We begin today’s roundup with Philip Elliot at the AP, who analyzes a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump general election in the wake of the AP’s tally of pledged and super delegates and its declaration of Hillary Clinton as the presumptive nominee (and first woman ever to be nominated for president by a major party):
The Clinton campaign is perhaps the most advanced ever, with teams of data scientists, message analysts, new media mavens and traditional get-out-the-vote engineers packed into two stories of a Brooklyn headquarters and around the country. The campaign is building on President Barack Obama’s two technically groundbreaking campaign techniques, and Clinton has invested millions in a political machine that, if it works, could make history and elect the nation’s first female President. [...]
She is now the de facto nominee for the Democratic Party. The base of her party is growing more quickly than Republicans’ core supporters. She has the better campaign machinery. She has the donor network that Trump never will. Her team is remarkably unified, while Trump’s inner-circle feuds publicly in the New York tabloids and on cable shows. And, as Clinton’s team bets, Trump’s nomination will be sufficiently horrifying to unify Democrats who didn’t vote for her in the primary. They don’t have to like Clinton. They just need to defeat Trump.
The Clinton campaign, for its part, sidestepped the AP report and focused on today’s primaries. Here is the Sanders campaign statement on the AP report.
Meanwhile, here’s CNN’s Stephen Collinson on the state of the contest:
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are blitzing California on an intense final day of campaigning in the 2016 Democratic primary. The former secretary of state on Tuesday is expected to become the first female presumptive nominee of a major party -- a feat that will likely raise pressure on Sanders to drop his bid quickly. The Vermont senator has been loathe to discuss exiting the race -- even raising the potential over the weekend of a contested convention -- but struck a more subdued note Monday. [...]
The Clinton-Sanders battle is playing out far longer than most would have predicted at the beginning of the campaign season. With his critique of economic inequality, Sanders, a 74-year-old self-described democratic socialist, has become the unlikely hero of the young, progressive Democratic base. Still, Clinton is on the verge of the nomination after she dominated contests in the South and won large states including New York and Pennsylvania.
Karen Tumulty:
Hillary Clinton has been part of our national consciousness for so long that it is easy to forget how far she has pushed the edges. It is not just that she has made history by becoming the first woman to claim the presidential nomination of a major party. Hillary — known on a first-name basis, both by her fervent supporters and by those who despise her — has been the avatar of a different way of thinking about women and what they can do. [...]
The arc of her career has not been a graceful one. Again and again, the sequence has been the same: She sets out, stumbles, gets up again, grinds on.
And as she herself has acknowledged, she lacks the natural political talents of the two men against whom she is inevitably measured — the one she married, and the one to whom she lost in 2008. [...] It was never much in doubt that she would try again, because that is her laborious way. She is determined to make history, and she has; what she will never do is make it look easy.
Over at POLITICO, Shane Goldmacher correctly points out that one of Bernie Sanders’s historic accomplishments is his massive donor list:
“Campaigns can be ephemeral. They exist. They are very important — the most important thing. And then, win or lose, they go away,” said Erin Hill, ActBlue’s longtime executive director. But the idea of ActBlue is that it lives on, she said, allowing each successive campaign to reap the benefits of the previous cycle.
The Sanders camp knows that, long after the Democratic primary is over, this is the key part of the digital inheritance it is leaving for the political left.
“Sen. Sanders’ participation in building up the Democratic fundraising ecosystem will pay dividends for progressive candidates up and down the ballot for years to come,” predicted Kenneth Pennington, digital director for the Sanders campaign.
And don’t miss Lisa Belkin’s interview with Jane Sanders:
“It’s not just about winning the presidency, it’s about changing our country to have it be what we all want it to be and know it can be,” she says. “As president, he’d want an outside, really organized group of people helping support him, moving it in the direction of the issues that he’s talked about. And if he’s not the nominee, it will be him leading that group, leading that transformation.”
She’s been spending some time noodling on the details of such a group — something like MoveOn or Organizing for Action, but with a Sanders-issues focus. “It’s something I’ve thought about and will be able to bring to him at a future moment, not in the middle of a campaign. This is something we will move on regardless of the outcome of this election, and I will definitely be involved in that.”
