An incident involving strange images on Twitter all but engulfed the Trump campaign this week.  I tried to go a little deeper than the usual interpretations in explaining it at New York.

It’s difficult to believe Donald Trump is anti-Semitic. For one thing, his adored daughter Ivanka is a convert to Judaism, out of solidarity with her Jewish husband. For another, as a New York–based business tycoon, Trump has interacted frequently and cordially with Jewish colleagues, employees, investors, politicians, and members of the news media throughout his career.

That’s all the more reason to puzzle over the weaselly reaction of Trump and his campaign to allegations one of his Twitter blasts at Hillary Clinton borrowed anti-Semitic imagery from one of Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters. Trump has gone to great lengths to claim that the image in question isn’t what it is, and has in general done everything other than the obvious: apologize for screwing up and forcefully disassociate himself with his alt-right fan club.

In a thorough examination of the incident, Matt Yglesias hit on an important insight about Trump that goes beyond anti-Semitism:

“Trump has not acted to distance himself in any way from the anti-Semitic behavior of his followers. There’s been nothing remotely in the vicinity of Barack Obama’s famous race speech from the 2008 campaign, and Trump has consistently appeared angrier about being criticized for ties to anti-Semites than about the anti-Semitism expressed by many of his fans.”

Some might associate this reluctance to admit error, apologize, and then move on to Trump’s narcissism — those who endlessly admire themselves in every mirror are not prone to see or admit flaws.

But there’s something else going on that makes Trump’s supporters share the same reluctance to say they are sorry. He’s developed a cult of “political incorrectness” in which any sensitivity to others’ feelings is considered weakness, and the impulse to apologize for offensive remarks or behavior is dismissed as a surrender to bullying by elites and their minority-group clientele.

In his long, sympathetic meditation on Trump’s supporters for the New Yorker, George Saunders noticed this same phenomenon:

“Above all, Trump supporters are ‘not politically correct,’ which, as far as I can tell, means that they have a particular aversion to that psychological moment when, having thought something, you decide that it is not a good thought, and might pointlessly hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore decline to say it.”

In other words, there’s a tendency in Trumpland to view what most of us consider common decency as “political correctness,” which is to be avoided at all costs, most especially when the opprobrium of liberal elitists is involved.  It’s no accident, then, that Trump sometimes seems to court the appearance of impropriety, and defend examples of rudeness, crudeness, and bigotry even when he’s not personally guilty of perpetrating them.

Trump did not invent this strange mindset, of course. Right-wing talk-radio types have made a living from baiting liberals and women and minorities and then inciting listeners to express umbrage at the resulting outrage. Trump’s former rival and current supporter Dr. Ben Carson could not go five minutes on the presidential campaign trail without attacking “political correctness” as the source of all evil and as a secular-socialist stratagem for silencing the Folks by shaming them….

To use a phrase beloved of Trump’s great predecessor in political sin George Wallace, the mogul does not “pussyfoot around” in offending his detractors and those people — the pushy feminists and entitled minorities whose very presence profanes America in the eyes of many Trump supporters. Trump tells it like it is, which means he is not inhibited by a civility that masks nasty but essential truths.

Inevitably, this nasty but essential explanation of Trump’s appeal will annoy supporters and enemies alike, who insist on ascribing purely economic motives to those who have lifted him so shockingly high in American political life. Sorry, but I don’t think uncontrollable rage at having to “press 1 for English” or say “Happy Holidays” can be explained by displaced anger over wage stagnation or the decline of the American manufacturing sector. As Saunders said in another of his insights into Trump supporters:

“[T]he Trump supporter might be best understood as a guy who wakes up one day in a lively, crowded house full of people, from a dream in which he was the only one living there, and then mistakes the dream for the past: a better time, manageable and orderly, during which privilege and respect came to him naturally, and he had the whole place to himself.”

