Like most political analysts, I’ve felt for a good while–certainly since her big win in New York last week–that Hillary Clinton had the Democratic presidential race well in hand, and is increasingly the prohibitive favorite. From a Democratic Party unity point of view, I’ve been looking ahead at how the two candidates and their followers reconcile in Philadelphia. Most analyses of this challenge approach it from Sanders’ perspective, discussing which demands he ought to make for endorsing his vanquisher. I wrote an analysis from Clinton’s point of view for New York yesterday, before the five-state northeastern primaries results came in (they confirmed Clinton’s standing by adding to her pledged delegate lead).

[T]he strategic question for Clinton of how to achieve a “soft landing” in Philadelphia with a united party and Sanders and his devotees fully onboard will [soon] grow sharper.
There is little question that Sanders himself is preparing to make his enthusiastic support at the convention and in a general-election campaign conditional on substantive and political concessions; he’s been telegraphing his determination to place his stamp on the party as a consolation prize for some time now. At Monday night’s MSNBC “town hall” event, he took the clever tack of projecting his disgruntlement onto his supporters rather than personalizing it:

If we end up losing, and I hope we do not, and Secretary Clinton wins, it is incumbent upon her to tell millions of people who right now do not believe in establishment politics or establishment economics, who have serious misgivings about a candidate who has received millions of dollars from Wall Street and other special interests, she has got to go out to you and to millions of other people and say, you know, “I think the United States should join the rest of the industrialized world and take on the private insurance companies and the greed of the drug companies and pass a Medicare for all.”

As noted by the Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent, Clinton’s response to Sanders’s apparent lack of interest in achieving party unity without major concessions was basically to shame him via the example she set in 2008:

“Then-Senator Obama and I ran a really hard race; it was so much closer than the race right now between me and Senator Sanders,” Clinton said, adding that this time around she is far ahead of Sanders in the delegate count and total number of votes. “We got to the end in June, and I did not put down conditions. I didn’t say, ‘You know what, if Senator Obama does X, Y and Z, maybe I’ll support him. I said, ‘I am supporting Senator Obama because no matter what our differences might be, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and the Republicans.’ That’s what I did.”
At the time, Clinton said, 40 percent of her supporters said they wouldn’t support Obama.

The trouble with this analogy is that her campaign had few, if any, substantive arguments with Obama’s, and no particular demands for procedural changes in the nominating process either. The implied sexism many Clinton supporters saw in the eagerness of elites to get behind Obama was a grievance that could, and could only, be mitigated by tokens of respect for the vanquished candidate and for women, not by platform planks or process reforms.
The crusade for a “revolution” in the Democratic Party represented by the Sanders campaign is another thing entirely, and thus the kind of unconditional surrender she offered to Obama was never really on the table. If Clinton wants a peaceful convention, some concessions are probably in order. Selecting which to make and which to reject will be a delicate process. Where doubling down on shared positions to make them more of a priority is an option — as it is on, say, overturning Citizens United or pointed rhetoric on income equality — Clinton should have an easy time “caving” to Sanders’s demands. Even on some more detailed policy positions, hedging is entirely possible, as shown by Clinton’s recent willingness to concede that a carbon tax is one possible way to deal with greenhouse-gas emissions, or her contention that breaking up big banks may now be justified under Dodd-Frank. On the “political reform” front, it wouldn’t be that hard for Clinton & Co. to punt the idea of universally open primaries to some post-convention commission, which is generally how Democrats have always dealt with such matters.
But if Sanders and his supporters decide to go to the mats on “Medicare for all,” it will be more difficult for Clinton to surrender inconspicuously, especially if the planted axiom is that opposition to a single-payer system can only be explained by whorish submission to private health insurance and pharmaceutical interests, as Sanders generally insists.
The ultimate calculation Team Hillary must make is how much Sandernista unhappiness it is safe to accept, and within that calculation, whether the prime objective is a happy convention or minimizing possible defections in November.
Since presidential politics is ultimately about winning the general election, Clinton could probably afford to honk off Bernie and his devotees to some extent in Philadelphia if she is reasonably certain they’ll turn out for the Democratic ticket in November. And that’s where she and other Establishment Democrats have really caught a break from Republicans this year.
Experts may differ on the exact value of negative versus positive mobilization strategies, but there is not much question that either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz — at present the overwhelming favorites for the GOP nomination — would offer a virtual laboratory experiment in maximizing negative mobilization for Democrats. There are few if any Bernie Sanders policy priorities on which Cruz does not hold a near-opposite position. That’s also true to a considerable extent of Trump, with the added ingredient of an implied extra-constitutional threat to civil liberties that makes the word fascism spring easily to the lips of precisely the kind of people most likely to feel the Bern. To put it another way, if Hillary Clinton has to make policy concessions to convince liberal and “very liberal” voters to turn out to smite Cruz or Trump, then the general election may already be lost.
So in the final analysis, convention optics may be the central consideration for the Clinton campaign in figuring out exactly how much kowtowing to Sanders and his fans is in order, recognizing that too many concessions could convey a weakness that would offset the gains from early party unity. If Clinton makes it clear early and often that there are limits to the gestures she is willing to make, then Sanders’s leverage over her will accordingly be diminished.

