As always after a primary, the best stories will come tomorrow. Donald Trump crushed his side of things and gave Ted Cruz more to whine about in the ‘who is more disliked’ primary. Cruz is out, but John Kasich will be running in December, still thinking he’s got a shot (although to be fair, he accomplished his goal and took out Cruz).
On the D side, Indiana was a close win for Bernie, which did not change the equation at all: Hillary v Trump in the fall. In fact, Hillary is now more likely than not ignoring Bernie and running against Trump in her remarks. It’s a strategy. Expect to hear complaints about it, but that’s what she’s doing.
There will be Republicans who will endorse Hillary, reluctantly or otherwise. Watch for it.
RAND (I loved the RAND survey in 2008):
Attempts to gauge the outcome of a presidential election more than half a year out clearly need to be accompanied by disclaimers that such estimates are relatively weak predictors of eventual outcome. (Additional information about the methodology is available.) With that caveat, it is interesting to note that from our December baseline to the March survey, the gap between the percentage of voters choosing Republicans or Democrats has grown. Our previous survey results suggested that as of early January, 46.7 percent of voters would vote for a Democrat and 43.1 percent would vote for a Republican in the upcoming presidential election.[3] These results suggested a greater vote for the Democratic candidate. In March, our results indicate that 53.0 percent of voters will vote for a Democrat, and 37.9 percent will vote for a Republican in the upcoming presidential election, suggesting that the Democratic candidates are pulling ahead of the Republicans in the national vote.
Monkey Cage Blog on predicting November:
For example, in February, the Hummel/Rothschild fundamental model gave the Democratic candidate a 48 percent probability of winning — and now gives the Democratic candidate a 53 percent probability of winning, because of Obama’s surging presidential approval numbers. But whether it’s 48 percent or 53 percent, that would be a relatively tight election.
That result, however, is only relevant if we imagine a generic Democratic candidate running against a generic Republican candidate — clearly not applicable to this year’s election. In this cycle, the likely candidates — as of this writing, in all likelihood, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — generate plenty of controversy. Polling and prediction markets on the other hand examine the actual Democratic and Republican candidates. And while the data aren’t extremely clear, our models suggest that the likely Democratic candidate is in firm control.
Chris Cillizza:
Politico reported today on a Florida poll conducted for a business group in the state that shows Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by 13 points and Ted Cruz by nine.
Why is that important? Because if Clinton wins Florida and carries the 19 states (plus D.C.) that have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in each of the last six elections, she will be the 45th president. It's that simple.
The Upshot:
A general election matchup between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton became all but certain on Tuesday after Mr. Trump’s decisive victory in Indiana.
He would begin that matchup at a significant disadvantage.
Yes, it’s still a long way until Election Day. And Mr. Trump has already upended the conventional wisdom many times. But this is when early horse-race polls start to give a rough sense of the November election, and Mr. Trump trails Mrs. Clinton by around 10 percentage points in early general election surveys, both nationally and in key battleground states.
He even trails in some polls of several states where Mitt Romney won in 2012, like North Carolina, Arizona, Missouri and Utah.
There are a lot of implications to Trump losing to Clinton, from “what leverage does Bernie have?” to “what does it mean down ballot?” Watch this November trend to see how this plays out.
Vann R. Newkirk II with a Larry Wilmore explainer even an old white guy like me can grok:
Georgia McDowell was born the daughter of farmers and teachers in North Carolina in 1902. She was my great-grandmother, and she taught me to read, despite the dementia that clouded her mind and the dyslexia that interrupted mine. I loved Miss Georgia, though she kept as many hard lines in her home as she had in her classrooms. One of the hardest lines was common to many black households: The word “nigger” and all of its derivatives were strict taboos in person, on television, and on radio from any source, black or otherwise, so long as she lived and breathed. She’d kept the taboo through decades of teaching black students and raising black children. For most of my childhood, the taboo was absolute.
Miss Georgia certainly would not have enjoyed the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where comedian Larry Wilmore ended his performance by blowing past her taboo in the most public of places to the most revered of people. “You did it, my nigga,” he said, and then looked at the president, who returned his gesture of affection with a chest thump. He had just called the most powerful man in the world a nigga to his face.
Hey, want to know how you’re likely to die (assuming Trump isn’t in the WH)? If you do, check this visual:
Ever wondered how things might come to an end? This chart visualizes the nation’s cause-of-death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to give you a better idea.
Created by Nathan Yau from Flowing Data, the interactive visualizationshows how cause of death across 20 different categories varies according to age, gender and race. The height of each colored chunk shows the percentage of people dying because of a particular cause at that age. It’s based on data from between 2005 and 2014, so it’s fairly up-to-date. Yau explains what you can find out:
David A. Graham:
But although patently absurd, the incident is interesting as an example of how Trump manipulates false stories from unreliable sources. The entertainer has no hesitations about spreading blatant falsehoods—just take a look at his Politifact track record—but this case is interesting because it shows the symbiotic relationship between Trump and the National Enquirer.
It turns out that Trump is close friends with the immaculately named David Pecker, CEO of the National Enquirer. And the Enquirer has run a whole slate of stories that are awfully unflattering for Trump’s Republican rivals. The one that got the most attention—in part because Trump’s surrogates eagerly talked about it in the national media—was a claim that Ted Cruz had several mistresses. (Like the JFK story, that one appears to be entirely baseless.) But Slate rounded up a few more of the many stories the tabloid has run, from the vaguely truth-adjacent (a claim that Ben Carson left a sponge in a patient’s brain was traced to actual lawsuits, but an allegation in a lawsuit is far different from a claim being proven true) to the bogus (love children, hookers, etc.).