Such a guy may well be old enough to remember a time when he and people just like him could behave as though they had America to themselves. Nowadays that gets you hostile looks, a rebuke from HR, a shaming from moral authorities, and sometimes worse. But Donald Trump will fight for your right to offend in your own damn country. And some offenders will love him for it.

As we observed the beginnings of leadership fights in both of the UK’s major parties, it gave pause to some of the disputes we’ve been having over the presidential nominating process here, and particularly in the Democratic Party. I offered some compare-and-contrast notes at New York:

In the U.K., the party leaders (i.e., those who will compete to be prime minister in national elections) are chosen by dues-paying party members. The Tories charge 25 pounds a year — with lower rates for youth and military — and Labour has a standard monthly dues rate of 3.92 pounds, though the party recently created a cheaper “registered supporter” option at 3 pounds a year that carries with it the right to vote in leadership elections. The system also includes the equivalent of the U.S. Democratic Party’s “superdelegates.” Members of Parliament (the House of Commons, and in the Labour Party also Members of the European Parliament) determine the field for leadership contests by a nomination process; Tory MPs have the responsibility to narrow the field to two candidates before members get involved. In both parties, MPs can trigger a leadership contest by a vote of “no confidence” in the leader and then the nomination of one or more challengers. That’s the process currently in motion in the Labour Party, where Jeremy Corbyn will soon face a challenge and a new leadership election even though he has only been leader since September of last year.

While the left in the United States tends to oppose closed primaries at present, and the right tends to favor them, both left and right in the U.K. have their base in the dues-paying party membership. Indeed, the socialist Jeremy Corbyn won his leadership election — in an upset, yet by a landslide — on the basis of a big surge in party membership (and/or “registered supporter” membership), and it remains possible that he will hang on to his position in a second election despite the extraordinary and bitter opposition to him among Labour MPs and signs that his leadership and issue positions are not that popular with Labour voters or the new voters the party needs.

If the British system for nominating leaders seems, well, anti-democratic, it used to be far more restricted. Before 1998, Tory MPs completely controlled their party’s leadership contests. And before Gordon Brown proposed a new “one member, one vote” system for Labour in 2010, that party used an “electoral college” in which MPs had one vote, party affiliates (mostly unions) had one vote, and then party members had the final vote.

The more grassroots-y process now in use in the U.K. still gives short shrift to loyal voters who may not be well represented by either dues-paying party members or by MPs. All they can do is vote or not vote for the party as led or misled, and hope things get better. Such people really do have a bigger role in the U.S. system.

So count your blessings, Democrats. Your indie friends may have trouble voting in Democratic primaries in some states, but so far no one is asking any of you to pay for the privilege.

Earlier this week Donald Trump gave a much-discussed speech on trade and globalization in Pennsylvania. I am not sure all Democrats understand how heretical the whole thing must seem to your average chamber of commerce member out in the heartland–much less to Wall Street and K Street Republicans. I wrote about that at New York.

[B]y and large, this candidate, who never really embraced systematic thinking, mostly talked of trade policy as something that he would improve via his personal negotiating genius. Uncle Sam might still play the trade game, but he’d no longer be Uncle Sucker, being constantly outmaneuvered by swarthy or sallow foreigners.

But now, in a speech delivered in the Rust Belt state of Pennsylvania, Trump has gone High Protectionist, rejecting not just this or that trade deal, but the whole idea of globalization, which he regards as a politician’s trick on the Folks, who have watched helplessly as Bill and Hillary Clinton sold out their birthright of manufacturing jobs for a mess of Wall Street pottage. Trump sounds like Bernie Sanders on a very bad, dyspeptic day:

“The legacy of Pennsylvania steelworkers lives in the bridges, railways and skyscrapers that make up our great American landscape. But our workers’ loyalty was repaid with betrayal.

“Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization — moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas. Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.

“When subsidized foreign steel is dumped into our markets, threatening our factories, the politicians do nothing.

“For years, they watched on the sidelines as our jobs vanished and our communities were plunged into depression-level unemployment. Many of these areas have still never recovered.

