Jamelle Bouie:
How Trump Happened
It’s not just anger over jobs and immigration. White voters hope Trump will restore the racial hierarchy upended by Barack Obama.
Race plays a part in each of these analyses, but its role has not yet been central enough to our understanding of Trump’s rise. Not only does he lead a movement of almost exclusively disaffected whites, but he wins his strongest support in states and counties with the greatest amounts of racial polarization. Among white voters, higher levels of racial resentment have been shown to be associated with greater support for Trump.
Greg Sargent:
Clinton did not merely call on Sanders and his supporters to help unify the party in order to defeat Donald Trump in the general election. She also called on them to be an integral part of her governing coalition.
I don’t know how sincere Clinton is about this, but in a way, it doesn’t matter. Because this effectively functions as a challenge to Sanders and his supporters — to exert as much influence as possible over her agenda as president.
The question of how — or whether — the Sanders movement will endure, once Clinton wins the nomination, has been debated for months, and one possibility is that many Sanders supporters will see trying to influence her presidency as one constructive near-term path forward. If so, that suggests a more positive outcome than the one envisioned by some Sanders critics — namely, that by campaigning on unrealistic goals, Sanders risks disillusioning a new generation, ultimately causing them to give up on politics in disillusionment and despair.
Interested in actual governance? Pay attention to the offer.
Josh Barro with an excellent piece on Paul Ryan’s deliberations re Donald Trump:
Other Republicans have a lot to gain from surrendering to Trump. Chris Christie could become attorney general. Rick Perry probably hopes to be Trump's running mate. If what you care about is proximity to power for power's sake, the calculus of a Trump endorsement is obvious.
But if (as I think is the case) Ryan's real priority is policy, not power, he has nothing to gain from backing Trump right now.
The Upshot:
Toni What do you make of the Quinnipiac polling today? It’s sure to scare liberals.
Nate I think there are two basic ways to look at them.
On the one hand, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Clinton has a comfortable edge in the battleground states. Quinnipiac, for good measure, has been pretty tough on the Democrats over the last few cycles. You can see some sign of that in the racial composition of the surveys. In Florida, for instance, Quinnipiac’s registered voters are 69 percent white, 11 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic. The official data from the Florida secretary of state (since voters are asked their race when they register to vote) is 65.7 percent white, 13.3 percent black and 14.8 percent Hispanic. Similarly, the census’ current population survey in 2014 found that 64.3 percent of registered voters were white, 15.2 percent were black and 17.9 percent Hispanic.
On the other hand, this can be a pretty volatile period in the race.
Think of it as Trump’s best fantasy scenario: missing working class whites are found at last.
USNews:
The Donald's Trump Card Isn't an Ace
The media narrative that Donald Trump is winning over white working-class voters is false.
.Baltimore Sun with a ‘Republicans for Hillary” essay:
Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I unhappily have to conclude that, troubling they both are in their own way, not only does Ms. Clinton edge out Mr. Trump on the sum of the issues I consider most pressing, more critically, Hillary Clinton isn't unbalanced.
With Ms. Clinton, I know what I'm getting. She's a member of the Democratic political elite, with all the flaws associated with those circles: She comes across as arrogant and entitled; she seems unable to connect with the everyday man and appears to think she knows best — better than the taxpayer, the business owner, the parent.
But for her flaws, frustrating though they are, Hillary Clinton doesn't cause me to worry that religious minorities could be jailed, critical press silenced, followers encouraged toward physical violence, and the power of the presidency expanded to dangerous levels to meet the ego of its occupant.
No, it doesn’t mean Hillary is a Republican. Yes, you will be seeing more of this.
Kyle Kondik and Geofrey Skelley:
5 Things You Need to Know About the Coming Trump vs. Clinton Showdown
What to expect if The Donald doesn’t change course, and what to expect if he does.
Dana Houle on the rationale for Bernie stepping back:
It is Sanders’s prerogative to remain in the race. But exercising that prerogative makes it easier for mega-wealthy conservatives to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lethally bludgeon both Clinton’s candidacy and the progressive agenda to which Sanders has devoted his career. This is not solely about combating the grave threat of a Donald Trump presidency. It is also about the potential of a Democratic landslide and the progressive achievements that could follow, which is an opportunity too rare and precious to squander. The best way for Sanders to advance the progressive cause is to end his campaign and unabashedly ask his supporters to join him in helping to elect Hillary Clinton.
Stephen Stromberg on Bernie Sanders’ proposals:
The analysts found that Sanders’s program is very progressive, jacking up taxes massively on the rich and providing a range of new benefits to the poor. Though every working person would face higher payroll taxes, the value of these benefits would leave 95 percent of households better off. They granted Sanders that his single-payer health system, in which the government would pay for everyone’s care and demand no co-payments or other cost-sharing, would expand health-care access and cut the growth of health-care costs, and they made “aggressive” assumptions about how much the new system would reduce drug and other prices.
But there is a massive catch. Sanders’s assurance that he has “a plan to pay for every spending program he has introduced to date” is wrong. And not just wrong, but extravagantly so. Even with his large tax increases, Sanders would fall $18 trillion short over just 10 years. Factoring in interest costs, his plan would add $21 trillion to the debt over a decade. That is more than the roughly $19 trillion the Treasury already owes. And the picture would probably get much worse as time went on. Expanding Social Security, for example, would become much more expensive as more people retired.
Talking about them and taking them seriously doesn’t always mean agreeing with them.
Monkey Cage Blog:
Donald Trump has a well-documented problem with women. Several surveys show that about 70 percent of women rate Trump unfavorably. And recent polls by CBS and CNN both suggest that he could lose female voters to Democrat Hillary Clinton by at least 25 percentage points in November.
Even worse for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, his image among women has grown increasingly negative over the course of the primary campaign — a campaign in which Trump’s offensive comments about women became a major issue. Indeed, a majority of women now rate Trump very unfavorably.
Jonathan Cohn:
Hillary Clinton Is A Progressive Democrat, Despite What You May Have Heard
Here’s what people would be saying about her if she wasn’t running against Bernie Sanders.
US News:
Americans are receptive to economic reforms based on creating a "level playing field" and "rewriting the rules" to aggressively help the middle class and reduce the advantages enjoyed by the rich and big corporations, according to a new survey.
The poll goes a long way toward explaining the political strength of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and insurgent Democratic candidateBernie Sanders, each of whom won his party's presidential primary in Indiana Tuesday. Each of them is advocating, in different ways, an attack on the power of big money and special interests in Washington and pledging to put American workers first.