Anyway, here’s what I assume is happening. White House leaks Sandoval for SCOTUS. Media will rush to every Republican Senator who has said they won’t even consider a SCOTUS nominee this year, and ask if they would consider Sandoval.
If some of them say yes they would, then they expose themselves as blocking the nomination not out of principle regarding the lame-duck President, but because they will only consider a Republican nominee. That ramps up the political pressure, just as Obama announces his real nominee.
If (more likely), the Republican Senators are smart enough to see through this, they will all say no, I would not consider Sandoval, because it’s the principle of the thing. Democrats will then use this as proof that Republicans are so impossible to work with they won’t even consider the most compromise-type nominee. Then, after Obama announces his real nominee, any criticism about that person’s liberalism or other faults can be dismissed — because obviously the Republicans have already shown that they had decided not to consider any nominee regardless of their views.
A sterling record. A deep respect for the judiciary’s role. An understanding of the way the world really works. That’s what I’m considering as I fulfill my constitutional duty to appoint a judge to our highest court. And as Senators prepare to fulfill their constitutional responsibility to consider the person I appoint, I hope they’ll move quickly to debate and then confirm this nominee so that the Court can continue to serve the American people at full strength.
Weighing 34 Senate races against one presidential election
Many have speculated that McConnell's reluctance is due to his hope that a future Republican president might nominate Justice Scalia's replacement. However, our logic suggests a different rationale. Given President Obama's relatively constrained political capital and the GOP's control of the Senate, this seems like a good opportunity for the Republicans to press Obama for a moderate nominee. However, that might be exactly what McConnell fears!
McConnell's desire to preempt any Obama nominee is motivated by the fear that, when confronted by a nominee, his GOP colleagues will confront a Catch-22 in which, regardless of what they say or do, the GOP's prospects for maintaining control of the Senate in 2017 will be worsened. Scalia's passing rocked the political scene, and left Mitch McConnell in a very hard place indeed.
See, if you’re an R Senator form a swing state (Kirk, Ayotte, Portman and many more) and vote yes on a moderate, your base is pissed. But if you vote no, the indies you need to win are pissed. You can’t win except if you don’t play at all. And that’s exactly what we are seeing.
Philip Bump, back in December, built a popularity meter, realtime, using Gallup party ID and RCP polling averages.
A real-time tool for settling the argument: Who’s more popular, Trump or Sanders?
From Philip Bump, Washington Post
Unlike the screenshot I did, the tool is active every day back at the Washington Post site.
As it happens, by this metric, Bernie is more popular than the Donald. And as it happens, Hillary is more popular than either (not surprising, she leads Bernie by 5.6 in RCP averages and by 11 via HuffPost “less smoothing” metric I always use.) The point isn’t to say anything about Clinton and Sanders except this: Both D candidates are more popular than Trump at this time. So, when you argue about whether ‘only Hillary can beat Trump’, or ‘only Bernie can beat Trump’, generally from head to head polling known to be inaccurate this far out… well, they are both more popular than Trump is. This guarantees nothing, but it’s reasonable to suggest either could beat him in November. Nothing about this one metric says they can’t.
And with that, I’ve either settled an argument or started one. Another day at the office.
Trump also gave an unfortunately apt salute to the Silver State, declaring during his victory speech, after his habit of rattling off polling crosstabs, “I love the poorly educated.”
Forget “Battle Born.” Forget “All for Our Country.” We have a new motto: “Nevada -- The Poorly Educated State.”
To understand Trump’s appeal here and elsewhere is to listen to him while he was in our benighted state as he played to his usual teeming throngs, mused about punching a protester in the face and treating people like it was the good old days. All I could think of as I watched Trump’s smashmouth speeches is how I occasionally hear people wistfully long for the days when “the mob ran Nevada,” as if things were better then. Yes, people – or too many of them – believe Teflon Don can make the trains run on time in the country and if you don’t like it, you should be consigned to a proverbial (I assume not literal) desert dirt nap.
No one has ever more cynically and brilliantly channeled the electorate’s anger as Trump has, tapping into a vein of discontent about how the government is working and a ribbon of fear spreading across the land about how safe we are from bogeymen, real and imagined. Trump’s twisted genius is to make the audience believe that he believes what he is saying and even more so, that he thinks like they are thinking, says what they want to say.
Dan Diamond on taking Bernie’s health care proposal seriously (and we should):
— Two million Americans currently work in insurance and medical billing. That's according to Gerald Friedman, the UMass economist who's done analysis for the Sanders campaign, and those workers would presumably be directly affected by a plan that ends private insurance.
And Sanders' plan calls for lower payments to doctors and hospitals, likely cutting employment there too.
— Millions of non-health care workers would also be affected. Yevgeniy Feyman, the deputy director of health policy with the conservative Manhattan Institute, estimates that the combination of taxes and mandates in Sanders' health plan would lower employment by 11.6 million full-time equivalent workers. (The model partially draws on CBO estimates and assumes that some of those people would choose not to work because they wouldn't need health care, to be clear.)
