Will Jordan:
Take race and ethnicity, an increasingly important factor in an increasingly diverse Democratic Party. From the first four contests (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina), it was clear Clinton did better with African Americans and Sanders’s strengths were with whites, particularly in more liberal states. Even then, it was clear Sanders would have to broaden his appeal, something his campaign said they would do once voters got to better know him as a candidate.
Using YouGov’s national polling as a guide, Sanders has made real gains with non-white voters since late last year, but Clinton has retained a substantial edge. And the progress appears to have stalled since March.
David Roberts with an interesting tweetstorm:
Charlie Cook (paywall site):
One of the biggest questions about the 2016 race is turnout. This will be the first presidential election in modern history in which both nominees are disliked by a majority of voters. This could depress turnout, but the intense hatred voters feel for the opposition could increase it. And there may be plenty of voters who disdain both candidates, but despise one while merely dislike the other. With increasing numbers of voters in recent years motivated more by antipathy toward one candidate rather than enthusiasm for the other, we could have a very large number of highly motivated voters intensely caring that one or the other not be elected president.
In short, we are in uncharted waters. The fundamentals argue that Clinton should win, but the swirl of emotions suggest it won’t be by a lot.
Politico:
The Obama administration says the Department of Health and Human Services and USAID need more cash to contain Zika’s spread here through mosquito control, to develop better tests and speed vaccine development and to expand Medicaid coverage in Puerto Rico, where heat, humidity and poverty make it Ground Zero for a U.S. outbreak.
Republicans want to see more funding set aside in the regular appropriations process to deal with crises. Burr accused the White House of underfunding emergency preparedness accounts in the regular budget process — funds that are supposed to be set each year to deal with crises like Zika.
You’d think with good will this would be settled: pay it now, raise funds later. The real problem is that now or later, the Republicans refuse to fund the government.
NY Times editorial:
Nobody should be surprised when the present House of Representatives, dominated by penurious reactionaries, produces a stingy response to a danger that calls for compassionate largess. But for sheer fecklessness it’s hard to top the House’s response this week to the Zika virus. The salient feature is that in providing money to fight one health menace, it steals from other funds meant to fight an even more dangerous threat — the Ebola virus.
Preparation for Ebola is preparation for all infectious diseases. Hospitals are much better prepared in terms of capability now compared to pre-Ebola, but it takes constant retraining. Cutting funds is a big mistake.
The Hill:
President Obama’s strong approval rating is bolstering Democratic chances of holding the White House, according to a closely followed election model.
Moody’s Analytics is forecasting that the Democratic nominee, who is widely expected to be Hillary Clinton, will win the presidency in November over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Ryan Cooper:
Long before Bernie Sanders, there was Eugene Debs. He was a longtime socialist and union organizer, and five-time candidate for president. At his electoral high tide in 1912, he got nearly 6 percent of the presidential vote, by far the best any socialist has ever done in national politics. That is, until now.
Bernie Sanders, though he does not subscribe to the more traditional socialist views of Debs, still calls himself a socialist, and got within spitting distance of capturing the nomination of one of America's two parties. That is beyond question the electoral high water mark for an American socialist — at least for now. Why?
As people are continually rediscovering, Sanders gets most of his support from young people, across race and gender. Indeed, though a spectacular volume of punditry has focused on Sanders' lack of support among African-Americans, a recent Gallup survey found that black millennials (defined as being from age 20 to 36) give Sanders higher marks than whites or Latinos, at 67 percent approval. Hillary Clinton is not so popular, particularly among whites…
Sally Kohn suggests the following explanation for this discrepancy:
[W]hen you see progressive white men — many of whom enthusiastically supported Barack Obama's candidacy — hate Clinton with every fiber of their being despite the fact that she's a carbon copy of Obama's ideology (or in fact now running slightly to his left), it's hard to find any other explanation than sexism. [Time]
Sexism probably has something to do with the fact that Clinton's approval rating among male millennials is 13 points lower that it is among female ones (though it's still fairly striking that the likely first female president has only 45 percent approval among millennial women).
However, policy is also a huge reason.
Fox News:
With less than six months to go before the presidential elections, Latinos overwhelmingly support Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to a Fox News Latino poll released on Friday.
The poll found that 62 percent of registered Latino voters would head to the ballot box for Clinton in November, while only 23 percent would support Trump on Election Day – a finding that many experts say is not surprising given the two candidates’ differing stances on issues important to Latinos.
“There’s a more hospitable tone that Hillary Clinton is taking in terms of communicating with Hispanics,” Evelyn Perez-Verdia, analyst with Political Pasión, told Fox News Latino. “Compared to Donald Trump, it’s a much different message.”
The poll, which had a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, had Clinton outpacing Trump in a number of categories important to Latino voters.