Turning to the Republican Party’s nominee, which is making history for all the wrong reasons, Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine writes about the possibility of Dick Morris joining Trump’s campaign:
According to two sources with direct knowledge of the talks, the Trump campaign is in discussions with Dick Morris, the former Clinton adviser-turned Clinton nemesis, about joining the campaign as a strategist. Morris would “join the Hillary unit,” one source explained. “It’s on the table,” a senior Trump adviser added. “Some of the most important info about the Clintons is 20 years old.” [...]
In many ways, the Trump campaign is the most natural fit. Where else could the right's biggest fact-denying pundit feel at home?
The New York Times:
Mr. Trump is essentially arguing that his own bigoted attitude toward Mexicans has disqualified a respected jurist from hearing a court case in which he is a defendant. Under that bizarre logic, he could rationalize ruling out judges from every demographic group he has insulted or happens not to like. At the rate he’s going, there would soon be no person in the land left to judge him. Fortunately, the American legal system doesn’t work that way.
Jose A. DelReal and Mike DeBonis at The Washington Post look at the continued scandal over Trump’s unprecedented and racist comments about US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel:
GOP lawmakers and strategists face uncomfortable questions about how they can support Trump without also tacitly endorsing his criticism of Curiel and his remarks that a Muslim judge might also be questionable. Some Republican lawmakers arriving Monday on Capitol Hill scurried from reporters to avoid answering questions about the remarks; others condemned the comments as wrong while saying they would still support Trump as the Republican nominee. [...]
The episode has distracted from the Trump campaign’s efforts to unite the party ahead of a competitive general-election bid against rival Hillary Clinton, who has secured the delegates necessary to win the Democratic nomination. Democrats hope to use his comments — the latest in a series of attacks and proposals that have infuriated Hispanic voters — to paint the entire Republican Party as out of touch with minorities.
At The Atlantic, James Fallows analyzes Trumps’ attacks:
[W]hat’s clear about Trump’s argument, and what is deeply un-American about it, is its essentialism. Trump is saying that because of who you are, in an ethnic or hereditary sense, he will make judgments about what you think and what role in society you can play. The related assumption, as Garrett Epps explains to irrebuttable effect, is that people’s public roles cannot be separated from their ethnic or religious identities. A “Mexican” judge will think and act as a Mexican, not as a judge.
There is no more un-American concept.
Dana Milbank:
A confluence of three factors has caused a sudden and sharp change in Trump’s fortunes. The media scrutiny has increased significantly since he secured the nomination, and journalists, rather than chasing his outrage du jour, are digging in to report more on Trump University, Trump’s stiffing of charities, his lies and his racism. Hillary Clinton has, finally, made the shift to attacking Trump vigorously over his instability. And Republicans are, belatedly, discovering that their presidential candidate wasn’t putting on a show during the GOP primaries: He’s an actual racist.
Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim at POLITICO also dive into the fallout from Trump’s remarks:
The wheels are already coming off the GOP’s Donald Trump unity train.
In the first major test of relations with Capitol Hill Republicans since Trump became the party’s nominee, his attacks on federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel are sapping any goodwill he had accumulated in private meetings and phone calls with congressional Republicans. But now that House Speaker Paul Ryan and much of the party have endorsed Trump, Republicans are left with little room to maneuver other than decry his comments and hope people move on.
That’s not likely to happen anytime soon, with media attention rising and Trump refusing to back away from his attacks. [...]
When Trump speaks, he’s now speaking for the whole party, including a number of vulnerable senators and House members from battleground states and districts.
On a final note, here’s Eugene Robinson’s take:
Imagine what a disaster it would be if this man were elected president. Really think about it. Then consider your obligation, as a citizen, to prevent such a thing from happening. [...]
GOP leaders who choose “party unity” over principle should know that there is no way back; when you embrace Trump, you make a decision that will stay with you forever. [...]
He’s not going to change. He’s not going to become presidential, he’s not going to grow a thicker skin, he’s not going to take an interest in policy or become less of a bigot. He’s not going to temper his language or close his Twitter account. Donald Trump turns 70 next week. He is who he is.
The question for those who cynically support him: Who are you?