At The American Prospect, Paul Starr’s “The Democrats as a Movement Party” offers several perceptive observations, including: “Sanders’s purism on campaign finance–no super PACs, no big financial donors–can work in states like Vermont with low-cost media markets and in congressional districts with lopsided Democratic majorities. It might even be enough to win a presidential nomination, thanks to all the free media coverage. But it is not feasible in most congressional and statewide elections. Candidates who follow that approach are likely to be outspent by a wide margin, and the difference will doom many of them. That’s why most Democrats who want to reverse Citizens United and see more public financing have nonetheless decided to work within the regime the Supreme Court has established.”
Commenting on a newly-released survey of more than 42,000 Americans conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, William A. Galston notes at Brookings: “Overall, 62 percent of Americans favor a path to citizenship for immigrants living here illegally, and an additional 15 percent support permanent legal residency without the option of citizenship. Only 19 percent favor a policy of identifying and deporting them…the positive view of immigration enjoys majority support in crucial swing states such as Colorado and Florida and a near-majority of 49 percent in Virginia. Support for this view is strong even in long-time red states such as Arizona (55 percent), Texas (52 percent), and Georgia (50 percent). So Republicans may have a fight on their hands in states they have long taken for granted, especially if immigration becomes a more prominent issue in the campaign.”
Tony Monkovic reports at The Upshot: “A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton essentially tied among people 40 and older, but with those under 40 preferring her by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.”
Primary season polls have had their problems this year. But, less than a week out, the underdogs are trending well in WI, according to the respected Marquette Law School poll, which does include cell phones.
If you were a top corporate executive, how much visibility would you want for your company at The Republican National Convention? Not much, seems to be the emerging consensus, in the wake of the violence and chaos of recent Trump rallies and misogynistic utterances opf the GOP front-runner. Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman explain why at The New York Times.
“Democrats are grabbing election-season television time in eight markets from New Hampshire to Nevada as part of their longshot bid to take majority control of the House…The markets cover around a dozen House districts that could see competitive elections in November. They include Denver, Colorado, where GOP Rep. Mike Coffman is being challenged, and West Palm Beach, Florida, where Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy is abandoning his seat to run for the Senate…Other markets where Democrats are reserving time are Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, Iowa; Las Vegas, Nevada; Manchester, New Hampshire; New York City and Philadelphia,” reports AP’s Alan Fram.
At Roll Call Alex Roarty considers the strategic value of U.S. Senate primary endorsements by the Democratic Party.
The Crystal Ball trio, Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, has a new analysis of the presidential race, assuming a Clinton vs. Trump race, which looks very good for Democrats. As the authors note, “Election analysts prefer close elections, but there was nothing we could do to make this one close. Clinton’s total is 347 electoral votes, which includes 190 safe, 57 likely, and 100 that lean in her direction. Trump has a total of 191 (142 safe, 48 likely, and 1 leans)…Over the years we’ve put much emphasis on the seven super-swing states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Virginia. While some will fall to the Democrats less readily than others, it is difficult to see any that Trump is likely to grab. In fact, four normally Republican states (Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, and Missouri) would be somewhat less secure for the GOP than usual. North Carolina, which normally leans slightly to the GOP, would also be well within Clinton’s grasp in this election after being Mitt Romney’s closest win in 2012.”
This question seems a tad simplistic. A better question for 2016 would be “Is voting based on fear or resentment wrong?”

Riveting as the presidential election has been so far this cycle, it’s important for Democrats to keep an eye on what’s happening down- ballot. Here are some thoughts on the connection between the two that I discussed at New York:

