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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with coverage of yesterday’s Super Tuesday election.
First, Clinton’s victory speech in its entirety.
Vox transcribes:
You know all across our country today Democrats voted to break down barriers so we can all rise together. I am so delighted to be here with you in Florida. I congratulate Sen. Sanders on his strong showing and campaigning.
I'm grateful to all of you who voted for me, to the volunteers and organizers. I know you worked your hearts out. To all my friends, many of a lifetime who traveled to all the states to tell people about the candidate they knew, and the hundreds of thousands of people who went to HillaryClinton.com to give what they could – most less than $100 – now this campaign moves forward to the Crescent City, Motor City and beyond.
We're going to work for every vote, and we will need all of you to keep volunteering, contributing, doing everything you can, talking to your friends and neighbors because this country belongs to all of us not just those at the top. Not just the people who look one way, worship one way or even think one way.
America is strong when we're all strong. We know we've got work to do. That work, that work is not to make America great again. America never stopped being great. We have to make America whole. We have to fill in what's been hallowed out.
We have to make strong the broken place, re-stitch the bonds of trust and respect across our country. Now, it might be unusual, as I've said before, for a presidential candidate to say this, but I'm going to keep saying it: I believe what we need in America today is more love and kindness.
Trying to divide America between us and them is wrong, and we're not going to let it work. Whether we like it or not, we're all in this together my friends. We all have to do our part. Unfortunately, too many of those with the most wealth and the most power in this country today seem to have forgotten that basic truth about America.
Yesterday I was at the old south meeting house in Boston where nearly two and a half centuries ago American patriots organized the original Tea Party. I had to wonder what they would make of corporations that seem to have absolutely no loyalty to the country that gave them so much. What would they say about student loan companies that overcharge young people, struggling to get out of debt, even young men and women serving our country in the military or corporations that shift their headquarters overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Like Johnson Controls and Auto Parts from Wisconsin, that we taxpayers helped to bail out with the auto rescue back in 2008, now they're turning their back on America.
I'm interested this making things right. Let there be no doubt, if you cheat your employees, exploit consumers, pollute our environment or rip off the taxpayers, we're going to hold you accountable.
But if you do the right thing, if you invest in your workers and in America's future, then we'll stand with you. We all need to work together to break down the barriers holding back our families and our country. The middle class needs a raise.
Add more good jobs, jobs that pay enough for a family to live on. Even put a little away for retirement. Jobs that provide dignity and a bright future. We have to invest in manufacturing and business infrastructure, enough clean energy for every home in America. Don't let anybody tell you we can't make things this America anymore because we can, we are and we will.
Together we can break down the barriers that face working class families across network especially in struggling rust belt communities and small towns that have been hallowed out by lost jobs and lost hope. Families who for generations kept our lights on and our factories running.
We can break down barriers for families who have seen too many black children harassed, humiliated and even killed. We can break down barriers for voters in North Carolina who have been systemically disenfranchised. We can break down barriers for hard working immigrants who are too often exploited and intimidated. We have to defend all our rights, workers rights and women's rights, civil rights and voting rights, LGBT rights and rights for people with disabilities.
It starts by standing with President Obama when he nominates a strong, progressive justice to the Supreme Court.
I know, I know too many Americans have lost faith in our future. We hear it in the voices of parents who don't know how they're going to give their kids the opportunities they deserve. We see it in the eyes of working men and women who don't expect anything to come easy, but wonder why it has to be quite so hard.
Like many of you, I find strength and purpose from my family and my faith. They gave me simple words to live by: Do all the good you can for all the people you can for as long as you can.
That is why I believe, deeply, that if we resist the forces trying to drive us apart, we can come together to make this country work for every one. The struggling, the striving and the successful. If we all do our part we can restore our common faith in our common future. That's the spirit powering this campaign. It comes from the young janitor in Arkansas who stopped buying junk food and put off getting a haircut so he could contribute to it. It comes from the disabled combat veteran from Nebraska who sent in $10. In 70 years of his life he never donated to a political campaign until now.
You can join us too. Go to hillaryclinton.com. Make a donation. Text, join to 47246.
Let me leave you with a story that's inspired so many of us. By now we all know what happened in Flint, Michigan, don't we? Our city's children were poisoned by toxic water because the governor wanted to save a little money. There's another story in Flint. It's a story of a community that's been knocked down, but refused to be knocked out. It is hundreds of union plumbers coming from across the country to help install new water fixtures. It's students raising funds for water deliveries and showing up to distribute supplies. It's the united auto workers and general motors donating millions of dollars to help.
When I visited Flint a few weeks ago, I went to the house of prayer missionary Baptist church. The congregation locked arms and sang. We've come too far from where we started from. They're not about to quit now.
We know there are many other Flints out there. Communities that are hurting and need help. We've come too far in this country to let us turn back. We're going to build on the progress that we've made. We save the auto industry thanks to President Obama. Now we've got to create new jobs and industries of the future.
We now insured 90 percent of Americans thanks to President Obama. Now we have to finish the job and get to 100 percent. We have come too far to stop now. We've got to keep going.