“Our politicians took away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families. Skilled craftsmen and tradespeople and factory workers have seen the jobs they loved shipped thousands of miles away. Many Pennsylvania towns once thriving and humming are now in a state despair. This wave of globalization has wiped out our middle class.”

And on and on it goes. Trump’s narrative of an idyllic, prelapsarian America ruined by globalization has a few holes. It begins with virtuous protectionists George Washington and Alexander Hamilton (you know, the star of that Broadway musical), and then skips far ahead to the Clintons, who wrecked it all with NAFTA and China’s admission to the WTO. You wouldn’t know from listening to him that Ronald Reagan (mentioned by Trump only in connection with a highly uncharacteristic tariff he imposed on Japan) was talking favorably about something very much like NAFTA in 1980; that his successor George H.W. Bush actually negotiated and signed the agreement; or for that matter, that the TPP is as much a product of George W. Bush’s trade diplomacy as Obama’s.

More generally, Trump is ignoring a free-trade tradition in the Republican Party that dates back to the very post–World War II era that he identifies as an American golden age. Yes, Richard Nixon offered protection to the textile industry as part of his 1968 deal with Strom Thurmond (whose South Carolina Republican Party was a wholly owned subsidiary of textile baron Roger Milliken). Yes, John Connally bashed the Japanese during his unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign. And yes, Pat Buchanan offered very much the same analysis and prescription of America’s economic challenges during his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns (curiously, he somehow saw America as ruined even in 1992, before NAFTA!).

But for the most part, Republican protectionism, rooted in the early 19th-century Whig protectionism of Henry Clay and his “American System,” expired with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, widely blamed for setting off a worldwide trade war that made a worldwide Great Depression significantly more painful. And far from being some Clintonian invention, Democratic support for trade liberalization is probably the longest-standing policy tradition in either party, dating all the way back to Martin Van Buren (his predecessor Andrew Jackson had a protectionist streak often attributed to his important political following in the selfsame Pennsylvania where Trump unleashed his protectionist thunder today).

Bernie Sanders represents an authentic and fairly widespread progressive backlash against the Democratic free-trade tradition, rooted in the labor movement, which obviously lost an awful lot in the demise of many traditional, often unionized, industries. Hillary Clinton’s decision to oppose TPP is a sign of that perspective’s power. But in Trump’s case, he’s reaching far back to a lost Republican tradition that is now the starkest heresy among most economic conservatives. On word of Trump’s speech in Pennsylvania, you can be sure knees jerked violently not only on Wall Street and the editorial rooms of its Journal, but also in chambers of commerce across the land where the pure gospel of free trade has been preached for eons. Trump has now declared that gospel pure evil, and the blowback may make the embarrassment-bordering-on-irritated-hostility that his immigration demagoguery produced in the same circles look very mild by comparison.

It’s really unclear any votes Trump can peel off with this rhetoric will offset that blowback.  We’ll see.

In the reaction to the British vote to leave the European Union, there have been a lot of loose analogies made between the US and the UK I discussed one of them at New York:

Anyone who has been watching the run-up to the Brexit referendum in Britain, in which controversy over EU-mandated immigration policies has been a central issue, might have been surprised by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s initial reaction to the results:

A lot of the message that has come back from this is that many communities are fed up with cuts, they are fed up with economic dislocation and feel very angry at the way they have been betrayed and marginalised by successive governments in very poor areas of the country.

So Brexit is about budget cuts and Tory social policies? Really?
Now, part of what Corbyn may be reflecting is the left’s traditional tendency to view cultural phenomena as by-products of economic dynamics — what critics call “economic reductionism.” You can see a glimmer of that in the reaction to Brexit by Bernie Sanders, a pol who is often accused of economic reductionism:

“What this vote is about is an indication that the global economy is not working for everybody,” he said. “It’s not working in the United States for everybody and it’s not working in the U.K. for everybody. When you see investors going to China and shutting down factories in this country and laying off, over a period of many years, millions of people, people are saying you know what, global economy may be great for some people but not for me.”

