Philip Bump:
A new poll from Quinnipiac University shows how the field has evolved since December, back when there were 14 Republicans to ask about, not six. Trump jumped from 28 percent support to 39 percent, essentially absorbing the equivalent support of those eight candidates who dropped out. (Those eight totaled 12 percent of support in December.)
This increase came despite Trump still being the candidate who the largest number of Republicans find unacceptable. Two-thirds of Republicans either plan to vote for him or refuse to do so. For the other candidates, at most a third have an opinion one way or the other.
But wait! New NBC/WSJ poll (arguably still the best media poll) has Trump falling and Cruz rising:
Ted Cruz has inched ahead of Donald Trump among Republican voters nationally, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
In the survey — which contrasts sharply with other national polls — Cruz draws 28 percent, narrowly leading Trump at 26 percent. Trailing behind are Marco Rubio at 17 percent, John Kasich at 11 percent, Ben Carson at 10 percent and Jeb Bush at 4 percent.
Outlier? More below.
Okay, then. When you have a poll that’s different from all the others… wait for another batch. But Trump is still in a race with Cruz and someone else to be determined. Just when you think it’s settled… it’s not.
Janie Valencia:
It's bad practice, however, to rely solely on one poll. It's possible that the NBC/WSJ poll is an outlier -- but it's also possible that it is picking up a change in the campaign. A clearer picture should emerge as more polls are released.
In addition, it's important to remember that there is no such thing as a national primary. And while Cruz may be leading in one poll of a hypothetical race, Trump still has a strong lead in upcoming primary elections in South Carolina (17-point lead) and Nevada (27-point lead).
In South Carolina (Bloomberg):
Donald Trump holds a 19-point lead over Ted Cruz among those likely to vote in Saturday's South Carolina Republican primary, with Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush locked in a close race for third and John Kasich showing no signs of a surge.
TPM:
Kevin Madden, a GOP strategist and former spokesman for Mitt Romney, told the Los Angeles Times that Trump’s views on 9/11 and the Iraq War were “outside the mainstream of Republican thought.”
“His views in that debate were more associate with Code Pink and the liberal left and that might give people pause, rather than reinforce what they liked about some of his debate performances,” Madden told the newspaper.
Glenn McCall, who represents South Carolina on the Republican National Committee, seemed tosuggest to Politico that Trump's 9/11 comments wouldn't play well in the South Carolina primary.
"I think most South Carolinians understand what President Bush did to protect our country and know that 9/11 was no fault of his, and they appreciate what he did over those eight years to respond and keep us safe,” McCall was quoted as saying.
Despite the hemming and hawing from the chattering class, if Trump's 9/11 comments have had a detrimental effect in the Palmetto State it hasn't shown yet. A poll released Tuesday by the Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling found Trump leading in the state by a 17-point margin.
Kevin Drum:
WTF? Per-capita GDP will grow 4.5 percent? And not just in a single year: [Amherst professor Gerald] Friedman is projecting that it will grow by an average of 4.5 percent every year for the next decade. Productivity growth will double compared to CBO projections—and in case you're curious, there has never been a 10-year period since World War II in which productivity grew 3.18 percent. Not one. And miraculously, the employment-population ratio, which has been declining since
2000 and has never reached 65 percent ever in history, will rise to 65 percent in a mere ten years.I've generally tried to go easy on Bernie Sanders. I like his vision, and I like his general attitude toward Wall Street. But this is insane. If anything, it's worse than the endless magic asterisks that Republicans use to pretend that their tax plans will supercharge the economy and pay for themselves. It's not even remotely in the realm of reality. If it were, France and Germany and Denmark would all be Croesian paradises by now.
A group of stuffy establishment economists says "no credible economic research" supports Friedman's analysis, which "undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic." Or, in Austan Goolsbee's more colorful language, Sanders' plans have "evolved into magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars."
Enough is enough. Everyone needs to get back to reality. This ain't it.
This isn’t a hit piece. It’s a WTF piece. There are some other stories that have to be a bit concerning (see polling data below) but then again this is ‘everyone’s nervous’ time.
WSJ with more on Bernienomics:
Four leading Democratic economists sharply criticized Bernie Sanders for citing “extreme claims” about the economic effects of his presidential campaign proposals, which they say risk undercutting the Democrats’ reputation as “the party of responsible arithmetic.”
The critique of a fellow Democratic presidential candidate came in an open letter, posted online, that was signed by all three former directors of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers—essentially, the White House’s economic brain trust—and one director for President Bill Clinton.
It won’t make a bit of difference to true believers, but it might with those still on the fence.
Nevada is coming up fast:
We won’t know who is really winning until it’s over. It’s a low turnout caucus. Don’t believe NV polling, it’s not good enough.
Dara Lind:
The Clinton campaign's theory of the primary has always been that once it's in the hands of nonwhite voters, she'll win. So now, instead of undermining that theory to lower expectations in Nevada, they're portraying Nevada in a light that's consistent with their theory.
Expectation setting is a game of eleventy-dimensional chess, and it often results in candidates vastly understating their own chances. But the Clinton campaign's sudden uncertainty about Nevada is real. And in part, it really is driven by fears that Latinos won't turn out in 2008 numbers — even though their share of the electorate has grown.
And they're not the only ones worrying.