It is not lost on Democrats watching the whole Republican presidential nominating contest veer crazily into a demolition derby that the GOP is almost certainly going to nominate one of their weakest candidates according to general-election polling, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. And both of these gents are nicely fitted in the dead man’s clothes of a landslide loser in November, with Trump alienating millions of normally reliable Republican voters and Cruz channeling the ideological excesses of Barry Goldwater.
But aside from giving Democrats a better-than-average chance of holding on to the White House, would Trump or Cruz at the top of the ticket have serious consequences down-ballot? Most of the early speculation on this topic has focused on the battle for control of the Senate, where the GOP’s four-seat margin was already in some question thanks to a landscape where too many vulnerable Republican senators (e.g., Johnson, Kirk, Ayotte, Toomey, Portman) are running for reelection in blue states. But now the wild rhetoric of the GOP presidential primaries and Trump’s terrible general-election numbers are making Democrats think about the previously unimaginable prospect of winning the 30 net seats necessary to take back control of the U.S. House for the first time in six years.
The Washington Post‘s Paul Kane has a good roundup today of expert opinions on this possibility. One independent observer, Nathan Gonzales, downplays its likelihood, noting that House Democratic plans focusing on 2020 or even 2022 (after the next decennial redistricting) may have led the party to underrecruit viable candidates for this cycle. The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman documents the tough math for Democrats but notes it is still early:

Right now, we rate only 31 Republican seats as at risk, meaning Democrats would need to win an impossibly high 97 percent of them – and hold all their own seats – to take back control. But filing deadlines still haven’t passed in a majority of districts, and it’s worth watching how many more Democratic recruits Trump and Cruz will entice in the coming months.

Wasserman also notes two important crosscutting data points: On the one hand, past presidential landslides have not necessarily produced correspondingly large House turnover, but on the other, the widespread ticket-splitting that made these variable results possible has been declining steadily in recent years. So that leads to the big imponderable question: If, say, Donald Trump is getting waxed by 20 points in the presidential race, will normally Republican voters split tickets, vote for Democrats, or skip voting altogether? It’s really difficult to know at this point.
It is reasonably clear that the rise of straight-ticket voting owes a lot to the growing ideological consistency of the two major parties, with Republicans in particular becoming a monolithic conservative coalition. By contrast, back in 1972, Democrats in (for example) Georgia could reject liberal presidential nominee George McGovern and then (with the help of a convenient sub-presidential straight-ticket ballot line) vote for a consistently moderate-and-conservative set of Democratic candidates down-ballot. And that’s exactly what they did. Nowadays the gradual extinction of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats both among candidates and voters means fewer people inherently inclined to split tickets. But arguably both Trump and Cruz, in somewhat different ways, stray far enough from the ideological consensus among Republicans that down-ballot candidates (perhaps supported by signals from party leaders) have no compunctions about distinguishing themselves from their party’s presidential candidate, much as southern Democrats did in the heyday of ticket-splitting. This could be particularly true if disunity is apparent at the very top of the party hierarchy, as it seems to be now that the three remaining presidential candidates are abandoning loyalty pledges to support the ultimate nominee.
Given the unusually large GOP majority in the House and thus that party’s exposure in marginal districts, and the pro-Democratic turnout patterns typical in recent presidential elections, some Democratic House gains are almost certain, even if the Republican presidential candidate is not an albatross. Democratic gains short of a majority could paradoxically increase the power of the House Freedom Caucus by reducing Speaker Paul Ryan’s room for maneuvering without Democratic votes. But it’s worth keeping an eye on the number of Republican seats that look vulnerable after the conventions. It was widely believed during the last decade that success in redistricting gave Republicans a lock on the House until 2012. The lock was picked in 2006 and a whole new order was (very temporarily) created by Democratic wins in that year and in 2008. It remains to be seen if a scary presidential nominee can do as much damage to the GOP as did the Iraq War and the financial crisis.

It’s a question we had no way of anticipating as central to Campaign ’16.

From E. J.Dionne, Jr.’s column, “Arizona’s voting outrage is a warning to the nation” at The Washington Post:

It’s bad enough that an outrage was perpetrated last week against the voters of Maricopa County, Ariz. It would be far worse if we ignore the warning that the disenfranchisement of thousands of its citizens offers our nation. In November, one of the most contentious campaigns in our history could end in a catastrophe for our democracy.
…The facts of what happened in Arizona’s presidential primary are gradually penetrating the nation’s consciousness. In a move rationalized as an attempt to save money, officials of Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, cut the number of polling places by 70 percent, from 200 in the last presidential election to 60 this time around…Maricopa includes Phoenix, the state’s largest city, which happens to have a non-white majority and is a Democratic island in an otherwise Republican county…As the Arizona Republic reported, the county’s move left one polling place for every 21,000 voters — compared with one polling place for every 2,500 voters in the rest of the state……There were fewer voting locations in “parts of the county with higher minority populations.”
…Many people had to wait hours to cast a ballot, and some polling stations had to stay open long after the scheduled 7 p.m. closing time to accommodate those who had been waiting — and waiting. The Republic told the story of Aracely Calderon, a 56-year-old immigrant from Guatemala who waited five hours to cast her ballot. There were many voters like her.

If all this summons up a fading memory, try Florida in 2000. In adition to the hanging chads, the “Brooks Brothers riot” and other Repubican electoral atrocities, similar crimes against democracy were very much a part of that notorious election year in the ‘Sunshine State’ under the rule of Gov. Jeb Bush, to his eternal shame.
Dionne quotes Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, noting that “Republicans have “moved with strategic ferocity” to pass a variety of laws around the country to make it harder for people to cast ballots. The Brennan Center reports that 16 states “will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election.”
Looking forward, Dionne warns,

Imagine voting debacles like Arizona’s happening all across the country. Consider what the news reports would be like on the night of Nov. 8, 2016. Are we not divided enough already? Can we risk holding an election whose outcome would be rendered illegitimate in the eyes of a very large number of Americans who might be robbed of their franchise?

“This is not idle fantasy,” Dionne concludes. “Arizona has shown us what could happen. We have seven months to prevent what really could be an electoral cataclysm.”
The progressive media has done a decent job in reporting on the disgrace in Arizona, and the MSM has begun to follow up on the story. In this already embarrassing year for the GOP, the leading conservative columnists have so far continued their appalling silence about the Republicans’ racially-driven voter suppression. In so doing, they betray both genuine conservatism and the values of democracy.

Most observers of political attack ads will tell you that it’s easy to overdo it. Some recent examples could include Alan Grayson’s campaign ad referring to his opponent for a Senate seat as “Taliban Dan” or Kentucky Democrat Jack Conway’s senate campaign “Aqua Buddha” ad knocking Republican candidate Rand Paul. Both of these ads backfired and actualy helped the targeted Republican.
In 2016 Democratic ad makers have a unique problem with respect to the 2016 presidential campaign, an overflowing embarrassment of riches, owing to Trump’s never-ending stream of gaffes, bullying comments and tasteles insults. There is so much material that the challenge for attack ads is what to leave out.
At The New Republic Laura Reston’s “Can Democratic Attack Ads Tear Down Donald Trump?: Republican groups’ attacks haven’t done the trick. But one big-money Democratic super PAC believes it has the formula” previews the approach of one anti-Trump group:

Republican groups in the #NeverTrump camp have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the real estate mogul in the last two months–mafia connections, failed business ventures, flagrant misogyny, racism, you name it. But Trump has continued to rack up delegates and now looks likely to secure the GOP nomination before the convention in July. This has generated some alarm in Democratic quarters: What if Donald Trump is this resilient in the general election?
You’ll find no such pessimism around the Washington, D.C., headquarters of Priorities USA Action. The wealthiest Democratic super PAC bent on taking down Trump in the general election is the same one that successfully portrayed Mitt Romney as a heartless corporate titan in 2012…Since last summer, Priorities USA’s small team has been planning a frontal assault on the next Republican nominee. The strategists at Priorities are now sketching out a plan to boost the Democrats’ probable nominee, Hillary Clinton, assembling dossiers on both Trump and Ted Cruz, and getting a head start on reserving prime television time in crucial battleground states. The super PAC announced Tuesday that it had begun preparing a $70 million advertising blitz slated to begin after the July conventions in battleground states like Florida and Ohio.
..The group has been scripting and testing ads since last year. But what do they think is going to work against Trump when every Republican attack has failed? “While we don’t forecast our strategy specifically,” says Priorities spokesman Justin Barasky, “it’s likely that we will explore Donald Trump’s temperament, character, and selfish legacy of enriching himself at the expense of others.”