Not a word about immigration, even as an economic issue.

Unike Sanders, Corbyn and other Labour leaders have to be very careful in talking about this subject. On the one hand, nonwhite immigrants are a strong Labour constituency. On the other hand, white native British working-class voters appear to have overwhelmingly voted for Brexit in Labour’s northern English strongholds. And Labour is far more dependent on white working-class support than are our own Democrats. For one thing, the U.K. remains a much “whiter” country than the U.S.; as of the last census, 87 percent of the British population was white. And so Labour has not been able to make up for white working-class defections with a large minority voting population. There’s also more competition in the U.K. for the higher-income, higher-educated voters who have been gravitating to the Democratic Party in the U.S.: The Lib Dems and Greens are serious parties, as are the regional nationalist parties, and the Tories are (or were in the last two national elections) a lot more moderate than their American counterparts.

That is not to say Brexit, or even anti-immigrant sentiment, is all about race, by any means. The immigrants most associated with EU policy are typically Eastern European (about half of the immigrant population of the U.K. is now nonwhite, and half is white, according to some estimates). But many British people fear the EU will force the U.K. to accept countless Middle Eastern migrants as a by-product of the Syrian nightmare.

In any event, Labour must balance a diverse coalition anchored in a white working class that increasingly resents diversity. It simply does not have the demographic luxury to champion diversity and acceptance of immigrants the way most Democrats — notably presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — have done.

So it’s safer to talk about Tory austerity and economic inequality. Corbyn’s rap has the added advantage of expressing some truth. It’s just not the whole truth.

Most Democrats are aware that Bernie Sanders’ campaign has been pushing for certain changes in the presidential nominating process. Unfortunately, they are so tied up in that campaign’s claim that the system is “rigged” against its own candidate that perceptions of the proposals depend on which camp one is in. But last weekend in California we saw what could be the beginning of a unity push for reforms. I wrote about it at New York earlier this week:

[Sanders’] “reform” agenda is a bit self-serving, aimed as it is at features of the nominating process that hurt Sanders’s prospects and helped Clinton’s. Most notably, while complaining that superdelegates and closed primaries reduce the influence of actual voters, Sanders and his supporters have been largely mute on the most anti-democratic device of them all, the use of caucuses rather than primaries.

Now that the identity of the Democratic presidential nominee is no longer in question, it should be possible for supporters of both Sanders and Clinton to consider reforms without this kind of candidacy-driven tunnel vision. That’s exactly what happened this last weekend at an executive-board meeting of the California Democratic Party:

The California Democratic Party on Sunday called for a broad overhaul of how the party nominates its presidential candidates, including the elimination of caucuses and most super-delegates.

The resolution urging the Democratic National Committee to change the nominating rules for the 2020 contest has no official power, but is a symbolic statement from the largest state Democratic party in the nation.

Many of the changes were sought by supporters of Bernie Sanders, but Hillary Clinton backers also endorsed the effort, resulting in the resolution being unanimously approved at the state party’s executive board meeting on Sunday.

The resolution specifically called for limiting superdelegates to the membership of the DNC and then binding them to actual primary results. It also called for an upending of the traditional calendar rules that have given four states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina — disproportionate influence. If achieved at or after the convention (Democrats tend to defer nomination-process reforms to postelection “commissions”), these changes would represent the largest reforms in the process since the 1980s.

This reform effort represents what is often called “logrolling” in a legislative context, and it can provide powerful impetus to the achievement of big compromises when it encompasses multiple objectives of multiple interests. Partly because of California’s reputation as a trendsetter, and partly because it no longer affects the outcome of the nomination race, it’s entirely possible this combo platter of reforms could gain momentum as the convention approaches, to the probable horror of some governors and members of Congress and a lot of Iowans.

Indeed, another compromise is readily available on the remaining bone of contention over the nomination process between Sanders and Clinton supporters: open versus closed primaries.