But after Nevada is SC and Super Tuesday. If you haven’t seen the polling from PPP polls:
Clinton leads in 10 of 12 Early March Primaries; Benefits From Overwhelming Black Support
State
|
Clinton Support
|
Sanders Support
|
Spread
|
Alabama
|
59%
|
31%
|
Clinton +28
|
Arkansas
|
57%
|
32%
|
Clinton +25
|
Georgia
|
60%
|
26%
|
Clinton +34
|
Louisiana
|
60%
|
29%
|
Clinton +31
|
Massachusetts
|
42%
|
49%
|
Sanders +7
|
Michigan
|
50%
|
40%
|
Clinton +10
|
Mississippi
|
60%
|
26%
|
Clinton +34
|
Oklahoma
|
46%
|
44%
|
Clinton +2
|
Tennessee
|
58%
|
32%
|
Clinton +26
|
Texas
|
57%
|
34%
|
Clinton +23
|
Virginia
|
56%
|
34%
|
Clinton +22
|
Vermont
|
10%
|
86%
|
Sanders +76
|
Vermont is apparently a statistical dead heat (after all, Bernie is only up by 76).
Meanwhile national polls from Quinnipiac (Hillary +2, no change) and Morning Consult (Hillary +8, 1 point increase) haven’t changed significantly since last week, though obviously much tighter since before IA and NH. Suffolk/USA Today has Hillary +10, nothing recent to compare to. Reuters/Ipsos also has Hillary +10 (down 2), so as usual, I don’t believe Quinnipiac. Figure the aggregate to be ~Hillary +8.
Just for fun, Obama took the lead in national polling from Hillary on Feb 13. 2008.
Feels like we’ve settled into some kind of equilibrium. And then we have real, actual votes every week x3 (NV Feb 20, SC Feb 27, Super Tuesday March 1.) Play nice with each other until then. And after, even.
Vox on how a sharp Scalia dissent made the liberal majority opinion better:
None of this is to say that Justice Scalia was a liberal on the Court. He was not, as any number of anecdotes will reveal. These conservative contributions are easy to observe because they can be seen in his majority opinions. But under the right circumstances, conservatives can be important for the development of good liberal law. These contributions are much harder to observe, for it is the shadow of Scalia's dissent and his critical evaluation that improved liberal opinions behind the scenes.
Justice Ginsburg has attested to this empirically. My colleagues' scholarship suggests that the rational tactic of a Supreme Court justice committed to liberal doctrine — as many commentators presume Ginsburg is — would be to improve the quality of her draft opinions in order to win the support of a justice like Scalia. That tactic reflects the rules established by the founders of the Court. And perhaps testimony to their apparent wisdom is the most fitting tribute to Scalia of all.
Here’s another ‘say something nice about Scalia’ piece, this time from Slate on Fourth Amendment views:
Scalia wrote several opinions vigorously protecting the Fourth Amendment. “Justice Scalia actually believed that a group of revolutionaries cared deeply about privacy,” says Richard Myers, a law professor and former federal prosecutor. Scalia’s Fourth Amendment opinions, Myers added, illustrate that while “he did not believe in a living Constitution, he believed in a powerful, binding one.” For example, in Kyllo v. United States, the court held that the use of a thermal-imaging device to keep tabs on a private home is a Fourth Amendment search.
Greg Sargent:
What this really means is that this dispute will be for the people to decide. That may sound obvious, but it may prove more meaningful than it sounds, on several levels. Democrats are betting that the American people will see their reading of what the Constitution obliges the Senate to do as the more reasonable one, i.e., that voters will agree that Senate Republicans should consider Obama’s nominee, and that their refusal to do so reflects the broader GOP strategy of scorched earth anti-Obama obstruction that has produced so much gridlock and chaos. In this narrative, as Brian Beutler puts it, Republicans have sought for years to render normal functions of government dysfunctional as an explicit political goal, and the current GOP posture is a uniquely glaring symbol of this GOP “disdain for, and strategic resistance to, Obama’s presidency.”
To paraphrase James Carville, it’s the Supreme Court, stupid. Vote with that in mind.
Rembert Browne with a great read, not because Hillary is better than Bernie, but because this is what candidates need to do:
The moment was a brief callback to the controversial opinion of scholar Michael Eric Dyson in his November 2015 New Republic piece, which said that Hillary Clinton will do more for black people than Barack Obama. And like Dyson further argues in his book, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, Obama uniquely had to comply with the expectations of whites. That’s not something Clinton will ever have to deal with to the same degree.
Hillary then followed up the Flint statement with the following series of points, all delivered in about two minutes:
- "We still need to face the painful reality that African-Americans are nearly three times as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage."
- "Something's wrong when the median wealth for black families is just a tiny fraction of the median wealth of white families."
- "Something is wrong when African-American men are far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white men convicted of the same offenses."
- "Black kids get arrested for petty crimes, but white CEOs get away with fleecing our entire country — there is something wrong."
- "Just imagine with me for a minute if white kids were 500 percent more likely to die from asthma than black kids — 500 percent."
- Imagine if a white baby in South Carolina were twice as likely to die before her first birthday than an African-American baby.
- "Imagine the outcry. Imagine the resources that would flood in."
- "Now, these inequities are wrong, but they're also immoral. And it'll be the mission of my presidency to bring them to an end. We have to begin by facing up to the reality of systemic racism."
I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The tiptoeing had vanished. She wasn’t trying to win everyone’s vote by flying as close to the middle as possible. And even though the room was markedly black, these thoughts were now on her permanent electoral record for all to see. The use of “imagine” was powerful, because it comes with an almost implied,You can’t imagine it, because that shit wouldn’t fly. She was finally just saying it, bluntly. Hearing this, in February, was so much more powerful than any policy plan. Because before many people want to know your plan — or before people will ever truly consider believing in your plan — they want to know that you understand their world.