Greg Sargent:
The latest draft of the Democratic Party platform, which is set to be released as early as this afternoon, will show that Bernie Sanders won far more victories on his signature issues than has been previously thought, according to details provided by a senior Sanders adviser.
The latest version of the platform, which was signed off on recently by a committee made up of representatives for the Sanders and Clinton campaigns and the DNC, has been generally summarized by the DNC and characterized in news reports. Sanders has hailed some of the compromises reached in it, but he has vowed to continue to fight for more of what he wants when the current draft goes to a larger Democratic convention platform committee in Orlando coming weeks, and when it goes to the floor of the convention in Philadelphia in late June.
The document can be found here. Keep in mind it is believed to be a draft (hard to tell, I know, but that’s what my sources say).
Ron Brownstein on a long and deep read on demographics, Brexit and Trump:
In these ways, the British vote showed the power of the Trump-like anti-immigration, anti-globalization argument for white, older, non-urban and non-college-educated voters who feel marginalized by economic and cultural change. The key difference is those voters represent much less of the U.S. electorate. In particular, while whites comprised about 90 percent of British voters, they will likely cast only around 70 percent of American ballots. In the U.K., Ashcroft found 53 percent of whites voted to leave; because Trump faces so much opposition from minorities, if he wins the same percentage of whites, he will lose in a landslide. He will likely need well over 60 percent of whites to win.
If anything, the resistance to the leave campaign’s nativism from college-educated and urban U.K. whites underscores the headwinds Trump will face reaching that number. Since 2000, every Democratic presidential candidate has run better among college-educated than non-college-educated whites. But even so, in modern polling tracing back to 1952, no Democratic presidential candidate has ever carried most of those college-educated whites. Yet the last five national surveys have shown Clinton leading Trump with them. Greenberg predicts that as the GOP is tugged more toward the resistance to immigration (and diversity more broadly) of its culturally conservative blue-collar wing, more college-educated voters will defect, perhaps lastingly. “They drove their college-educated voters out by the nature of this primary,” he said.
Revolving around these cultural differences, the Trump-Clinton contest seems certain to accelerate the two parties’ long-term re-sorting into a cosmopolitan, urban-centered Democratic coalition comfortable with demographic and cultural changes and a primarily non-urban traditionalist Republican coalition mostly resistant to them. That ongoing shift’s most immediate 2016 effect may be to reorder the states at the tipping point of U.S. elections.
Politico:
Trump pivots backward
In new month, Trump returns to his old style.
This happens a lot:
Politico with some great quotes:
Insiders: Clinton dominates Trump on the ground
'I can honestly say I have never seen a Republican presidential campaign with this weak of a field presence,' said a Florida Republican.
“Donald Trump just hired a guy yesterday in Colorado,” said a GOP insider there. “One guy — does that count as an organization?”
Added another Colorado Republican: “Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush still have better organization here than Donald Trump.”
In Iowa, one insider called Trump’s organization “MIA.” Another said it was “as small as his hands.”
An Ohio Republican said Trump’s team there is comprised of “a bunch of posers who get no respect.” A Pennsylvania Republican called it “the embodiment of chaos.” A Virginia Republican said Trump’s campaign there amounted only to “a series of Fox News appearances.”
While the judgments were mostly unanimous across the map, a few states stuck out as particularly problematic for Trump.
Noah Rothman (no liberal, no friend to Elizabeth Warren) nonetheless identifies a problem with Trump’s approach to politics:
There is an alternate universe in which Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, long ago consolidated the Republican Party’s base and is now squarely focused on winning over persuadable swing voters. In that parallel dimension, Trump devoted Monday to honing his message on abortion after a sweeping Supreme Court ruling paring back regulations on Texas clinics galvanized the GOP’s pro-life base. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Donald Trump allowed himself to be baited into a trap set by Senator Elizabeth Warren. This is a tragedy not because Warren is an illegitimate target; she is a polarizing and controversial figure, and that controversy is of her own making. The way in which Trump went about his attacks, however, is a perfect illustration of his tendency to render valid and advantageous issues lurid and toxic for his fellow Republicans.