All Clinton has to do in the meantime is actually win the nomination without bruising any more feelings than is necessary.

I realize that idle speculation about future contingencies that may not arise is an occupational hazard for political writers. But I did address a fairly inevitable topic at New York earlier this week: the possibility of a Clinton-Warren ticket:

HRC campaign chairman John Podesta [told] the Boston Globe that “there will be women on that list” of possible vice-presidential choices when the time comes for ticket-making. A separate Globe article speculated that Janet Napolitano, Jeanne Shaheen, Amy Klobuchar, and Patty Murray could join the junior senator from Massachusetts as women under consideration for the gig.
Let’s get serious, though. Unless Podesta is just conducting old-school constituency-tending via the process of “mentioning” women along with various other demographic categories as potentially supplying a Clinton running mate, speculation should begin and end with Elizabeth Warren. No credible candidate of either gender or from any background could so quickly and definitively prevent the party split that tensions between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have threatened to create. Yes, in theory Democrats could nominate a “unity ticket” of Clinton and Sanders; neither has ruled that out. But the crow-eating and ego-stroking involved in that scenario probably exceeds the obstacles that prevented an Obama-Clinton unity ticket in 2008.
Besides, is there really a sizable body of Sandernistas out there who would be dissatisfied with Warren on the ticket? She’s the candidate many of them hoped and prayed for in the first place. And despite an unimpeachable record on the anti-Wall Street themes that most excite Sanders supporters, Warren has few of his weaknesses: She’s well under 70, has not made a habit of calling herself a “socialist,” and will never be played by Larry David on Saturday Night Live.
The objections to a Clinton-Warren ticket are not terribly credible. Yes, Warren is from blue-state Massachusetts, not a battleground state. Recent research, however, has pretty conclusively demonstrated that a running mate doesn’t make his or her state significantly more winnable, which reduces the allure of Warren Senate colleagues like Tim Kaine and Sherrod Brown. And yes, Warren would not break any glass ceilings that Clinton is not already breaking at the top of the ticket. But with 92 of 94 major party tickets since the Second Party System emerged in 1828 being composed of two men, can anyone seriously object to one composed of two women? I suspect the first crass joke from Donald Trump about two chicks on the ticket would be pretty severely punished by the swing voters who already look dimly on him and the contemporary GOP anyway.
Conversely, choosing Warren would reinforce the historic nature of the ticket, much as Bill Clinton’s choice of fellow young southern moderate Al Gore in 1992 reinforced his claims to be a “different kind of Democrat” and the avatar of generational change. That partnership worked out pretty well, or would have had the U.S. Supreme Court not had different plans for the country in 2000.
The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza today all but rules out a Clinton-Warren ticket on one vague ground — a lack of “personal chemistry,” which if true could be a big problem, but he cites zero evidence of that particular hunch — and one specific one: Clinton doesn’t really need to mend fences with the kind of left-bent voters who are concerned about her integrity or her relationship with Wall Street. He calls Warren “a specialized pick to fix a very particular problem — which doesn’t exist yet and likely won’t.”
There’s a pretty easy test for Cillizza’s proposition: polling Clinton partisans on how they feel about a ticket that includes Warren. If there is this unbridgeable division in how the two women view the world, as Cillizza suggests, it should extend to Clinton’s supporters, and I betcha it doesn’t. And far from being the break-this-glass-in-the-case-of-emergency option, Warren would be, in the eyes of most political observers across the spectrum, a more substantial figure than just about any pol you could name.

