Apologies to Eugene O’Neill, but this election cycle has become a psychodrama, especially on the R side.
Lauren Fox/TPM:
Donald Trump sewed up the GOP nomination Tuesday despite the clear dangers he poses to his party in November. Polls show him deeply vulnerable against Hillary Clinton, and he could cost Republicans the Senate and, according to some analyses, put their House majority in peril.
But the longer term threat Trump poses to the GOP is in some ways more vexing. After a Trump drubbing, the party could very well be in the exact same position it found itself in in 2008 and 2012, re-litigating a core question: Is the GOP losing because its candidates aren't conservative enough -- or because it's banking on a narrow, white constituency that is being eclipsed by a growing minority population?
"There was hope there would be some clarity in this election. My fear is that by nominating Trump we may not have that clarity," says Republican strategist Brian Walsh. "There were some Republicans who were saying when it was between Trump and Cruz that we would rather lose with Cruz, and at least put to rest this false narrative that we lost because the nominee wasn’t conservative enough."
Monkey Cage Blog:
Racial attitudes and race have had a very different impact on Clinton’s two presidential bids. Without Obama on the ballot in 2016, Clinton’s support has increased significantly among blacks and racially liberal whites.
Despite her loss Tuesday night in Indiana, that improved standing among racial liberals has enabled her to withstand a sizable decline among racially conservative white voters and put her on track to winning the Democratic nomination.
Peter Suderman:
By Picking Donald Trump As the GOP Nominee, Republicans May Have Handed the Presidency to Hillary Clinton
Why did GOP voters pick such a weak general election candidate? ...
But the reality, as Nate Cohn writes pursuasively in The New York Times, is that just about every data point we have right now suggests that Trump would be a historically weak candidate—even against someone who would normally be considered a fairly weak candidate, like Hillary Clinton.
In giving the nomination to Trump, then, Republicans may have ensured a win for Clinton—the outcome that, in theory, the party was trying to prevent.
This isn’t some startling new conclusion. Trump’s weakness as a general election candidate has been apparent for months. And yet Republican primary voters appear to have, if anything, warmed to him as the election has gone on. He won Indiana with slightly more than 53 percent of the vote last night, beating out the combined vote total of both of his rivals, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, suggesting that Trump’s success is not strictly a result of the fractured field.
So what’s going on? The general presumption when looking at these races is that primary voters take electability into account in their decision process. That just doesn’t seem to have happened this year, and it’s one of the reasons that campaign staffers and election analysts have struggled to understand what voters are thinking.
Maybe, though, it did happen—but Republicans just didn’t accept the evidence that was in front of them.
Just a reminder: the primary voters are not the general election voters. Pass it on.
Philip Bump:
Barring something catastrophic, Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination for the presidency. There's basically no way that Bernie Sanders can catch Clinton's pledged delegate lead and no way that he will convince superdelegates to back him.
There are several reasons that Sanders hasn't conceded. One is that he claims he has an outside chance at winning. Another is that he wants to go into the convention in Philadelphia with a strong group of vocal supporters, allowing him to advocate for change. And third -- and perhaps most importantly -- he doesn't feel any reason to be loyal to the party in the way of past candidates. Sanders became a Democrat for the purposes of running for president. He's been a Democratic-leaning independent for decades, a political position that's increasingly common with Americans…
But there is a more striking way to present that success. In states for which we have exit poll data, people who identify as independents have voted for Sanders over Clinton 23 out of 26 times. (The exceptions: Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama.) People who identify as Democrats, meanwhile, have voted for Clinton over Sanders in 23 out of 26, excepting Vermont, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, where the two tied…
Why isn't Sanders conceding? There are two Democratic primaries happening. Hillary Clinton has locked up the Democratic party nomination, largely because there are still far more Democrats who vote in the primaries than Democrat-leaning independents. If there were a separate nomination for those independents, Sanders would win in a landslide.
There is a Democratic primary and Hillary has won it. Everyone else is welcome to join. Independents are especially welcome. But understand that you will be outnumbered by Democrats until/unless you become a Democrat yourself. Then you get to sit on the rules committee, and whatever happens happens.
Upshot:
Current national and battleground state polls have Mr. Trump trailing Mrs. Clinton by about 10 percentage points should they face off in the general election.
If those numbers hold, Mrs. Clinton would take all of the states that President Obama won in 2012, as well as North Carolina (which he won in 2008), putting her far over the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
Mrs. Clinton currently fares worse than Mr. Obama only in New York, a state that she would win easily according to current polling.
Bloomberg:
On the day that he claimed his new title, Trump faced new doubts from donors who have spent millions to elect Republican rivals like Cruz. In Indiana on Tuesday, 71 percent of the Texas senator's supporters said they definitely won't support Trump in November.
“There's definitely going to be an issue in uniting around a guy who quite frankly doesn't share our values,” said Bob Vander Plaats, a national co-chairman for Cruz's campaign and an influential evangelical voice in Iowa.