“We’ll have a focused strategy,” says Guy Cecil, chief strategist at Priorities, “not just waiting until three weeks before the election and simply throwing everything we have at Trump, which is what the Republicans did.” In adition to the cornucopia of videos casting Trump in an extremely unfavorable light, Reston adds,

Whether or not Priorities comes up with the magic bullet against Trump, it will have advantages the Republican groups never had: the time and resources to adjust its strategies, toss out what doesn’t stick, and try new tacks. That was what the Republican establishment lacked in this primary cycle: By the time groups like Our Principles realized their attacks weren’t hitting home with Republican primary voters, Trump had already racked up a nearly insurmountable delegate lead…Trump could, of course, still prove to be uniquely, almost magically, immune to attacks in the general election. But he’ll have to fend off the kind of sustained barrage that he hasn’t faced in the Republican primaries–and one that will be aimed, this time, at voters who are already skeptical of him.

There may be a “too much of a good thing” dynamic at play here. Making fun of Trump is awfully easy, and you have to wonder if Trump-bashing could get as old as Trump himself by the time November rolls around.
Then there is the concern that Trump will look so bad by election time, that many will feel his defeat is in the bag and not bother to vote. Dems have to be more positive than negative going into the final weeks of the election; they have to give voters something to vote for, not just against, and that should be well-reflected in the pro-Democratic ad campaign. Attack ads work better, when the candidate of the attacking campaign is presented in a positive light.
As the Democratic front-runner, and despite her impressive delegate tally thus far, Hillary Clinton still has high negatives that Democratic ads must help reverse. If Sanders is nominated there will be a relentless tsunami of red-baiting ads. Countering GOP attack ads will be a challenge for Democratic ad-makers, regardless of all of the damaging video clips showing Trump as a dangerous, mean-spirited blowhard.