I wrote this aware that the case I made for an Obama-Clinton “unity ticket” back in 2008 didn’t bear fruit. But now the decisive shoe’s on the other foot.

After watching returns from New York Tuesday night until just past midnight EDT, I offered this take on the Republican primary for, appropriately, New York:

Anyone who made the mistake of predicting that Donald Trump’s defeat in the Wisconsin primary two weeks ago finally sounded the much-anticipated death knell for his candidacy needed to eat a big plate of crow Tuesday night, as Trump crushed John Kasich and Ted Cruz in his home state. The mogul won a sizable majority of the vote in every part of the state and took 90-91 of the 95 available pledged delegates. He seems to have nailed what he needed to accomplish (according to a finely calibrated estimate by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver) in order to stay on the track — or perhaps it’s better described as a tightrope — to a first-ballot majority of pledged delegates.
Because Trump has almost certainly lost hope of winning on anything after the first ballot in Cleveland, he has no margin for error. So his immediate challenge is to maximize his potential delegate haul in the five northeastern states holding primaries a week from now. One of those states, Delaware, should give all its delegates to Trump on a winner-take-all basis. Two others, Connecticut and Maryland, award some delegates to the statewide plurality winner and the rest to the plurality winner in congressional districts. Trump could sweep all the delegates in both states or instead get picked at from both directions in the odd CD by Cruz or Kasich. Rhode Island is a sort of throwaway proportional-delegate-award state, and Pennsylvania (like West Virginia in May) elects a majority of its delegates directly, with no binding candidate preferences.
Trump needs to cook in the Northeast because, afterward, the terrain gets more difficult, with Indiana providing another midwestern winner-take-all-by-congressional-district test in early May and then several winner-take-all primaries in plains and western states where Ted Cruz should clean up. Trump is almost sure to sweep winner-take-all New Jersey on June 7, and then it will all come down to another state where plurality winners statewide and in congressional districts take the jackpot in 172-delegate California.
Unsurprisingly, given his comments about “New York values,” the Empire State was not good to Ted Cruz, and not just because his rival Trump did so well. Cruz finished a poor third in New York with no delegates, and his long-standing effort to create a one-on-one contest with Trump was once again delayed by a relatively good Kasich showing. The Ohio governor will now naturally make a big push in the northeastern primaries just ahead and will then probably concentrate on trying to win a few California districts where a close three-way race could yield a three-delegate harvest.
We can expect a lot of hype from team Kasich in the days just ahead, along with dismissive sounds from team Cruz of anything happening other than its steady progress in picking off uncommitted delegates and later support from delegates bound to Trump on the first or second ballots. The closer Trump gets to a first-ballot victory, the greater the pressure will be on Kasich to get out, particularly if he’s failed to reduce the Donald’s northeastern-delegate haul. Even as the Kasich campaign celebrates its relatively good showing in New York, it should pay attention to the exit-poll finding that 70 percent of New York Republicans think the candidate with the most votes should win the nomination.

Don’t bet the farm on any particular outcome just yet. And Democrats, don’t pop the popcorn just yet, but do keep it handy.

As the Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus becomes more of a target for abuse and a figure of fun each day, you have to wonder how long he can survive. I speculated on that subject a bit at New York earlier this week:

As recently as the beginning of last year, Reince Priebus was riding pretty high as chairman of the Republican National Committee. He was reelected with little opposition to a third term as chairman, the first to do so with a Democrat controlling the White House. Republicans had made big and historic gains in the 2014 midterms. Party finances were looking good. Priebus’s famous 2013 “autopsy report” after the 2012 presidential loss, with its call for a more diverse and less angry GOP, was still the prevailing wisdom in the GOP.
Now, 15 months later, you get the sense Priebus is going through the motions, sure to be replaced the next time his party reaches a resting point. To the Trump and Cruz partisans dominating the GOP presidential nominating context, Priebus is the face of the hated Republican Establishment, eyeing their presidential candidates with bad intent and doing what he can to set the stage for a stab in the back in Cleveland or soon thereafter. Just yesterday Trump called Priebus a “disgrace” who “should be ashamed of himself” for the “rigged” rule of the nomination process. But to anti-Trump and anti-Cruz Republicans, Priebus is an empty suit babbling about party unity when he should be taking a stand. Today’s Washington Post has not one but two columns kicking the man in the slats.
First there is journalist and snark-master Dana Milbank, who acidly notes that the more Priebus’s party sinks into the mire of Trumpism, the more its chairman engages in vapid uplift:

Priebus failed to act to stop Trump when he could have, or to coordinate Republicans to clear the field for a mainstream alternative. And now he compounds the damage by sticking with the same moral neutrality and happy talk of GOP unity that allowed the situation to develop.
After the Jan. 14 debate, in which Trump said he would “gladly accept the mantle of anger” and traded charges with Cruz about their constitutional eligibility for the presidency, Priebus tweeted: “It’s clear we’ve got the most well-qualified and diverse field of candidates from any party in history.”
In the Feb. 13 debate, Trump blamed George W. Bush for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and said Bush “lied” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Trump, Cruz and Marco Rubio took turns calling one another liars, and Rubio ridiculed Cruz’s Spanish skills. “Our well-qualified & experienced candidates continue to put forth serious solutions to restore prosperity & strength to America,” Priebus tweeted.
And after the March 3 debate, in which Trump spoke about the size of his genitals, Priebus tweeted that “Republican candidates are the only ones offering the course correction voters overwhelmingly want.”

At this rate, if the worst happens and Cleveland is a bloodbath of historic dimensions, you figure Priebus’s joy at GOP unity will know no bounds.
Similarly, conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin is enraged at Priebus’s refusal to flat-out oppose Trump. Damning with the faintest of praise the chairman’s refutation of the Trump camp’s claims of being robbed in Colorado this last week, which she attributed to Priebus being “momentarily roused from his stupor,” Rubin cuts loose:

What is missing here — as it has been for months now — is any principled defense against the man threatening to replace the conservative movement’s political apparatus with one that is nothing more than a cult of personality. In the latter, any outcome other than one favoring Trump is “crooked” or “rigged.” Acceptable rhetoric is defined as whatever he says; any efforts to present the party as inclusive go out the window.
Priebus continues to passively allow Trump’s torrent of deception, threats and out and out lies to wash over the party, treating him as just another candidate. It was this attitude that sent Priebus scurrying to Trump Tower with the pledge, now shown to be entirely worthless. Priebus’s collapse into moral relativism led him to forgo speaking out against the vast majority of Trump’s outrageous comments, and to only cryptically frown on violence in the race, which Trump alone has instigated and condoned. Worse yet, without an operative moral compass, Priebus again and again praised the entire field and provided assurance that no matter who got to 1,237 delegates, the entire party would get behind him. In short, he offered Trump carte blanche and now stands accused of running a corrupt and undemocratic outfit. You would think he would show a smidgen of indignation.

There’s an informal bipartisan tradition that a party’s presidential nominee — if it’s not an incumbent president who’s already been running the show — is given the opportunity to name her or his own national chairman. No matter who finally claims the tarnished prize in Cleveland, it’s hard to imagine Priebus will be kept around unless it’s to serve as a scapegoat if things go south.

Nice work, Reince.

While most of the carping about nominating process rules is emanating from the Republican side of the partisan barricades, there’s some interest in reforms in the Democratic ranks as well, as I discussed at New York.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent wrote a stimulating post on the possibility of Bernie Sanders using his leverage over Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to demand changes in the process that will determine future presidential nomination processes. Aside from the pros and cons of such “reforms,” a more basic question is the extent to which the national parties are in a position to implement them. To a surprising extent, they are not.
Nominating-process guru Josh Putnam of the University of Georgia made this clear in his comment on Sargent’s piece at his Frontloading HQ site. After noting that Democrats typically punt rules changes to a post-convention commission, Putnam gets to the heart of the problem in promoting nominating-process “reforms”:

The problem, as always, is that the national parties have only so much control over the presidential nomination process. The system started out and has evolved into a patchwork of overlapping national party rules, state party rules and state laws. In attempting to fix the perceived problems of any given cycle, the national parties have to navigate that patchwork.