A cynic might even speculate that these stories were published simply so that Trump could bring them up on the stump. New York’s Gabriel Sherman did the cynics one better in October, reporting that in fact the stories had been placed in the rag by the Trump campaign. Sherman relied on anonymous sources; both the newspaper and the Trump campaign flatly denied the claim.
Georgetown University Health Policy Institute:
Medicaid expansion has led to declines in the rate of uninsurance, improved access to care for enrollees, and financial savings for states. A new study points to an additional benefit to newly eligible Medicaid enrollees: lowering debt.
Prior studies indicate that Medicaid reduces medical debt, but a new study examined the impact of Medicaid expansion on a range of measures of financial well-being. Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and the University of Michigan published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), The Effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansions on Financial Well-Being. Using credit reports of low-income people across the country, researchers examined six financial indicators: total debt, debt past due, credit card balance, credit card debt past due, the number of non-medical bills sent to collections, and the total non-medical balance outstanding in collections.
The study found that Medicaid provides families with additional financial protections. In particular, Medicaid expansion significantly reduced the number of unpaid bills and the amount of debt sent to third parties for collection. Conservatively, Medicaid eligibility expansions lowered non-medical debt by $600 to $1,000 for the previously uninsured population, according to the authors.
Fivethirtyeight on the Never Trump movement:
harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I think a few things happened, not the least of which is that Cruz is unacceptable to most moderate and liberal voters. That just killed him in the Northeast. And once Trump started putting together 50-plus percent in a number of states, voters decided that they wanted to move on from the primary. There’s obviously more to it than that, but that’s my starting point.
clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Right, what we have here is a failure to communicate. Cruz’s campaign was always about turning out the base of the Republican Party, activists, etc., who were going to bring on the new era of Reagan. He doubled down on the 1990s/early 2000s cultural conservatism of the GOP instead of making the tent bigger, as a lot of people suggested the party do post-2012. That killed him this year as he tried to become the nexus of #NeverTrump. There was some interesting stuff, for example, in this Politico Mag piece about Cruz missing the mark on Indiana’s moderate Republicans in particular.
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Don’t forget, though, that Trump’s gains in the polls coincided with the period when he started pressing the case about the Republican primary system being rigged against him. For many Republicans, it’s no longer a choice between Trump and Cruz, but a choice between Trump and chaos, or Trump and a contested convention.
Pre-convention StopTrump failed because people couldn’t rally around Ted Cruz, a guy everyone despises. Post-convention NeverTrump is a different animal. Both D’s and R’s will rally, but the upside is higher on the D side. See Cruz and his election eve diatribe.
Matt Lewis:
Was this confrontation the end of the road for “Lyin’ Ted”?
“You’ll find out tomorrow, Indiana don’t want you,” a Trump supporter averred.
Cruz, the same man who prided himself as an excellent debater, had just lost one to some pretty average Trump supporters.
Maybe it was Cruz’s patented “pregnant pause" that hurt him most. It had worked so well in formal debates, but here, on the street, it only allowed these rabble-rousers in "Make America Great Again" garb to finish his sentences for him.
“America is a better country ..." Cruz tried to say, but was interrupted with the words, “without you.”
“And a question that everyone here should ask ...” Cruz began.
“Are you Canadian?” came the response from the peanut gallery.
This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
The savior, it seems, had been forsaken.
Eventually, the revolution destroys the revolutionaries. Just ask Robespierre.
Simon Maloy:
Bill Kristol redefines “never”: The always-wrong pundit explains how he and his GOP pals will come around to Trump
John Aravosis:
I’ve seen people talk about how Hillary Clinton is “bad” on fracking, and Wall Street, and money in politics, so they’re just not going to vote for her in November unless she does something “big” to win them over. But how is Donald Trump on all of those issues? Far worse than Hillary, in fact. And how is Donald Trump on the civil rights of gays, women, blacks, Latinos, and Muslims? How is Donald Trump on climate change, immigration, criminal justice, gun violence, privacy, health care, and caring about the middle and working classes? And how is Donald Trump on a woman’s right to choose? Awful, awful, awful.
If you choose not to support Hillary in the fall, because of some misguided notion of what she “owes” you, then you choose to cede the election to a man who will destroy every cause that Bernie Sanders, and you, once claimed to care about. And while you may be in a position in life that it won’t affect you directly if Trump bans Muslims, repeals Obamacare, and does everything he can to hurt gays, blacks, Latinos and women, is that really why you felt the Bern this election — because you put your own disappointment over the needs of the many?
Look, I get it. It feels totally unfair that your guy lost. We’ve all been there. (The election of 2000 comes to mind.) But cutting off your nose, and the collective noses of every American, out of a personal sense of pique is the last thing your revolution was about.
David Wasserman:
In the House, where Democrats would need to pick up 30 seats, Republicans are more insulated by gerrymandering and the fact that filing deadlines are now closed in over 80 percent of districts. On a micro-level, it’s extremely difficult to count 30 GOP seats that Democrats have a chance to win. But on a macro-level, if Clinton does end up beating Trump by more than eight points nationally, there could be some surprises, particularly in highly educated and heavily minority districts. So maybe Trump changes my range from Dems picking up 5-15 seats to perhaps 10-20, but that’s still a long way from 30.