With less than a week to go before the NH primary, the contours of an expected Bernie Sanders victory are taking shape. Hillary will just have to suck up a week’s worth of ‘she’s losing/going to lose’ stories and get ready to move on to NV (2/20) and SC (2/27). So does she cut her losses altogether or play for the smallest NH loss?
Here’s an odd one: While the exact number doesn’t matter, Reuters tracking poll for all adults has Hillary with a 5 point lead over Bernie. It’s 7 points with “D’s and I’s only, no R’s”. But that lead balloons to 36 points if you filter in Likely Democratic Primary Voters. It’s an indication of the importance for Bernie of mobilizing new voters, especially younger voters where he dominates.
Yesterday, the two had a dust-up on twitter (you can read it here wherein I eliminated all the follower tweets. You’re welcome.) But that’s not a heated battle. The Republicans have a heated battle. That’s because for them it’s about survival.
In any case, fighting over who the real progressive is, is good for America, sez I.
This is a fun listen. Christie hits Rubio because he has to.
Jeff Spross:
The Iowa results are in, and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders finished in what was effectively a dead heat. (Clinton technically won by the slimmest of hairs.) And yet, as spirited as their competition has been, the Democrats' nomination race has seen nothing like the upheaval on the Republican side, where anti-establishment figures Ted Cruz and Donald Trump finished first and second in Iowa, respectively, with establishment-favorite Marco Rubionipping at the latter's heels. Which raises the question: Why is the GOP facing an intra-party crisis right now, and not the Democratic Party?
The Democrats have held the White House for eight years, and the country remains frustrated and downcast. More than that, they're much more diverse — along every conceivable metric of class, race, gender, and religious identity — than the GOP. You'd think the Democrats would have a lot more potential ways to fracture.
To explain this, I think, you need to understand how the Democratic and Republican parties feed off one another right now. And you need to understand the one great divide in America that fundamentally shapes both coalitions: namely, class.
Atlantic from 2012:
It's one of the weirder traditions of American democracy: In many states, if a race is tied, a "game by lot" -- cards, straws, or most often, a coin toss -- determines who goes to the house and who goes home. Months of campaigning, committee assignments, the fortunes of careers, the possibility of political change -- it all comes down, like possession in a football game, to heads or tails.
Elahi Izadi:
Indeed, a number of the Founding Fathers explicitly mentioned Muslims — along with other believers outside the prevailing Protestant mainstream — as they outlined the parameters of religious freedom and equal protection.
"When enshrining the freedom of religion in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, our Founders meant what they said when they said it applied to all religions," Obama said Wednesday at the Islamic Society of Baltimore. "Back then, Muslims were often called Mahometans, and Thomas Jefferson explained that the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom that he wrote was designed to protect all faiths — and I'm quoting Thomas Jefferson now — 'the Jew and the gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan.'"
Muslims, who were also alluded to in those years as "Turks," did live in this country at the time, Obama said. An estimated 20 percent of enslaved Africans were Muslim, but much of the citizenry at the time didn't acknowledge that Muslims existed in America, according to several historians.
Stephen Stromberg:
On Sean Hannity’s show Tuesday night, Donald Trump placed part of the blame for his second-place finish in Iowa on the fact that “we didn’t have much of a ground game.”
“We could have done much better with the ground game,” he said.
This would not be a fatal admission for another candidate. But Trump based his candidacy on his uncommon ability to get things done, honed by years building things in the private sector. To critics who say he ignores facts and offers little or no realistic policy details, he responds with some version of this: “It’s called management.” He will get “great people,” like himself, to fix it all. Yet his incompetent campaign got out-managed in Iowa.
Josh Marshall:
For all the talk about South Carolina and Nevada and all the rest, Iowa and New Hampshire still play a massive, massive role in the presidential selection process. The generally accurate conventional wisdom is that Iowa has extremely conservative conservatives and extremely liberal liberals. I was just hearing some pundit on TV explaining how Iowa's conservatives are more weighted towards evangelicals while New Hampshire's have a more libertarian hue. All true, as far as it goes. But there's one overwhelming reality about these two states: everybody is white.
Not everybody, of course. But pretty close. Let's look at the numbers.
Tara C. Smith on the unfortunate but inevitable:
Like cockroaches, the conspiracy theorists suggesting the Zika virus outbreak is anything but a normal, naturally-occurring event have begun to come out of the woodwork. To be expected, the theories they’re espousing make no sense scientifically, and each theory is incompatible with the others, but why should anyone expect that conspiracy theorists would actually use logic?
Adam Wollner:
Why Rand Paul’s 2016 Moment Never Arrived
Between his libertarian foreign policy views and Trumpmania, Paul’s message wasn’t in sync with GOP electorate.
Ted Cruz will make a play for them, especially in NH. We’ll see if it works.
As for the #DEMTOWNHALL last night, this from Josh Marshall:
But here's the one thing that stood out to me. Again, I won't say it's new in the campaign. But in this townhall, it was articulated on both sides in a sharper relief.
Sanders is saying that the kind of society most Democrats won't can't be achieved by operating within the current system - you need a fundamental shift in the role of money in public life, the values that drive our political system, etc. He is saying quite clearly and crisply that we're never going to get there through incrementalism. Phrased that way, I think there's a very good argument that he's right.
Clinton is coming at things from an altogether different vantage point: Think what we could lose. Think about all the tangible, if incremental, things we've achieved and realize that we could lose them. The Affordable Care Act, voting rights, advances for women and the LGBT community. Even if you have a Republican Congress forever, a Democrat in the White House is the great protector of all of that. It is implicit in what she says and sometimes said openly that without a dramatically different Congress none of what Sanders is proposing will even get a hearing in Congress let alone get passed. But the deeper argument - realism and protecting gains - is the essence of the message she's pushing.
It has the benefit of being a pretty stark and clear cut choice.
John Cassidy:
For all his crankiness, Sanders is tapping into this optimism and providing an outlet for it. Other populist movements do the same thing. The English translation of the word “podemos” is “We can.” Clinton, although she retains a great deal of support in the Democratic Party, has so far failed to inspire the young. As I noted following the Iowa caucus, her response to the Sanders phenomenon sometimes seems to be “No, we can’t.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Tuesday night, the former Secretary of State briefly tried to strike a more upbeat note. She said that it was a positive development that so many young people are getting involved in the political process. But then she altered course, warning about the danger of allowing the Republicans to regain the White House. Meanwhile, the host, Chris Matthews, bemoaned the failure of the “kids” to understand the realities of American politics.
If you look at the rise of populism in other countries, you will find that urging people to be realistic is a common reaction from establishment politicians and their supporters. It is a risky response, though. Trotted out too often, or too vehemently, it can make those who rely on it sound suspiciously like one of the “mothers and fathers” that Bob Dylan addressed back in 1964—those people whose “order is rapidly fadin’,” whose “old road is rapidly agin’,” and who, finally, are bid, “Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand.” That, of course, is something no politician wants to hear, especially one who came of age in the sixties.