Take the question of whether to use primaries, as Sargent prefers, or instead the less “democratic” caucuses. Primaries cost a lot of money. As a result, they are generally financed by state governments, which in turn means that state legislatures, not state parties (much less the national parties), decide whether and under what circumstances to hold them. If a given legislature doesn’t want to use tax dollars for primaries, odds are high the state parties will resort to the much-less-expensive alternative of caucuses. Could the national party play chicken with the states by demanding primaries? Yes, but are they really going to disenfranchise a state if it doesn’t comply? So far, no one has been willing to find out.
Then there’s the whole open-versus-closed primaries issue (again, Sargent thinks “reformers” would prefer open primaries to encourage engagement with indies). The practical implications of this decision depend heavily on state laws governing party registration. Some states make primary- (or caucus-) day changes in party affiliation very easy. Where that’s the case, making a primary formally “open” doesn’t add a lot of value. Conversely, there are 19 states that do not register voters by party. They are automatically going to be “open primary” states.
“Reforms” in the nominating-contest calendar have been a constant issue in recent years, but all the controversy has showed the limited power of the national parties in this area. It has required ever-more-severe sanctions to keep states from moving themselves up on the calendar, and the Democratic Party’s strong preference for proportional allocation of delegates has meant that it cannot offer the inducement of making winner-take-all (or winner-take-most) systems available to states that agree to hold their contests later in the year. And to the extent that state-financed primaries are utilized, changing dates often requires the cooperation of the opposing party since legislatures aren’t generally going to authorize two separate events.
As Putnam notes, one popular Democratic “reform” doesn’t run afoul of state prerogatives, but encounters another problem:

The problem with eliminating superdelegates is a little different. There is no overlap with state party rules or state laws, but nixing those unpledged delegates is an idea that requires superdelegates — members of the DNC — to vote to strip themselves of that power. It is not a nonstarter, but that idea is a long way from being enacted.

The bottom line is that the presidential nominating process isn’t a national contest with some state rules but a largely state-controlled system. If Democrats want to change that they need to deal with it comprehensively.

With all the talk lately about the U.S. Supreme Court and its past, current, and potentially future composition, we’re beginning to hear more about what Republicans might do if they retake the White House and still have an opening to fill. I wrote about one scary possibility at New York earlier this week:

At present, there’s a major boom among conservatives for Senator Mike Lee of Utah.
Today the Washington Post‘s James Hohmann offers a rundown on all the reasons Lee is enjoying this attention. For one thing, the Utah senator has long been considered Ted Cruz’s best friend in the upper chamber, so if Cruz is elected, it’s a bit of a no-brainer if Lee wants a robe. For another, Lee would probably have an easier time getting confirmed by his colleagues in the clubby Senate than some law professor or circuit-court judge, and might even avoid a Democratic filibuster (assuming Republicans haven’t already killed the SCOTUS filibuster via the “nuclear option”).
But one of the two most important reasons for the Lee boom is buried pretty far down in the story:

Lee is just 44. That means he could squeeze four or more decades out of a lifetime appointment.

Yep. If nominated next year for the Scalia seat, Lee would be the youngest nominee since Clarence Thomas, who has now been on the Court for nearly a quarter of a century, with many years of extremism probably still ahead of him. Before Thomas, you have to go all the way back to Bill Richardson’s favorite justice, Whizzer White, in 1962, to find a nominee as young as Lee would be. As you may have noticed, life expectancy has been going up for Americans in recent decades. For conservatives seeking a permanent grip on the Court and on constitutional law, someone Lee’s age is money.
But the second reason Lee would be significant is only hinted at by Hohmann in the praise lavished on the solon by the Heritage Foundation and longtime right-wing legal thinker Senator Jeff Sessions (the two most likely sources for SCOTUS advice for Donald Trump, as it happens). Lee’s not just any old “constitutional conservative”; he’s a leading exponent of what is called the Lochner school of constitutional theory, named after the early-twentieth-century decision that was the basis for SCOTUS invalidation of New Deal legislation until the threat of court-packing and a strategic flip-flop resolved what had become a major constitutional crisis.
Lee has, on occasion, suggested that child labor laws, Social Security, and Medicare are unconstitutional, because they breach the eternal limits on federal power sketched out by the Founders. Like most Lochnerians, he views the constitution and the courts as designed to keep democratic majorities from stepping on the God-given personal and property rights of individuals and corporations alike. So it’s no surprise he’s been a bitter critic of the deferential view towards Congress expressed by Chief Justice Roberts in the decision that saved Obamacare.
In effect, Mike Lee could become a more influential successor to Clarence Thomas — after overlapping with Thomas on the Court for a decade or two.

Now that would be scary.