Brian Beutler:
#NeverTrump has always meant different things to different conservatives. But the proximity of the Republican convention is bringing a key division within the campaign to stop Trump into sharp focus.
That division is between those who believe Trump should be denied the presidency, and those who believe Trump should be denied the GOP nomination altogether; it’s between those who recognize that Trump has forced the party to confront massive problems before it can responsibly stand for the presidency again, and those who seem to believe everything in the Republican Party was fine until Trump came along.
If you truly believe Trump is unqualified, you can’t vote for him. if you say otherwise, you are Marco Rubio. That is not a compliment.
Jeet Heer:
Taken together, Obama’s two speeches point to a two-pronged response to Trump. One is an attack debunking the real estate mogul’s claims to be a populist. The other is a broader, positive response offering up liberal remedies to the economic dislocation that the president sees as the cause of Trumpism. (In his remarks to Parliament, Obama was also staking out a difference with Bernie Sanders, who he had otherwise praised. In arguing that trade deals were a general good despite their drawbacks (which need to be more aggressively mitigated), Obama’s position was distinct from Sanders’s more general anti-trade deal stance.)
Obama’s remarks were warmly received in Ottawa, where the Liberal majority of Parliament broke out into cheers of “four more years” at the end of the speech. In the coming weeks, we’ll see if Americans are similarly receptive.
Nicholas Bagley:
This morning, the D.C. Circuit rejected West Virginia’s challenge to the so-called “like it, keep it” fix, which told the states that they could temporarily decline to enforce the ACA’s new insurance rules against their insurers. (Background here.)
I’m sympathetic to West Virginia’s underlying legal claim. It was unlawful, in my judgment, for the Obama administration to effectively waive the ACA’s insurance rules. But I’ve always thought that the state lacked standing to bring the case.
West Virginia’s standing theory is a little complicated. It believes it suffered a constitutionally cognizable injury because state officials had to decide whether to allow their insurers to take advantage of the administrative fix. Forcing those state officials to decide put them in an uncomfortable political position—so uncomfortable to amount to an injury. I didn’t buy it:
“For all practical purposes, West Virginia faced the same choice before and after the administrative fix: whether to use state resources to enforce the ACA. And it was a bona fide choice: prior to the fix, insurance commissioners in six states had announced they wouldn’t enforce the statute.”
All the administrative fix did was change the political stakes of a non-enforcement decision. But that sort of shifting-the-political-stakes claim doesn’t tend to fare well in standing analysis. It’s too speculative—too non-concrete—to license federal courts to referee what is, even in West Virginia’s telling, essentially a fight about political optics.
This morning, the D.C. Circuit agreed.
Neil Irwin:
What lesson should a card-carrying member of the economic elite take from the success of Donald J. Trump, and British voters’ decision to leave the European Union?
Voters in large numbers have been rejecting much of the underlying logic behind a dynamic globalized economy that on paper seems to make the world much richer. For the bankers, trade negotiators, international businesspeople and others who make up the economic elite (including journalists like me who are peripheral members of it), this is cause for introspection, at least among those who aren’t too narcissistic to care what their countrymen think.
Here is an overarching theory of what we might have missed in the march toward a hyper-efficient global economy: Economic efficiency isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Efficiency sounds great in theory. What kind of monster doesn’t want to optimize possibilities, minimize waste and make the most of finite resources? But the economic and policy elite may like efficiency a lot more than normal humans do.
Note two things about the Reuters poll: Trump is at 31% (that’s right, 31%!) and his numbers with registered voters have gone steadily down since clinching.
NY Times:
Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday signed legislation that would impose new restrictions on assault weapons and regulate the sale of ammunition in California, cementing the state’s reputation for enacting some of the most stringent gun regulations in the country.
Spurred by revulsion with mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and Orlando, Fla., the far-reaching gun regulations are the latest example of how this state, whose Legislature is under Democratic control, has been able to enact a legislative agenda on issues that have created deadlocks in Congress and other statehouses.