Keep working. Keep breaking down those barriers and imagine what we can build together when each and every American has the chance to live up to his or her own God given potential.
Thank you all so very much. Thank you.
On to the analysis, which includes coverage of the sheer scope of Clinton’s victories and the implications for the Democratic primary race as it moves forward.
New York Times reports:
Hillary Clinton took full command of the Democratic presidential race on Tuesday as she rolled to major victories over Bernie Sanders in Texas, Virginia and across the South and proved for the first time that she could build a national coalition of racially diverse voters that would be crucial in the November election.
Based on results from Democratic primaries and caucuses in 11 states, Mrs. Clinton succeeded in containing Mr. Sanders to states he was expected to win, like Vermont and Oklahoma, and overpowering him in predominantly black and Hispanic areas that were rich in delegates needed for the Democratic nomination.
Mrs. Clinton, who also won Massachusetts and showed notable strength among Southern white voters, came away with a strong delegate lead over Mr. Sanders — notably larger than the one that Barack Obama had over her at this point in the 2008 presidential race.
The closest race of the night was in Massachusetts, where Mr. Sanders campaigned aggressively and where many liberals shared his politics and had elected his ideological ally, Senator Elizabeth Warren. But Mrs. Clinton, buoyed by strong support in the greater Boston area and working-class towns like Lowell, New Bedford and Springfield, edged out Mr. Sanders, who fared best in western Massachusetts and towns bordering Vermont and New Hampshire.
Mrs. Clinton was set to win at least 150 more delegates than Mr. Sanders from Tuesday’s states; the final delegate allocation will be determined in the coming days. That outcome would give Mrs. Clinton a bigger lead than Mr. Obama eventually established in 2008, which she was unable to overcome. The delegate haul resulted from a broad cross-section of support for Mrs. Clinton: In Alabama, Georgia and Virginia, blacks accounted for more than half the population in some districts, while Hispanics dominated many of the districts in Texas that allocated delegates on Tuesday. Mrs. Clinton had some of her best results in these regions, and also did well in largely white areas of the south.
FiveThirtyEight reports:
Sanders is not having a good night. Last week, we published demographic targets in each state. These were not predictions; instead, they were estimates, based on the racial composition of each state and other demographics, of how well a candidate would have to do to get half of pledged delegates nationwide.
Clinton is running ahead of her benchmarks by an average of 16 percentage points tonight, which is equivalent to her holding a 16-point lead over Sanders in national polls. Sanders won a few of his “must-win” states tonight, but not others, and the huge deficits he racked up to Clinton in Southern states will make it hard for him to make up his deficit later on.
Los Angeles Times reports:
Hillary Clinton emerged from Super Tuesday having regained the mantle of prohibitive front-runner, decisively winning the biggest and most important states in an election that confirmed her overwhelming support from minority voters and left her rival with no clear opening to catch her.
Clinton appeared likely to rack up twice as many delegates from Tuesday’s contests as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as she swept through the South with crushing victories in delegate-rich states including Georgia, Virginia and Texas. She also won a narrow victory in Massachusetts.
Along the way, she won more than 8 in 10 African American voters taking part in Democratic primaries, as well as two-thirds of Democratic Latino voters in Texas and a majority of white voters in at least six of the 11 states holding Democratic nominating contests.
Despite a determined effort, Sanders has been unable to expand his support much beyond the white, liberal voters who began flocking to him last fall. In a Democratic contest, that’s an unsustainable position. More than 40% of the Democratic turnout Tuesday was projected to be nonwhite voters.
“You can't win the nomination writing off the most diverse states,” said Brian Fallon, Clinton’s press secretary. “That's the lesson from tonight.”
Even without counting her support from super-delegates — Democratic Party leaders and elected officials who can vote at the convention for whichever candidate they want — Clinton has pulled so far ahead of Sanders that he would have to win more than 60% of the delegates still up for grabs to get the nomination. Because the Democrats award delegates proportionately to each candidate’s vote, Sanders would need huge victories in most of the remaining states to achieve that.
Once a candidate falls behind, catching up is extremely hard, because even in a landslide both candidates receive delegates. Clinton learned that lesson eight years ago when she was the trailing candidate, trying unsuccessfully to catch then-Sen. Barack Obama. Now, she seems likely to be on the winning side of the equation.
NBC News reports:
Hillary Clinton took a decisive step toward locking down the Democratic presidential nomination on Super Tuesday, winning seven of the 11 states up for grabs, including the biggest prize — Texas — and likely racking up enough delegates to greatly foreclose Bernie Sanders' path to the presidential nomination.
Sanders had low expectations for the evening, and his top advisers insisted they were happy with the outcome. But what matters is the all-important delegate count, and Clinton simply won much larger states by much larger margins and more of them.
The true ramifications of the night, however, will not be known for some time as delegates are apportioned.
If Clinton dealt a body blow to Sanders Tuesday, she'll hope for a knockout in two weeks, when the next grouping of large states vote on March 15. Delegate-rich Ohio, Florida, Missouri, Illinois and North Carolina will all hold contests for a total of 693 pledged delegates at stake. In the meantime, her campaign will work to mitigate losses in upcoming caucus states and compete hard in next week's Michigan primary.