I’m jaded enough to roll with all sorts of lame claims in the coverage of presidential politics, but one today drove me to an immediate rebuttal at New York:

Time magazine has truly jumped the shark in publishing an interview with Ted Cruz in which he is encouraged without contradiction to call himself an “economic populist.” If Cruz is an “economic populist,” then the term has truly lost all meaning beyond the pixie dust of rhetorical enchantment.
We are supposed to believe Cruz is a populist because he opposes a few relatively small but symbolically rich corporate-subsidy programs like the Export-Import Bank and regulatory thumbs-on-the-scale for the use of ethanol — both objects of ridicule among libertarians for decades. In the Time interview, he leaps effortlessly from the argument that sometimes government helps corporations to the idea that government should not help anybody.

[B]oth parties, career politicians in both parties get in bed with the lobbyist and special interest. And the fix is in. Where Washington’s policies benefit big business, benefit the rich and the powerful at the expense of the working men and women.
Now the point that I often make, and just a couple of days ago in Wisconsin I was visiting with a young woman who said she was a Bernie Sanders supporter. And I mentioned to her that I agreed with Bernie on the problem.
But I said if you think the problem is Washington is corrupt, why would you want Washington to have more power? I think the answer to that problem is for Washington to have less power, for government to have less power over our lives.

Is there any K Street or Wall Street lobbyist who would not instantly trade whatever preferments they’ve been able to wring from Washington in exchange for a radically smaller government that lets corporations do whatever they want? I don’t think so.
Yet it’s hard to find a politician more inclined to get government off the backs of the very rich and the very powerful. My colleague Jonathan Chait summed it up nicely this very day in discussing Cruz’s Goldwater-ish extremism:

In addition to the de rigueur ginormous tax cut for rich people, Cruz proposes a massive shift of the tax burden away from income taxes to sales taxes. So, not only would Cruz’s plan give nearly half of its benefit to the highest-earning one percent of taxpayers (who would save, on average, nearly half a million dollars a year in taxes per household), but it would actually raise taxes on the lowest-earning fifth …
He advocates for … deregulation of Wall Street, and would eliminate the Clean Power Plan and take away health insurance from some 20 million people who’ve gained it through Obamacare. He has defined himself as more militant and uncompromising than any other Republican in Congress, and many of his fellow Republican officeholders have depicted him as a madman.

Cruz would have you believe his unsavory reputation among Beltway Republicans flows from his identification with the working class as opposed to the special interests. As a matter of fact, he’s considered a madman (or a charlatan) for insisting Republicans ought to shut down the federal government rather than compromise or abandon their anti-working-class policies (and their reactionary social policies as well).
Aside from the policies Chait mentions, Cruz also favors (in contrast to Donald Trump) that populist perennial, “entitlement reform,” including the kind of Social Security benefit cuts and retirement-age delays promoted by George W. Bush back in 2005.
And for dessert, in a position that would certainly make William Jennings Bryan roll in his grave, Cruz is on record favoring tight money policies to combat the phantom menace of inflation, along with a commission to consider a return to the gold standard.
One might argue the description of Cruz as an “economic populist” is a small journalistic excess justified by the heat of the GOP nominating contest. But in a general-election matchup between Cruz and Hillary Clinton, we could find ourselves hearing misleading contrasts of Cruz as a “populist” to Hillary Clinton, the “Establishment” pol. Let’s head that one off at a distance, people. Whatever you think of her set side by side with Bernie Sanders, compared to Cruz she’s a wild leveler and class-warfare zealot, favoring minimum-wage increases, more progressive taxes, large new mandates on businesses, continuation and expansion of Obamacare, action on global climate change, a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and (of course) opposition to the many reactionary policies Ted Cruz holds dear.

