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.