Virtually all Democrats favor liberal voter-registration rules. The national party could support closed primaries only in those states that adopted same-day registration and reregistration opportunities. Thus the primaries would be open only to Democrats, but it would be easy for voters to become Democrats after they’ve formed the intention of participating in a Democratic contest. One of the states that provides for same-day registration right now is Iowa. Maybe it could be officially named “the Iowa reform” to mitigate the agony and grief of Iowans if their first-in-the-nation caucus is delegitimized.

That was a joke. But the possibility of joining the passions of both presidential campaigns to a unity agenda of reforms is quite serious.

A lot of intemperate things were said in the wake of the massacre in Orlando, many of them by Donald Trump. But John McCain took the shameful cake, as I discussed this week at New York:
[Y]ou’d figure the presumptive Republican nominee has reasserted his leadership of the Obama-haters of America. But then came this astounding attack today:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the elder Republican statesman, said President Obama was “directly responsible” for the terror attack in Orlando due to his failure to combat the rise of the Islamic State terror group.

Wow.
McCain’s “reasoning,” so to speak, for this remarkable statement involved the stacking of dubious premises to reach an absurd conclusion:

When pressed by a reporter on the claim that Obama was “directly” responsible, McCain reiterated his point — that Obama should not have withdrawn combat troops from Iraq and should have made a more determined effort to intervene in the Syrian civil war.

Keep in mind that so far as anyone knows, ISIS had nothing to do with the Orlando massacre other than taking “credit” for it ex post facto thanks to the murderer’s apparently independent decision to dedicate his evil act to the evil actors in the Middle East.
Shortly after spouting this insanity, McCain issued a statement on Twitter saying that he “misspoke”: “To clarify, I was referring to Pres Obama’s national security decisions that have led to rise of #ISIL, not to the President himself.”
So that’s reassuring: McCain was not accusing the president of being personally involved in the planning or execution of the attacks in Orlando. But that he felt the need to clear that up is telling.
It’s worth remembering that if John McCain had somehow beaten Barack Obama in 2008, he might still be in office today, actively waging wars instead of merely longing for them and bitterly lashing out at a commander-in-chief who is, to his view, insufficiently bloodthirsty. He’s convinced himself that the case for an expanded and eternal Iraq War was strong when he championed the “surge” and, if possible, is even stronger today. And he wants a new war or two now to make up for Obama’s horrific decision to bring that great folly to a close. Perhaps because he knows Donald Trump won’t make this particular argument, McCain felt the need to make it himself.
If the myth of McCain the Maverick Good Guy still survives in some quarters, it’s time to consign it to the history books for good.

While the two national political conventions are still more than a month away, the two presidential candidates’ general election strategies are coming into focus. I discussed the contrast this week at New York.

Politico didn’t have to mince words when it came to describing the strategies Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will pursue in the key general-election battleground states:

Republicans will rely on the sheer force of Donald Trump’s personality to tap into deep-seated voter anger. Democrats are counting on a superior field organization to serve as Hillary Clinton’s firewall.

The Republicans quoted in the story appear to have decided to make a virtue of Trump’s famous disdain for data analytics, micro-targeting, and all that other fancy-dan stuff. He doesn’t need it.

“His job is to be Mr. Trump,” said Rob Gleason, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party. “His appeal is very different than a normal politician. Usually, when we have rallies for people, we prepare weeks in advance. All he has to do is announce three days ahead of time he’s going to be somewhere and a huge crowd shows up. It always energizes people.”

Indeed, Trump’s casual approach to figuring out what to do where is encouraging to GOP leaders in places presidential candidates usually skip:

Deployed the right way, Trump’s force-of-nature persona could help flip some long-blue states toward the GOP, others said.
“I think if he invests in Michigan and shows up in our state, he will do very well,” said Ronna Romney McDaniel, chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party (and niece of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney). “We haven’t had a candidate actually run a robust campaign in Michigan where they’re showing up post-convention.”