Trump's chances of beating Clinton depend largely on whether he can win back one-third of Republicans who say they won't vote for him in the general election, and then win over enough independents to tip the Electoral College his way. In a CNN/ORC pollreleased Wednesday, Clinton led Trump nationally by 13 percentage points.
For his part, Trump said Wednesday on NBC, “I am confident that I can unite much of” the party. “Some of it I don’t want.”
The part he doesn’t want? They are welcome to vote for Hillary.
Julia Azari:
It seems fitting as Donald Trump takes his political science–defying place as the GOP nominee and Sanders claims a victory in Indiana to write yet another post about democracy within parties. A few weeks ago, I conceded that the way political scientistsconceive of strong parties is unlikely to persuade many people or to conform to contemporary norms about how parties should make decisions.
Writing for Pacific Standard, my fellow Mischief Seth Masket responded with the idea that now, more than ever, the case for strong parties is evident. His argument is best summarized with this passage: "[The GOP] is on the verge of nominating a candidate who appears hostile to many of the party's longstanding beliefs and to many of the country's basic principles, and who demonstrates no serious understanding of government or politics. This would make a great trashy novel if it weren't actually happening. Why is the party doing this? Because it has thus far failed to do its job this year."
Masket's case, in other words, is that our institutions should have protected us from this undesirable outcome. Brendan Nyhan also raised this point a while back in a series of tweets.
But I think it's time to interrogate whether this is really true. Can we really design institutions that protect us from anti-democratic ideas?
In order to answer this question, we need to confront two uncomfortable, seemingly incompatible truths.
BuzzFeed:
Republicans Burn Their Voter Registration Cards After Trump Becomes Likely Nominee
Pictures and videos were posted on social media Tuesday after Ted Cruz suspended his campaign and Donald Trump was declared the presumptive nominee.
Brian Beutler:
On the eve of the presidential election in late October 1964, Ronald Reagan pleaded with voters to “preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth” by voting for Barry Goldwater, rather than “sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” His speech was called “A Time for Choosing,” and a few days later voters chose to deal Goldwater a huge, embarrassing, landslide defeat. Nevertheless, things worked out okay enough that 20 years later (just 980 off the mark), Reagan was able to declare it morning in America.
From the early days of this year’s presidential primary, Ted Cruz deployed Reagan’s failed entreaty repeatedly—always to imply that his opponents have failed the public somehow. The aftermath of President Obama’s reelection was, in Cruz’s telling, a time for choosing, and Marco Rubio disgracefully chose amnesty. More recently, Cruz described Tuesday night’s Indiana primary as a “time for choosing,” suggesting that those who chose Trump over him would be welcoming the darkness…
That means a time for choosing is now, fittingly, upon Cruz—along with a whole array of conservatives who have either vowed to oppose Trump’s candidacy through November, or who’ve implied in their critiques that Trump is unfit for office. Their decisions will help determine what the Republican Party looks like after Trump, and whether the conservative movement comes out of the 2016 election diminished or extinct. And nobody’s choice will matter more than Cruz’s.
John Avlon:
The Republican Party woke up in Trump Tower after Election Day, lying in a marble bathtub full of ice. Its back hurt and a kidney was missing.
Hitting rock bottom hadn’t come overnight. The troubles had been brewing for years, well before it sealed the deal with Donald Trump one night in Indiana. Once there had been dozens of suitors: governors, senators and even a pediatric neurosurgeon. But the choice between Trump or Cruz—a celebrity demagogue or a friendless ideologue—was a measure of how low things could go when the field narrowed to different flavors of conservative populist: angry and absolutist. The final decision wasn’t driven by love as much as desperation.
There had been attempts at intervention. Some friends warned things were getting out of hand after a few crazy hate binges dragged the party far off-center. But the rock-ribbed conservatives always pushed back and said those so-called friends were disloyal closet Democrats who just didn’t know how to party.
Steve Schale:
Dear Democrats:
Well it is a done deal. Republicans have chosen Donald Trump as their nominee, and already, my social media timeline is full of Democrats & Republicans saying this election is over. And I am here to tell you that you are wrong.
Yes, I get it. We all cheered his getting into the race. I even told a national news outlet that his running was proof of a God that loved me. And down deep, we all thought it would flame out. But it didn't. And now he is one person away from the nuclear codes.
Trust me, I understand all of the reasons why he should lose. His misogyny is disgusting, his anti-immigration rhetoric is offensive, and his focus on Muslims is xenophobic pandering at its worst. His oppo file could fill the Library of Congress, and his business record is spectacularly awful. His numbers with Hispanics are almost statistically impossible, and his ratings among women aren’t much better. If this was a traditional election, this would be over. Book the plane ticket for the inauguration, rent the tux, buy the gown, and reserve the hotel room, because we are headed to a landslide of Johnson or Reagan proportions.
In the end, maybe it will be. But I doubt it. This isn’t a normal election, and these are not normal times. And in recent times, my state — one that elected Barack Obama with more than 50% of the vote twice — has proven it.
Two words: Rick Scott.