Bernie Sanders experienced a ressurrection of sorts over Easter weekend, winning three Democratic presidential contests, in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington — all by impressively large margins, 82, 71 and 73 percent, respectively and equally impressive turnouts, reports Amy Chozick in The New York Times.
But Harry Enten explains at FiveThirtyEight that “Bernie Sanders Continues To Dominate Caucuses, But He’s About To Run Out Of Them.”
At The Nation D. D. Guttenplan’s “Keep On Running, Bernie!: An active Sanders campaign through June is good for the party and for democracy” observes “Turnout remains the Democrats’ Achilles’ heel: In Ohio, where Trump came in second, he still pulled more votes than either Democrat. Clinton herself seems to get this, declining to endorse the calls for Sanders to drop out. Any other course would leave Trump in sole possession of the media for the next four months…Winning the nomination would be nice, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about that goal. Building a durable nationwide network of mobilized, active supporters prepared to keep fighting for universal healthcare, a living wage, and an end to Wall Street welfare and America’s endless wars–including the War on Drugs–and to occupy the Democratic Party in numbers great enough to take it back from its corporate funders is absolutely crucial.”
Julian Zelizer’s “Is Sanders doing Clinton a favor?” at CNN Politics adds, “..In the long run, Sanders may turn out to have been one of the best things to have happened to Clinton’s campaign…Assuming that she does win the nomination, Clinton will emerge as a much stronger candidate and her campaign operation will be in a better position for the fall, thanks to Sanders’ insurgency. Unlike divisive primaries that hurt a political party — such as Sen. Ted Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter in 1980 or, most likely, the internecine battle that is ravaging the GOP this year — the Democrats will benefit as a result of the past few months.”
But Joan Walsh argues, also at The Nation, that Sanders can’t win without broadening his base of support beyond white working-class voters.
In “How the G.O.P. Elite Lost Its Voters to Donald Trump,” Nicholas Confessore breaks it down nicely: “While Republicans debated rhetorical approaches, Mr. Trump took a radically different tack. Announcing his campaign a few months later, he spun a tale of unfair trade deals hashed out by lobbyists, backscratchers and incompetent presidents who were stealing jobs from Americans. He would stop the flow of jobs over the border with Mexico, Mr. Trump promised, and build a wall to stop the flow of people…That message has resonated with lower-income voters, and helped drive Mr. Trump’s string of successes. In Mississippi and Michigan, both of which Mr. Trump won, six in 10 Republican primary voters said that free trade cost the country more jobs that it produced, exit polls showed.”
Again at The Times, Amy Chozick and Trip Gabriel see Trump’s wife-bashing as a big plus for Democrats, and note “Mr. Trump has shown a particular weakness among female voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton 55 percent to 35 percent in a New York Times/CBS News poll released this week, twice the gender gap of the 2012 presidential election, when President Obama defeated Mitt Romney. And 31 percent of Republican women said they would be upset if Mr. Trump were the party’s nominee, according to the most recent CNN/ORC poll.”
At HuffPo Pollster Janie Valencia and Ariel Edwards-Levy have some data on the lack of women’s support of Trump: “TRUMP HAS A SERIOUS PROBLEM WITH WOMEN – Carrie Dann: “This month, about half (47 percent) of Republican female primary voters said they could not imagine themselves voting for Trump. (About 40 percent of male GOP primary voters said the same.) Compare that to their relative willingness to accept Trump’s rivals. Only about three in ten female Republican voters say they can’t imagine backing Ted Cruz (32 percent) and John Kasich (27 percent)….When it comes to the general electorate, Trump has an even more pronounced problem with female voters.Trump’s favorability with women overall is a dismal 21 percent positive/ 70 (!) percent negative. With men, it’s 28 percent positive/ 59 percent negative. And while women traditionally vote for Democratic candidates in larger numbers than men, data shows that a Trump nomination would exacerbate the issue for Republicans.”
WaPo’s Amber Phillips addresses a question that is popping up with increasing frequency: “Do House Democrats have a shot at the majority this year?” Phillips says “Democrats would need to sweep most or all of the 27 Republican-held seats that are currently regarded as competitive and then win even more districts to get the magic number 30 needed for a majority. (The current breakdown is 246 to 188, meaning Democrats need to turn 30 GOP seats blue.)…Republicans are defending some 26 districts that voted for President Obama in the last presidential election. Democrats have just five incumbents trying to win reelection in districts that voted for Mitt Romney.”

As the Republican presidential nominating contest lurches into it dog days phase with limited activity but a riot of speculation, there’s still talk of party elites drafting some “unity” figure in Cleveland instead of going with one of the people who are still battling in the primaries. But as I noted at New York this week, the polls are showing that actual Republican voters really hate the idea:

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post

points

to two emphatic data points:

A new Bloomberg Politics poll finds that 63 percent of Republican voters nationwide think that the winner of the most delegates should get the GOP nomination, even if he does not win an outright majority. Only 33 percent say the delegates at a contested convention should pick the nominee instead …
[A] CNN poll earlier this week … found that by 60-38, Republican voters think the candidate with the most delegates should get the nomination, even without a majority.

As Sargent notes, both polls also showed Trump losing to Hillary Clinton in a general election, which will be the party elites’ excuse for taking over the nomination process if they can — and if they dare.
But they could be courting disaster if they do so. An even more emphatic indicator of rank-and-file antipathy to a bossed convention comes from a HuffPost/YouGov survey, which shows only 16 percent of self-identified Republicans and leaners being “satisfied” with a nominee chosen from outside the current field, while the idea makes 55 percent angry. The second-worst idea, respondents to the survey say, would be to nominate John Kasich, the closest thing to an acceptable-to-the-Establishment candidate left in the field and the brandisher of many a general-election poll. Seems Republicans who keep passing up opportunities to vote for Kasich may mean it.
There is, of course, more than a little irony in the insistence of Republican voters on intra-party democracy. This is, after all, the party that’s busy creating potholes in the path to the ballot box anywhere it can. And you could make the argument that latter-day “constitutional conservatism” is all about creating iron-clad protections for conservative governing models (and the interests that benefit from them) against popular majorities acting through Congress or the presidency to enact progressive policies. There’s very significant support among conservative activists for repealing the 17th Amendment to take away direct election of U.S. senators in favor of returning the privilege to state legislators.
In that context, this sort of opinion expressed by North Dakota RNC member Curly Haugland isn’t so surprising:

“Do the primaries choose a nominee or do the convention delegates?” he asked. “It can’t be both.” “Democracy is pretty popular,” he added, “but it’s simply not the way we do it.”

