Late results from yesterday’s elections here, main story from AZ with Donald Trump (47%) and Hillary Clinton (58%) winners. Bernie Sanders had even bigger wins in ID (78%) and UT (80%), but he only netted +6 delegates for the night (57 Bernie and 51 Hillary) [update has it closer to +17], illustrating the difficulties of delegate math for him (he trails by 300). Ted Cruz won UT (69%) and/but Trump increased his delegate lead by 18. As long as John Kasich insists on staying in, Trump’s path to the nomination will continue.
More tomorrow from the pundits.
NBC News:
Early and absentee voting is changing the face of elections in the United States. Casting a ballot before Election Day allows campaigns to build advantages - sometimes significant ones.
In the Arizona presidential primary Tuesday, the early vote will be pivotal in determining the outcome. Arizona has a very high early and absentee voting rate. In the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, around 75 percent of 505,613 overall ballots cast were of this type. Who wins the absentee vote in Arizona has a very high likelihood of winning the state.
Tampa Bay beat Cuba 4-1 in Havana. Here’s the box score. So awesomely ordinary.
Charles P. Pierce, with transcript here (but Charlie has the good bits):
He, Trump dropped by to chat with The Washington Post's editorial board—also d/b/a Fred Hiatt's Rescue Mission for Unrepentant Torturers—and, to its credit, the newspaper released the complete transcripts of the meeting, probably to prevent bootleg copies from leaking as if they were the political Basement Tapes. Because the meeting was just freaking awesome. ..
Of course, at the end, He, Trump decided to engage in what sounds like some lighthearted sexual harassment of one of the editors at the meeting. This is a great fcking country.
Real Clear Politics:
ERICK ERICKSON: Trump is not going to win... He's losing to Hillary in the latest polling...
LAURA INGRAHAM: Could you write an op-ed for your site, or for another site, about why Hillary Clinton will be a better commander in chief than Donald Trump? And would you pen that?
ERICK ERICKSON: I don't think either of them are good, why do you want to make it binary? We can run another candidate. It is not a binary choice for me...
LAURA INGRAHAM: My point is, Hillary is gonna win... You want to beat Hillary, correct? I do too...
Glenn Kessler:
All of Donald Trump’s Four-Pinocchio ratings, in one place
Yes, it matters. Oh, not to his voters. But there’s fewer of them than you think.
Doug Sosnik:
The 2016 presidential election is looking like it will be a matchup between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. While this election season has been full of surprises, it is likely that the most decisive period in the election has already passed, the outcome is set and this presidential election will be the first time since 1952 that Democrats will hold on to the White House for three terms in a row.
Charlie Cook:
Cook Political Report House Editor David Wasserman has written in recent days that it is now possible that the GOP House majority could be in danger. A far more plausible scenario, assuming the GOP presidential ticket is weak, would be a loss of a dozen or more seats for Republicans, cutting their House margin in half. Given the GOP’s difficulty in pushing through legislation even with the largest House majority since 1928, Paul Ryan will have a devil of a time winning votes if he loses this cushion.
All of this is why it is so interesting to see so many congressional Republicans sitting on the sidelines of this potentially pivotal GOP nomination contest. If the hard-core conservatives in the Freedom Caucus members consider Ryan and Boehner squishy moderates, what will they think of Trump, whose ideological roots are so shallow that they don’t even add up to a political philosophy?
Five Thirty Eight:
The Most Important States On Trump’s Path To 1,237 Delegates
On Monday, we published the results of a survey of fellow presidential election delegate obsessives that we conducted in an effort to map out Donald Trump’s route to the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the Republican nomination. So for this week’s politics Slack chat, we also gathered the available members of that panel to talk over/geek out on the results. The transcript below has been lightly edited
Ross Baird with an intriguing long read:
Silicon Valley’s Unchecked Arrogance
In its mind, Silicon Valley creates the future, while the rest of the world will soon become the “idle class.” What if they instead helped people build wealth for themselves?
This is from a Hillary supporter (Joan Walsh); the controversial point is one we have debated here:
Clinton’s big wins last week almost certainly guarantee her the nomination. Sanders promises to fight on, however, and he deserves to. He’s raising crucial issues, and he’s already helped pull Clinton to the left. But if he wants his effort to yield lasting organizing victories for the left, he better study the lessons of the first half of his campaign. One thing should already be clear: No multiracial, left-wing coalition can be successfully built out from a white base. Let’s stop trying.
Ed Kilgore:
Promising to make his SCOTUS list public right now is smart, because otherwise it's an empty promise, and involving the Heritage Foundation in developing it is key to its credibility. Not only has Heritage had a long history of vetting Republican appointees; its current president, Jim DeMint, is arguably the most reliable of "constitutional conservatives," a man who believes conservative policy prescriptions ought to be permanently protected from the occasional liberal majority via a divinely inspired and unchanging Supreme Law.
Bonding with conservatives over SCOTUS makes some psychological sense for Trump as well. Nothing symbolizes the betrayal of the conservative rank and file — whose abiding exemplar is arguably the humble anti-choice activist staffing phone banks and licking envelopes to protect the unborn from "baby-killers" — by those GOP elites in Washington better than the long string of Republican SCOTUS appointees who have turned out to be traitors to the Cause, from Roe v. Wade author Harry Blackmun to the generally liberal John Paul Stevens and David Souter to the current Obamacare-protecting chief justice. If Trump can break that pattern with Jim DeMint looking over his shoulder, maybe he won't be that bad for conservatism after all.
Dave Weigel:
AIPAC’s apology for Trump speech is unprecedented
Chemi Shalev, a correspondent for Israel's Ha'aretz, left the Trump speech in shock and asked how fellow Jews could have applauded it.
"The enthusiastic reception given Trump could very well deepen the fault lines inside the Jewish community that were uncovered over the summer in the bitter clash over the Iran nuclear deal," he wrote. "It was good enough to transform Trump from a morally repugnant presidential candidate into a run of the mill contender who deserves as much respect as the others."
It was the reaction -- wild applause now available to view on Trump's campaign website -- that was officially rejected by AIPAC.
Benjy Sarlin:
The Republican presidential primary is likely coming down to a battle between Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. No matter who wins, the party’s foreign policy is in for a major shakeup.
On Tuesday, the GOP presidential field sparred over the proper response to the Brussels terror attack, with candidates debating whether to crack down on Muslim communities at home, and the importance of America’s alliances abroad.