— Efficiency doesn't equal employment. Sanders is right: Administration and overhead is one reason why the United States carries higher health costs than comparable countries. But, to paraphrase Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt's famous line, every dollar of health care spending is someone’s health care income. Sanders may be calling for a health care revolution — but every revolution has casualties.
The above gives you a taste of the difficulty. You need transition, you need an answer for the folks above who lose their jobs. They vote, too. Not a reason to avoid the switch, but a very good reason to think through the process.
Harold Pollack in 2010 talking about the public option and difficulty of passage (a lesson in there regarding passing anything):
The public option is a complex venture in every political and substantive way. (Ironically, its ideologically moderate versions are more complicated and organizationally radical than a straightforward Medicare buy-in, which I believe is best). I just don't see this happening in a quick reconciliation bill. When I read between the lines at the Democrats' game-plan for this Thursday's summit, I don’t think Democratic leaders see this, either. I don't see groundwork being laid down to present the public option in a way likely to command the necessary public or insider support.
Senator Rockefeller, perhaps the leading public option supporter in the United States Senate, stepped up to the plate and said what needed to be said. It's time to lock the President's plan down, and not to put health reform at risk by trying to pass the public option at this moment in this way.
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Romney: "I have reason to believe that there is a bombshell in Donald Trump's tax returns."
Over the last week, I learned that supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will melt the pixels on your computer screen if you criticize him, don’t sufficiently #feelthebern or say something favorable about Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, backers of the former secretary of state and 2008 presidential candidate are no slouches in smacking down her detractors, especially those consumed by the Bern they feel. And then there are the protectors of thelegacy of President Obama who aren’t happy with the daylight Sanders is putting between himself and the man he hopes to succeed. It’s enough to make you think that one side will stay home in November if the other side wins the nomination. And if that happens, Democrats would have themselves to blame for the Republican president unleashed on the nation.
Donald Trump has now won three GOP contests in a row, but many pundits are still expressing shock at his success.
"What's actually -- what is happening out there? Joe Scarborough pondered on "Morning Joe" on Wednesday after Trump came out on top in Nevada. “[T]hey should have seen this coming and nobody did. They were in denial until a couple days ago," he said, referring to the Republican establishment.
The pundits worked to wrap their minds around the real estate mogul winning yet another state, but Trump himself had just bragged about beating their expectations. "Of course, if you listen to the pundits, we weren't expected to win too much and now we're winning, winning, winning the country," he said Tuesday night in his victory speech.
But HuffPost Pollster’s polling averages have pointed to Trump as the front-runner in most contests for several months -- and with the notable exception of Iowa, they’ve been mostly right in the primaries and caucuses that have taken place.
See graphic up top.
I had these posted yesterday in a myriad of other posts, but very much worth a read, from Cook Report:
Unlike on the Republican side, about 15 percent of DNC delegates are unpledged "superdelegates" - a total of 712 elected officials and party leaders - who can support whomever they want at the convention. According to the Associated Press, Clinton currently leads Sanders 449 to 19 among this group, for an overall delegate lead of 500 to 70.
That's a huge head start for Clinton, and it means Sanders would need to win roughly 55 percent of the 4,295 remaining pledged delegates and uncommitted superdelegates to reach a bare majority, while Clinton would only need to win 45 percent. That's an extremely tall order, and so far Sanders hasn't kept pace
Donald Trump is currently "on pace" to win 1,237 delegates after he claimed all 50 delegates in South Carolina on Saturday and 14 of Nevada's 30 delegates on Tuesday, pushing him up to 114 percent of his delegate target. The next closest contender, Marco Rubio, is at only 49 percent of his delegate target. Rubio and others don't have a lot of time to stop Trump: although only five percent of GOP delegates have been allocated so far, 65 percent of GOP delegates will be allocated by the end of March.
The biggest loser out of South Carolina and Nevada is Ted Cruz, who needed 47 delegates from the Palmetto State and 11 delegates from the Silver State, according to our estimates. Instead, he won zero in South Carolina, calling into question where he can rack up delegate leads if he couldn't win a very conservative, heavily evangelical state. He only won six in Nevada. Arguably, his best states on Super Tuesday (March 1) are his home state of Texas as well as Oklahoma, but both award their delegates on a proportional basis.
A group of conservative activist leaders that voted late last year to endorse Ted Cruz over Marco Rubio held a conference call Tuesday to re-evaluate their positions based on new developments in the Republican presidential race, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. The upshot: If Cruz is not successful on Super Tuesday — by carrying his native Texas at the least — some of his prominent backers are prepared to defect to Rubio.
In some ways, the not-Trump candidates need each other. Rubio needs Cruz in the March 1st Super Tuesday contest because it ensures Trump doesn’t outright win Texas, which has 155 delegates. If a candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote in Texas, he would win all of the delegates there. Cruz, based on the most-recent polling, has an edge over Trump there.
After March 15, the math becomes even tougher for the not-Trump candidates. That’s when Florida and Ohio vote. They’re winner-take-all states. Trump leads in both, according to the most-recent polls. A Florida win by Trump would likely be a fatal blow to Rubio and give Trump 99 delegates. An Ohio win by Trump would likely kill Kasich’s candidacy and give Trump 66 delegates.