Josh Marshall:
I've long believed that one of TPM's greatest assets - not financial assets but substantive assets - is the the collection of fifteen years of TPM Reader emails. We have an extremely literate and wise readership and we've cultivated email exchanges with them going back to November 2000. It's a great trove of historical information, a real-time source of insight into how a certain segment of the American political community understood, reacted to and thought about political and news events as they unfolded.
There are so many of them that it's hard to take stock of them all unless you're looking at a very narrow point in time. But occasionally I go back and read through them to get a sense of how people reacted to a given event right as it happened, not as we'd come to see it afterward. It's also been a way for me to get a flavor for what I myself thought since I tend to be more candid in emails than in what I write for public consumption.
With all this said, tonight I went back and read through emails from May 2008 and then others in March. As you'd expect, there are a lot of similarities to what we're seeing right now.
Robert Kagan:
Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.
This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.”
Yahoo News:
Robert Gates, the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011, said Thursday that he would not be comfortable if Donald Trump had control over the launch codes for nuclear weapons.
Gates sounded off on the presumptive Republican presidential candidate during a wide-ranging interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric in New York.
“Would you feel comfortable with his proverbial finger on the nuclear button?” Couric asked.
Gates, who also served as director of the CIA in the early ‘90s, took a deep breath before answering:
“Right now? No. But the question is does he moderate his views on national security issues going forward? Does he begin to have some more informed views about the complexities of some of these issues, some of the challenges that we face? And who does he choose as his advisors? If all of those things turned out in a positive way, then my concerns would be significantly reduced.”
Harold Meyerson, Democratic Socialist and Sanders supporter:
Over the past 48 hours, the Bernie Sanders campaign has all but eclipsed its own message. Like the antiwar movement of the 1960s—whence I came—a small group of its activists have themselves become the story, supplanting Sanders’s powerful critique of economic elites and the sway they hold over our politics. The issues that Bernie has so forcefully highlighted have been shunted to the background; the Bros have taken center stage.
We’ve seen this all before. By the late 1960s, most Americans had turned against the Vietnam War, but the extremism of a small share of the antiwar activists, and their proclivity for violent confrontations, turned millions of Americans even more decidedly against the protestors—a backlash that gave the Nixon administration the political space to continue the war for four more years.
This year, Americans have flocked to Sanders’s banner in numbers vastly exceeding any that a radical critic of capitalism has ever been able to claim. His indictment of Wall Street has resonated across the political spectrum; his proposals to break up the big banks, raise the minimum wage to $15, create tuition-free public colleges, and drive a wedge between the financial sector and elected officials have won wide acclaim, and enabled him to secure more than 40 percent of the votes in this year’s Democratic primaries and caucuses.
But now, what is arguably the most successful left campaign in the nation’s history stands in danger of being undone by an infantile fraction of its own supporters. The threats of violence, the shouting down of such lifelong liberals as Barbara Boxer, and the growing desire of some in the campaign, both on its periphery and at its core, to walk away from the real prospect of building left power by refusing to work with allies and potential allies in the Democratic Party—all these now threaten the campaign’s potential to bring lasting change to American politics.
NY Times:
William F. Weld, the twice-elected former Republican governor of Massachusetts, who was last seen campaigning in the 2006 Republican primary for governor of New York, now hopes to be on a national ticket as the vice-presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party.
And he is already on the attack.
In his first interview since accepting an invitation to be the running mate of former Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, Mr. Weld assailed Donald J. Trump over his call to round up and deport the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally.
“I can hear the glass crunching on Kristallnacht in the ghettos of Warsaw and Vienna when I hear that, honest,” Mr. Weld said Thursday.
Natalie Jackson:
FRUSTRATED AMERICANS ARE LESS LIKELY TO SUPPORT TRUMP THAN ANGRY AMERICANS - Amy Walter: “Americans aren’t actually any angrier at government today than they were a year ago, or even four years ago. In fact,according to data from the Pew Research Center, the percent of Americans who say they are ‘angry at the federal government’ has remained rather consistent over the last six years...’So, why the obsession with anger? Well, like just about everything else we talk about this year, it has an association with Donald J. Trump….[I]f you interview or focus on only ‘angry’ people, you get a very biased sample of the overall electorate and who they are likely to support….[T]hose who were the most likely to think Trump would be great were angry voters and those who thought he’d be terrible were ‘content’ or ‘frustrated’ voters...In other words, people who are angry with government (21 percent of all voters) have their candidate - Trump. People who are content with government (20 percent of all voters) have theirs - Clinton. But, for the vast majority who are frustrated, Clinton has a small edge. Or more accurately, those who are frustrated with government view Trump more negatively than they do Clinton.” [Cook]