You may recall that Sarah Palin pitched a fit in 2008 because the McCain campaign would not waste time and money contesting Michigan. Her buddy Trump may be easier to persuade. After all, he’s “very different from a normal politician.”
By contrast, Hillary Clinton is going to deploy all the state-of-the-art political resources she can. Her events may not have the demonic energy of Trump’s White Resentment Festivals, but she’s not counting on outgunning the mogul in some imaginary enthusiasm competition.

Today at New York I wrote about one notable challenge in restoring Democratic Party unity after the presidential nominating contest winds down:

The heartburn among Democrats about “Bernie or bust” voters who may resist pleas to turn out in November for Hillary Clinton is largely about young people. They’ve preferred Sanders to Clinton during the nomination contest by vast margins, even within racial or ethnic groups that otherwise favored Hillary. They are disproportionately self-identified independents, which means putting on the party yoke sounds like bondage rather than solidarity. And they are the classic marginal voters, thanks to high levels of personal mobility and low levels of political engagement.
Clinton, moreover, is a two-time loser among young voters, having been beaten by Barack Obama among under-30 voters by nearly as large a margin in 2008. Solid as she seems to be with the other big element of the Obama coalition, minority voters, millennials are simply not a natural constituency for her.
But will that matter crucially in November? The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler argues that it won’t, in part because the Kidz weren’t as big a deal for Obama (especially in 2012, when he won despite a significant drop in turnout from under-30s) as some have imagined. And then there’s the Trump factor: A Republican candidate far more distasteful to young voters than Clinton should help her in that demographic with or even without a great deal of effort from Democrats.
Without question, Beutler is right that Obama weathered a drop-off in both under-30 voter participation (from 17 percent of the electorate to 15 percent) and support levels (from 66 percent to 60 percent) between 2008 and 2012. That limits the damage another drop-off could inflict on the Democratic nominee this time around.
As for the impact among millennial voters of Republicans choosing Trump as their nominee, the best evidence we have is from a large-sample survey by Harvard’s Institute of Politics in April and May (i.e., the height of the Sanders phenomenon) that shows Clinton trouncing Trump among under-30 likely voters by a 61-25 margin, pretty comparable to Obama’s performance in 2008. This number is impressive in part because it exists despite meh assessments of Clinton herself: Her favorability ratio among under-30s is pretty far underwater at 37-53 (compared to Bernie Sanders at 54-31). But Trump is at the bottom of the sea with a ratio of 17-74. Clinton goes into the general-election campaign with a sizable advantage among young people even before Bernie Sanders and other validating figures lift a finger to help her.
In general, for all the talk about Trump’s dangerous appeal to white working-class voters, Clinton is very lucky to have drawn an opponent who probably caps at a very low level any potential defections from the Obama coalition of African-American, Latino, and under-30 voters.

Things have suddenly gotten weird for Donald Trump in the wake of his attacks on federal judge Gonzalo Curiel, with Republicans once again wondering if there’s some way to dump the tycoon and find a more conventional nominee. Now, however, their options are a lot more limited, as I explained at New York:

The backlash to Trump’s racially tinged comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel, and the putative nominee’s apparent inability to back away from them, has the senior leaders of the party unable to defend him. South Carolina senator and former presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, quite recently the quintessential Trump disparager who was reconciling himself to the mogul’s candidacy, is now sounding a new alarm and urging fellow Republicans to withdraw their endorsements: “This is the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy,” he told the Times. “If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it. There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.” Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell has offered the candidate a terse directive: “Get on message.”
So is there actually some mechanism whereby Republicans could dump Trump if the panic spreads or the “putative nominee” freaks out and starts blaming his troubles on a conspiracy between ISIS and the Cisco Kid?
Well, yes, there is a nuclear option — but it still has to be considered very unlikely. Approximately one-third of the delegations to the Republican National Convention will be bound to primary or caucus winners by state election laws. For the rest of them, however, the “binding” is by national party rules, and ultimately the rules of every Republican convention are made and can be unmade by the convention itself. So, in theory, convention delegates could vote to unbind themselves (or at least those not bound by state election laws) before the first presidential ballot and throw the nomination open again. If you recall that a significant number of “Trump delegates” are not personally loyal to the wiggy dude to begin with, you could see how a revolt could gain traction under very precise — and unlikely — circumstances.
There are two internal GOP conditions that would need to be present before the nuclear option could ever come into play. The first would be a widespread abandonment of Trump by the very party opinion-leaders who have been climbing aboard his bandwagon in the last few weeks — a mass exodus on the “off-ramp” Graham is talking about. The second and more important development would be a radical change in the rank-and-file sentiment — which was strongly evident long before Trump appeared to have nailed down the nomination — opposing any kind of “coup” against the primary results.
Regardless of what Lindsey Graham and other fair-weather friends of Donald Trump think, neither of these things is going to happen unless there is first a sudden, sickening downward lurch in Trump’s general-election poll numbers. I doubt anything other than 20 points or so — and with it a renewed fear of a down-ballot disaster for the GOP — would get the dump-Trump bandwagon rolling. At that point, all hell could break loose, and Cleveland could be wild and crazy fun after all.

Intrepid poll-watchers have been waiting for the much-revered Field Poll to come out before laying any bets on next Tuesday’s California Democratic presidential primary. It’s now out, and I wrote about the findings at New York as soon as it was available.

Clinton has led in all 18 public polls of California taken this year, and still leads in the RealClearPolitics polling average by six points (49-43). But the much-awaited final poll by the Field Organization, probably the most respected public-opinion operation in the country, shows Sanders pulling to within the margin of error, with Clinton hanging on to a 45-43 lead.
The coalitions put together by the two candidates are very familiar to anyone following the Democratic race. Sanders is running up big margins among under-30 voters (75-15) and to a lesser extent registered independents (54-27), while Clinton is dominating among over-65 voters (56-28) and holding a healthy lead among registered Democrats (49-40). Clinton’s traditional strength among minority voters is ebbing a bit; she leads among African-Americans (57-36) and Latinos (46-42), but trails Sanders among Asian-Americans (34-47), who represent a higher percentage of the likely primary electorate (11 percent) than do black voters (9 percent). Clinton actually leads overall among non-Latino white voters 44-43, probably a tribute to the relatively advanced age of white voters. There’s the usual gender gap as well, and it, too, is strongly influenced by age: Sanders leads among under-40 men by 71-19, while Clinton leads among women over 40 by 57-29. Regionally, Clinton is ahead in Los Angeles County and the Central Valley, while Sanders’s top regions are the San Francisco Bay and the Central Coast.
Since Field showed Clinton’s lead in April at a slim 47-41 margin, there aren’t any big late trends apparent, other than a Sanders surge among Asian-Americans. Of the 23 percent who reported having already voted by mail by the last week of May, Clinton has a nine-point (47-38) lead, which is almost certainly explained by the higher propensity of older voters to vote by mail. Field estimates that two-thirds of the vote will ultimately be cast by mail, which is actually a bit less than in the 2014 primary.
Overall, Field’s two-point Clinton margin matches that of another late-May poll released Wednesdayday, from NBC-Wall Street Journal-Marist; PPIC had the same finding last week.
Certainly the perception is that Sanders has the momentum, although you have to wonder if his heavy dependence on younger voters makes further gains difficult. And there’s really zero evidence that Bernie is on the brink of the kind of big landslide victory he needs to cut deeply into Clinton’s pledged-delegate lead.

The two big takeaways from recent polling of California are this: despite all the talk about HRC’s strength among nonwhite voters and Bernie’s strength among white voters, the two candidates are running just about dead even in both categories, basically because age is dominating every other demographic “split.” And so long as they are running pretty much even, a win for Bernie Sanders won’t cut much ice except as a matter of symbolism.