Politico:
In the swing states that matter most in the presidential race, Donald Trump doesn’t have a prayer against Hillary Clinton in the general election.
That’s according to top operatives, strategists and activists in 10 battleground states who participated in this week’s POLITICO Caucus. Nearly 90 percent of them said Clinton would defeat Trump in their home states in a November matchup.
The Hill:
A number of prominent Republicans are vowing to never back Donald Trump even as he closes in on the GOP presidential nomination.
The "Never Trump" ranks include lawmakers, party operatives, pundits and GOP donors — and the movement even sparked a popular hashtag on social media.
They are convinced Trump as standard-bearer would lead the GOP to a devastating defeat in November, costing the party the Senate and potentially the House.
The real estate mogul, though, is marching ahead, and now has 994 of the 1,237 delegates needed to capture the nomination, according to the Associated Press.
And there are growing signs many in the GOP establishment are warming to Trump. He's been endorsed by 11 lawmakers, with others regularly attending Capitol Hill meetings with his staff. Trump has also declared himself the "presumptive nominee."
Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus has criticized the Never Trump movement as well. "It is essential to victory in November that we all support our candidate," Priebus said at the RNC's spring meeting.
Trump's opponents are focused on trying to deny him the delegates needed to secure the nomination in hopes of forcing a contested convention in July.
Here's a list of Republicans who won't back Trump as nominee.
Sure, most R’s will back Trump. The pressure will be too great for those that don’t have a backbone to begin with. But the point is, how many will nonetheless stay post-convention NeverTrump (even if pre-convention StopTrump is a failure)? I think more of these than the small number of BernieorBust-ers.
They don’t all have to join Republicans for Hillary (which will be a thing. Hey, maybe Lindsey Graham can chair it). They can stay home and make popcorn.
Kevin Drum:
Last month Politico polled 80 campaign reporters about this year's race. It turns out they hate Nevada and Ohio but love South Carolina—mainly because it has good food, apparently. They think Maggie Haberman is the best reporter covering the race, and Fox News has done the best job of hosting a debate. Donald Trump has gotten the softest coverage, probably because they all agree that "traffic, viewership, and clicks" drives their coverage.
And who's gotten the harshest coverage? Do you even have to ask? It turns out that even reporters themselves agree that it's not even a close call:
Kevin Drum never felt the Bern:
I mean this as a provocation—but I also mean it. So if you're provoked, mission accomplished! Here's my argument.
Bernie's explanation for everything he wants to do—his theory of change, or theory of governing, take your pick—is that we need a revolution in this country. The rich own everything. Income inequality is skyrocketing. The middle class is stagnating. The finance industry is out of control. Washington, DC, is paralyzed.
But as Bill Scher points out, the revolution that Bernie called for didn't show up. In fact, it's worse than that: we were never going to get a revolution, and Bernie knew it all along. Think about it: has there ever been an economic revolution in the United States?
Greg Sargent responds:
In one narrow sense, I agree with Drum. Sanders has offered an oversimplified indictment of the Obama years, by arguing that Obama-era reform fell woefully short of the scale of our challenges precisely because Democrats remained in thrall to plutocratic money and failed to rally the grassroots to break GOP Congressional opposition. This gives short shrift to what was achieved and risks misleading people about the structural constraints built into our system — and about the obstacles the GOP’s structural and ideological entrenchment pose to progressive change.
But has Sanders crossed over into running an outright con that risks leaving his “impressionable” supporters disillusioned and ultimately hurting the progressive movement, by articulating unflinchingly ambitious social democratic reform goals for the future? The question is worth thinking about, since the fate of the Sanders movement — to the degree that there is one — could matter a good deal to Democratic politics going forward.
I don’t see why Sanders’s candidacy represents a “con,” or why all of this is destined to play out the way Drum suggests it might. In fact, it may be more likely that the opposite proves true.
For one thing, it’s not really clear whether Sanders is the one indoctrinating his young supporters, or whether he’s speaking effectively to a set of ideals that were already taking shape among them (it could obviously be a combination of the two).
WisconsinWatch.org notes the WI has lessons for Michigan:
Wisconsin launches effort to replace aging lead pipes to safeguard water
$11.8 million program will help water utilities remove lead pipes that can leach the dangerous metal into drinking water, cause brain damage in children
Jed Kolko:
Earlier this week, Jim VandeHei, a former executive editor of Politico, wrotean op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal accusing the Washington political establishment of being out of touch with “normal America.”
“Normal America is right that Establishment America has grown fat, lazy, conventional and deserving of radical disruption,” he wrote, citing his regular visits to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Lincoln, Maine, as his credentials of normality.
It’s a familiar accusation in a year in which most presidential candidates are trying to pretend they have nothing to do with the coastal elite, and after one — Ted Cruz — spent weeks attacking “New York values.” Even PBS, a standard-bearer of the media elite, recently featured a quiz designed to assess in-touchness with “mainstream American culture” with questions about fishing, pickup trucks and living in a small town.
But that sense that the normal America is out there somewhere in a hamlet where they can’t pronounce “Acela” is misplaced. In fact, it’s not in a small town at all.
I calculated how demographically similar each U.S. metropolitan area is to the U.S. overall, based on age, educational attainment, and race and ethnicity.1 The index equals 100 if a metro’s demographic mix were identical to that of the U.S. overall.2
By this measure, the metropolitan area that looks most like the U.S. is New Haven, Connecticut, followed by Tampa, Florida, and Hartford, Connecticut. All of the 10 large metros that are demographically most similar to the U.S. overall are in the Northeast, Midwest or center of the country, with the exception of Tampa. Two of them — New Haven and Philadelphia — are even on Amtrak’s Acela (that’s “uh-SELL-ah”) line. None is in the West, though Sacramento, California, comes close at No. 12.
CNN:
Bernie Sanders' lone supporter in the Senate said Thursday that the Vermont senator should end his presidential campaign if he's losing to Hillary Clinton after the primary season concludes in June, breaking sharply with the candidate who is vowing to take his insurgent bid to the party convention in Philadelphia.
In an interview with CNN, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley argued that the party should be united heading into the July convention. And that if Sanders has no viable path to the nomination after the final round of primaries in June, he should concede to Clinton at that point. He said that Sanders should follow the model employed by Clinton in 2008, who dropped out in June of that year and pledged her support to Barack Obama.