All Democrats should howl with rage at such misappropriations of the economic populist heritage. They might disagree internally as to who is more faithful to that legacy and how much that matters, but if Ted Cruz is part of that club, it’s time to pick a new n

Everyone loves a good “contested convention” fantasy flowing from the decent odds that no one candidate will arrive at the Republican National Convention in July with a majority of bound delegates. But it’s important to understand how convention rules can make a wide-open convention impossible, and how the contending forces in the party have the power to make those rules stick. I wrote about this issue and the historical context extensively at New York this week:

As conventions became more tightly controlled and their managers worried about things like ensuring that the balloting and acceptance speeches occurred before East Coast television viewers were asleep, nonserious candidacies were sacrificed to efficiency. Among Republicans, the tradition developed that no one’s name could be placed in nomination without support from at least three delegations; that cut off the pure favorite-son candidacies. Beyond that, the status of conventions as ratifying rather than nominating events exerted its own pressure on “losers” who typically succumbed to the pressure to unite behind the nominee and grin for the cameras.
That was before the Ron Paul Revolution appeared on the scene. In 2012, the Paulites shrewdly focused on winning fights for delegates that occurred after primaries and caucuses in hopes of making their eccentric candidate and his eccentric causes a big nuisance at Mitt Romney’s convention. And so the Romney campaign and its many allies reacted — some would say overreacted — by using its muscle on the convention Rules Committee (meeting just prior to Tampa to draft procedures for the conclave) to change the presence-in-three-delegations threshold for having one’s name placed in nomination to this one:

Each candidate for nomination for President of the United States and Vice President of the United States shall demonstrate the support of a majority of the delegates from each of eight (8) or more states, severally, prior to the presentation of the name of that candidate for nomination.

This Rule 40(b), moreover, was interpreted to mean that no candidate who did not meet the threshold could have votes for the nomination recorded in her/his name.
Rule 40(b) succeeded in keeping the Paulites under wraps in Tampa, but as is generally the case, it remained in effect as a “temporary” rule for the next convention, subject to possible revision by a new Rules Committee meeting just prior to the 2016 gathering, and by the convention itself, which controls its own rules. In fact, its drafters may have intended to keep the rule in place to head off some annoying convention challenge to President Romney’s renomination.
Back in the real world, Rule 40(b) may have been in the back of some minds early in the 2016 cycle as a way to keep the convention from being rhetorically kidnapped by noisy supporters of Rand Paul, or of the novelty “birther” candidate Donald Trump.
Now, obviously, the shoe is on the other foot, and there is a growing possibility that the two strongest candidates for the GOP nomination, Trump and Ted Cruz, could join their considerable forces to insist on maintenance of Rule 40(b) or something much like it to prevent their common Republican Establishment enemies from exploiting a multi-ballot convention to place someone else at the top of the ticket.
Trump is currently the only candidate who is beyond the eight-state-majority threshold for competing for the nomination under the strict terms of Rule 40(b). But Team Cruz is confident enough that its candidate will also satisfy the rule that he’s the one out there arguing that Rule 40(b) means votes for John Kasich are an entire waste because they won’t be counted in Cleveland. And with both Trump and Cruz repeatedly claiming that the nomination of a dark horse who hasn’t competed during the primaries would be an insult to the GOP rank and file, maintaining Rule 40(b) is the obvious strategy to close off that possibility. A good indicator of the new situation is the evolving position of Virginia party activist and veteran Rules Committee member Morton Blackwell, a loud dissenter against Rule 40(b) before and after the 2012 convention, who now, as a Cruz supporter, is arguing that changing the rule “would be widely and correctly viewed as [an] outrageous power grab.”
But can the Republican Establishment stack the Rules Committee with party insiders determined to overturn Rule 40(b) and keep the party’s options wide open going into Cleveland? Not really. That committee is composed of two members elected by each state delegation. No likely combination of Kasich and Rubio delegates and “false-flag” delegates bound to Trump or Cruz but free to vote against their interests on procedural issues is likely to make up a majority of the Rules Committee, or of the convention. Indeed, most of the anecdotal evidence about “delegate-stealing” in the murky process of naming actual bodies to fill pledged seats at the convention shows Team Cruz, not some anti-Trump/anti-Cruz cabal, gaining ground. If Trump and Cruz stick together on this one point no matter how many insults they are exchanging as rivals, they almost certainly can shut the door on any truly “open” convention and force Republicans who intensely dislike both of them to choose their poison.
That would leave Kasich with his fistful of general-election polls and the proliferating list of fantasy “unity” candidates on the outside in Cleveland, playing to the cameras but having no real influence over the proceedings. And you can make the case that this is precisely what the Republican “base” wants and has brought to fruition through the nominating process. It would, of course, be highly ironic if the Republican Establishment’s Rule 40(b) became the instrument for two candidates generally hated by said Establishment to impose a duopoly on the party. But there’s no President Romney around to put a stop to it.

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.

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..