of the major media who’ve sold out to Trumpmania:

Essentially, TV news producers are wondering: "How do we keep getting the great ratings without helping elect the Fourth Reich?"

Some have even gone so far as to timorously suggest that maybe Trump ought to be ignored and coverage of him cut back. But Taibbi thinks it’s a little late for that—maybe 40 or so years too late:

The time to start worrying about the consequences of our editorial decisions was before we raised a generation of people who get all of their information from television, and who believe that the solution to every problem is simple enough that you can find it before the 21 minutes of the sitcom are over.
Or before we created a world in which the only inner-city black people you ever see are being chased by cops, and the only Muslims onscreen are either chopping off heads or throwing rocks at a barricades.

Taibbi interprets the “Trump phenomenon” as a rather damning indictment of an American culture guided by worship of the superficial: Trump’s relentless media barrage and his complete lack of interest in sticking to a single topic for more than a media cycle half-life is tailor-made for a generation of Americans with terminally diminished attention spans, eager to be fed quick, sound-bite solutions before surfing off to the next channel. Trump simply embodies the TV culture that created him and that most Americans wallow in every night of their lives. His views and pronouncements, in their idiotic simplicity and unworkability, follow suit:

If you got all of your information from TV and movies, you'd have some pretty dumb ideas. You'd be convinced blowing stuff up works, because it always does in our movies. You'd have no empathy for the poor, because there are no poor people in American movies or TV shows – they're rarely even shown on the news, because advertisers consider them a bummer.
Politically, you'd have no ability to grasp nuance or complexity, since there is none in our mainstream political discussion. All problems, even the most complicated, are boiled down to a few minutes of TV content at most. That's how issues like the last financial collapse completely flew by Middle America. The truth, with all the intricacies of all those arcane new mortgage-based financial instruments, was much harder to grasp than a story about lazy minorities buying houses they couldn't afford, which is what Middle America still believes.

This is how a pampered billionaire manages to connect with disaffected lower-middle class whites. They have television and the mentality it creates in common. As Taibbi puts it,  “TV is the ultimate leveling phenomenon. It makes everyone, rich and poor, equally incapable of dealing with reality.”
So it’s long past the point where taking Trump off the air would do any good. That ship probably sailed when Americans duped themselves into voting for a B-movie actor in 1980 who talked tough while bankrupting the country, and told themselves ever since that this was a good idea. Taibbi darkly warns that Americans’ penchant for wanting shallow, simple solutions to complicated issues isn’t going anywhere, even when Trump eventually goes away:

Even if we take the man off the air, the problem he represents is still going to be there, just like poverty, corruption, mass incarceration, pollution and all of the other things we keep off the airwaves.