I suspect party leaders like Haugland are in the process of finding out that Republicans want democracy for themselves even if they are occasionally willing to deny it to those people who are presumed to want to live off the hard work of virtuous older white people, or murder their own babies, or force bakers of conscience to create same-sex-wedding cakes. And a “brokered convention” that ignores this sentiment may soon find those sunny general-election polls showing some non-Trump or non-Cruz candidate winning may be premature.

Trump may well win the nomination decisively on June 7 in California and New Jersey and make it all moot. But if not, GOP elites would probably be prudent to let either Trump or Cruz win the nomination after a good vicious fight in Cleveland. Sure, they might be general election losers, but they’re what voters chose from a vast field. It’s not like they didn’t have options.

It’s a pretty bad day for the GOP when a leading columnist and party stalwart excoriates the two front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination as dangerously misguided on the most worrisome national security issue. That’s what WaPo columnist and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson did in his latest column “The anti-Muslim rhetoric of Trump and Cruz only helps terrorists.” An excerpt:

In Ted Cruz’s view, the United States is “voluntarily surrendering to the enemy to show how progressive and enlightened we are.” He would have us “carpet bomb” the Islamic State and “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized” here at home.
“Look,” says Donald Trump, “we’re having problems with the Muslims.” He would “knock the hell out of ISIS,” close the border to Muslim immigrants “until we figure out what’s going on,” “do a lot more than waterboarding” and target the families of terrorists (at least until he seemed to backpedal).
But here is the problem. Rhetoric that targets “the Muslims” and singles out Americans for suspicion based on nothing more than their faith seriously complicates the war against terrorism…

Gerson goes on to explain that “anti-Muslim rhetoric strains relations with Sunni Muslim countries.” He quotes former acting CIA director Mike Morell, who adds that “It certainly feeds extremist recruitment…but it also makes even moderate Muslims wonder if the extremists may be right.”
Gerson notes further that “anti-Muslim rhetoric needlessly disrupts relationships with American Muslim communities that are often the first to recognize and report radicalization in their midst,” which cripples our intelligence gathering needlessly.
“Alienating Muslim allies, scapegoating Muslim citizens and resigning ourselves to a global religious conflict,” says Gerson, “would grant the terrorists a victory without a battle. Which makes Trump and Cruz either quite cynical or alarmingly oblivious.”
That’s quite an assertion from one of the most respected members of the Republican establishment. With that concern, It’s hard to see how he could even vote for his party’s nominee, since Kasich is now regarded as a fading long-shot, even in the most optimistic scenarios of GOP moderates.
Trump seems to have a singular talent for provoking his GOP adversaries to engage in lower levels of political discussion. As Gerson’s fellow syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. put it, “The terrorist attacks in Belgium brought out the worst in Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Cruz demonstrated that his only focus right now is to find ways of out-Trumping Trump. He seeks words that sound at least as intolerant and as dangerous to civil liberties as the formulations that regularly burst forth from the Republican front-runner.”
The mutual intemperance of the two GOP aspirants has spilled over into areas long regarded as taboo in previous presidential campaigns. Gerson’s column punctuated a bad week for Republicans, which included jr. high school trash talk about each others wives. The exchange concluded with Cruz calling Trump a “sniveling coward,” an extraordinary ad hominem attack for a former college debate champion — which should pretty much end prospects for a unity ticket bearing both of their names.
“With large parts of the Republican establishment giving up on Kasich and embracing Cruz as the last anti-Trump hope,” says Dionne, “we can now look forward to a GOP race to the bottom in which fear itself is the only thing its leading candidates have to offer.”
If American swing voters decide in November that a cool head is needed to navigate the dangerous shoals of global terrorism, the Republicans may be facing a rout of historic proportions.