As someone semi-obsessed with the need to find ways to mobilize Democratic-leaning voters–especially young people–to participate in midterm elections, I was initially enthused about an initiative launched by former Bernie Sanders organizers focused on 2018. But then I saw the details, and reacted appropriately at New York:

[T]he closer you get to the Sandernistas’ Brand New Congress initiative — the new project by recently laid-off Bernie staffers to create a revolution in Congress beginning with the 2018 elections — the less it looks like the instrument for a difficult but achievable task and the more it looks like the product of a very strange set of beliefs about American politics. It’s not focused on boosting progressive turnout in general elections, but on recruiting and running candidates in Republican as well as Democratic primaries who meet a rigid set of policy litmus tests. The idea is very explicitly that people alive with the Bern can literally elect a “brand-new Congress” in one election cycle to turn public policy 180 degrees. Or so says key organizer Zack Exley:

“We want a supermajority in Congress that is fighting for jobs, criminal justice reform and the environment,” Exley said. “Most Americans actually want that, and I think we get it by running Dems in blue areas, Republicans in deep red areas, and by running independents wherever we didn’t defeat incumbents.”

Republicans, too?

Corbin Trent, another former Sanders staffer, said bringing Republicans on board is “the key to it being a successful idea” and there’s enough overlap between Sanders’ platform and tea party conservatives to make the PAC’s goals feasible.
Reality television star Donald Trump’s current status as the Republican front-runner demonstrates that GOP voters are eager for candidates who, like Trump, criticize the corrupting influence of money in politics and the impact of free trade deals on American workers, Trent said.
“This will allow Republicans to say ‘Yeah, I’m a Republican, but I believe climate change is real and I don’t believe all Muslims are terrorists,” he said. “It will allow people to think differently in the Republican Party if they want to pull away from the hate-based ideology.”

Yes, that was what I feared: The discredited notion that lefties and the tea party can make common cause in something other than hating on the Clintons and Barack Obama is back with a vengeance. And worse yet, Donald Trump — Donald Trump — is being touted as an example of a Republican capable of progressive impulses because he shares the old right-wing mercantilist hostility to free trade and has enough money to scorn lobbyists. Does your average Trump supporter really “believe climate change is real” and disbelieve that “all Muslims are terrorists”? Do Obamacare-hating tea-partiers secretly favor single-payer health care? Do the people in tricorn hats who favor elimination of labor unions deep down want a national $15-an-hour minimum wage? And do the very activists who brought the Citizens United case and think it’s central to the preservation of the First Amendment actually want to overturn it?
It’s this last delusion that’s the most remarkable. If there is any one belief held most vociferously by tea-party activists, it’s that anything vaguely approaching campaign-finance reform is a socialist, perhaps even a satanic, conspiracy. These are the people who don’t think donors to their political activities should be disclosed because Lois Lerner will use that information to launch income-tax audits and persecute Christians. The tea folk are much closer to the Koch brothers in their basic attitudes toward politics than they are to conventional Republicans.
But there persists a sort of “tea envy” in progressive circles. Here’s Salon staff writer Sean Illing in a piece celebrating Brand New Congress:

Real change in this country will require a sustained national mobilization, what I’ve called a counter-Tea Party movement. While their agenda was nihilistic and obstructionist, the Tea Party was a massive success by any measure. And they succeeded because they systematically altered the Congressional landscape.

Well, you could say that, or you could say the tea party’s excesses cost Republicans control of the Senate in 2012, and produced an environment that’s made Donald Trump and Ted Cruz the GOP’s only two options for this year’s presidential nomination. Indeed, you can probably thank the tea party for the likelihood of a very good Democratic general election this November.
But that will again produce excellent conditions for another Republican-dominated midterm in 2018. It sure would make sense for progressives to focus on how to minimize the damage in the next midterm and begin to change adverse long-term turnout patterns. Expending time, money, and energy on scouring the earth looking for Republican primary candidates willing to run on a democratic-socialist agenda will not be helpful.

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.