The larger the delegate lead Clinton builds up, the more pressure Sanders will face to step aside and let Clinton focus on the general election, especially with Donald Trump closing in on his party's nomination. Clinton's team and her allies are aware this has to be done delicately.
"With what's already happened, I think it's pretty clear that Democrats are on their way to nominating Hillary Clinton," former Rep. Barney Frank, who has endorsed Clinton, told MSNBC. Of Sanders, Frank said, "I don't think it's fair to ask him to drop out or diminish him, but I think that will be the effect on the other [Democratic] voters."
The bottom line is that than an improbable number of things probably have to go right for Sanders and wrong for Clinton for the Vermonter to win the nomination at this point.
Slate reports:
When the first Super Tuesday polls closed in Virginia, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Texas, one thing was clear: Hillary Clinton would have a great night.
Riding momentum from her South Carolina victory, Clinton scored big wins in each state. And as with last Saturday, her victories rested on strong support from black voters. In Virginia, exit polls showed her winning 84 percent of blacks; in Georgia, 83 percent; in Tennessee, 82 percent; in Arkansas, 88 percent. She also scored big with Hispanic voters, winning them by a 2-to-1 margin (65 percent to 34 percent) and securing a solid victory in Texas.
The biggest story from Democrats’ Super Tuesday isn’t the horse race between Sanders and Clinton, however; it’s the turnout drop from the previous open primary, in 2008. This fits the overall trend of this election, where Democrats are less likely to vote in the primaries than their Republican counterparts, who have turned out in huge numbers to vote for a grab bag of different candidates in a competitive and high-stakes nomination battle
Primary season turnout isn’t a reliable guide to general election results. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from it. If there’s a consistent result in the Democratic primaries thus far, it’s this: Everywhere black voters have had a chance to vote in significant numbers—South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, etc.—they’ve either come close to or exceeded their 2008 vote share. In South Carolina, blacks were 61 percent of the electorate versus 55 percent in 2008; in Georgia, they were 49 percent of the electorate versus 51 percent in 2008; and in Virginia they were 25 percent of the electorate versus 30 percent in 2008. And just as they’d backed Obama in 2008, they backed Hillary Clinton by similar margins this year, delivering supermajorities—almost 90 percent in some places—to her campaign.
It’s not wise to extrapolate these results to a general election, either. We can’t predict black turnout or vote share from these numbers in the primary. But we can say this: After years of speculation over black voters and their participation—will they turn out for Democrats who aren’t Barack Obama?—the answer is yes, they will.
What we can see from the 2016 results, thus far, is that two presidential cycles of this successful contact had an effect. Not only are black voters increasingly regular voters, but unlike many other Americans they also seem to believe in their efficacy as voters—that, if they organize and vote, they will change things for the better.
If true, this is a powerful turn, and not just in the Democratic primary. If black voters believe that they matter, then they will turn out in the general election too. And if they turn out like they did for Obama, then the Democratic Party—and Hillary Clinton in particular—could have a clear path to the White House.
Courtesy of Kossack Aphra Behn, an op-ed from The Huffington Post, written by former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin:
I've known Hillary and worked with her. She can be serious and funny. She inspires fervent camaraderie in her staff. She is the most intelligent woman I have ever met.
More importantly, she has the right temperament to lead us safely through the labyrinths of a dangerous world. She is both tough enough to be commander in chief, and compassionate enough to understand what our country needs to do to restore faith in the American Dream.
I first knew Hillary at governor's conferences when she sat there as President Clinton's spouse at the side of the conference table, taking notes while working for the Children's Defense Fund. I knew her when I was deputy secretary of education, and she took on the brave health care reform fight. Sometimes I sat in the same room with Hillary and Bill. What I remember most is not the subject being discussed, but their equal respect for one another. She paid close attention to what he said, and he listened intently to what she said. I learned what a good listener she was.
When I was the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland (1996-99) I saw her negotiate with world leaders and receive respect. At the Davos World Economic Forum in 1997, (where we took time out to ski together), after she had given her speech, presidents and prime ministers were already urging her to run for president.
I was there in in 1995 at the Fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing when I heard her voice soar over the crowd of thousands of women gathered from very part of the world, under stormy skies in drenched sari's and black burkas: "Women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights."
I can still hear the exultant cheers that made the sun come out. Year after year, Hillary has been voted the most admired woman in the world.
I trust Hillary. I trust her to keep our country safe, I trust her to motivate our country to take the lead on fighting climate change, I trust her to reduce the extraordinary high level of child poverty, which she focused on in her book, "It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us," published 20 years ago.
The truth is, she cares for the same people as Bernie does -- those who are left out. The difference is that she understands -- through years of experience and activism -- that American revolutions have never occurred overnight. Even the LGBT revolution, unusually swift as it was, is happening 47 years after the Stonewall riots in New York City. Change happens in America, more rapidly than in other countries but we move forward step by step.
And I trust her to raise American families' income by giving us equal pay for equal work, affordable childcare and paid family and medical leave.
And, most importantly, I trust her to respond competently and carefully to whatever crises our country may face in 2017 and beyond.
Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.