Sen. Bernie Sanders will deliver the most important speech of his life on this opening night of the Democratic Convention. But more importantly, his prime time speech could prove to be of pivotal importance for America’s future.

If Sanders rises to the challenge, he can help unite progressive voters to win, not only the presidency, but a working majority of the Senate, House and U.S. Supreme Court. Those are high stakes indeed. But Sanders did not launch a campaign that won primaries and caucuses in 22 states to fade away as a short-lived blip on the 2016 political radar screen.

The stakes have been jacked up even higher by the wikileaks implicating DNC leaders, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in partisan advocacy of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and opposition to Sanders, long before Clinton clinched the number of delegates needed to win the nomination. A significant number of Sanders suporters are understandably pissed off about it, and the Sanders campaign call for Wasserman Schultz’s resignation months ago was clearly justified, with benefit of hindsight.

It is important to put the wikileaks controversy in context. There are reports that the leaks were engineered by Russian hackers, likely at Putin’s behest, a disturbing possibility considering the warm relationship between Putin and Trump. There should be no doubt, however, about the timing of the leaks being designed to manipulate public opinion against the Clinton campaign. In that sense, one question is, how many American voters will allow themselves to be manipulated by Russian meddling in our politics.

That possibility is made even more unsavory by Trump’s piling on about the wikileaks, and his direct appeals to Sanders voters to support his candidacy. Chances are he won’t get many votes from angry Sanders voters, most of whom are too sophisticated to get suckered by the likes of Trump.  The greater concern for Democrats is the possibility that increased numbers of Sanders supporters will stay home or vote for Libertarian or Green party presidentical candidates, which is not so different in effect from voting for Trump.

The Republicans will want to put the worst possible face on the controversy, and they will imply again and again, without any proof, that the DNC favoritism was instigated by the Clinton campaign, even though it looks like the DNC leadership was so partisan they didn’t need any encouragement.

Sanders is not the only important speaker tonight. Elizabeth Warren will deliver the keynote address to the convention, and her speech will also be closely watched by millions of progressives nationwide. She, too, has a critical role to play in uniting progressives to defeat Trump. First Lady Michelle Obama provides another big draw. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Sen. Cory Booker will also speak to the convention tonight.

I expect that both Sanders and Warren will do their best to support Clinton. Anyone who has paid close attention to Sanders during the last year — and throughout his career — can see that he is wholly dedicated to the vision of a progressive future for America. His campaign, contrary to comments made by some of his critics, has never been about gratifying his ego. By any fair measure, he is one of the most deeply-committed U.S. Senators, always focused on reforms to advance social and economic justice.

Some Democrats grumbled that Sanders didn’t support Clinton fast enough, after she clinched the needed number of delegates to win the nomination. Both he and Clinton wanted to time his endorsement for the optimum moment when it could do the most good. I will be greatly surprised if he doesn’t do everything he can to defeat Trump and elect Clinton.

Wasserman Schultz has tendered her resignation as head of the DNC, effective at the end of the convention. As of this writing, however, she is still expected to address the convention. This may be a really bad idea, especially since she has not yet apologized to Sanders. Her appearance could be the most divisive moment of the convention and would likely invite protest both inside and outside the convention center.

Part of the dilemma facing Democratic leaders is that Wasserman Schultz has been a highly-effective fund-raiser for Democrats, particularly in Florida, a critically-important swing state. She also did an excellent job of organizing the 2012 Democratic convention. No doubt Clinton and the Obama Administration are looking for a way to allow her to save face, while playing a diminished public role at the convention. If she has real dedication to the success of the Democratic Party, however, she should take the initiative and bow out gracefully.

So day one of the Democratic convention will have more than its share of high drama and reason for good ratings. If Democrats, lead by Sanders and Warren, can leverage the increased public attention into an opportunity to educate and inspire the confidence of millions of American voters, this can be another Democratic convention that shows which political party is best prepared to govern wisely.

At Daily Kos Greg Dworkin rounded up some insightful and funny tweets responding to Trump’s 75-minute GOP convention speech, including:

David Brooks: “Donald Trump is dismantling the Republican Party and replacing it with a personality cult. The G.O.P. is not dividing; it’s ceasing to exist as a coherent institution…It’s going to end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained…Some rich children are careless that way; they break things and other people have to clean up the mess.”

Ezra Klein: “He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he’s a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he’s also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it’s hard to know if he even realizes he’s lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash….He has not become more responsible or more sober, more decent or more generous, more considered or more informed, more careful or more kind. He has continued to retweet white supremacists, make racist comments, pick unnecessary fights, contradict himself on the stump, and show an almost gleeful disinterest in building a real campaign or learning about policy.”

No matter how much lipstick Trump’s spin doctors put on the pig, there’s no denying that Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement stole the show — and the headlines — describing day 3 of the GOP convention.

“Cruz Speech Exposes Cracks in G.O.P.,” got the big headline type on the front page of the Thursday morning edition of the New York Times.

The Washington Post lead with “Attempt for unity falls short as Cruz upstages Pence.”

The  Los Angeles Times went with “Day 3 of the GOP convention restarts the war over conservatism.”

“Ted Cruz Snubs Donald Trump: Vote Your Conscience” blared the headline at the Chicago Sun-Times.

At the host city’s portal, cleveland.com, it was “Ted Cruz gets booed, but he also gets the better of Donald Trump: Wednesday’s RNC takeaways.”

In his Thursday New York Times column, Frank Bruni summed it up,

…Cruz had made his point and done his damage, providing the latest (and most vivid) illustration of how little control Trump has been able to exert over his own coronation, how much rancor he has failed to exorcise, how few bridges he has succeeded in repairing, how far short he has fallen in making these four days in Cleveland as dazzling and exciting as he’d long promised they would be.

In other words, yet another day of botched opportunities and convention mismanagement under the stewardship of a candidate whose claim to fame is his business acumen.

Trump can’t be very happy with the way Cruz’s diss played out. He tried to spin-tweet it as an indication of his tolerance for free speech, since he claims he expected it. He may have been hoping for a last minute gesture of support from Cruz, despite the fact that Trump never apologized for implying that Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination, insulting Cruz’s wife or calling Cruz “Lying Ted.”

Veep nominee Pence nonetheless showed he has some public speaking chops and did a competent job of introducing himself and larding out unmerited praise of his running-mate. However, as Ed Kilgore noted at New York Magazine, “once again, Trump has lost control of his own convention. Pity poor Mike Pence, the ostensible headliner of the evening, whose introduction to the convention was already under the cloud of the Trump-Cruz confrontation — the only thing that people will be talking about in the hours after this session.”

Not much else was newsworthy on Day 3. Scott Walker was predictably ineffectual, while wingnut radio yakker Laura Ingraham generated some excitement, though she may want to work on her hand gestures.

Despite the mismanagement of the convention so far, tonight Trump delivers the most important speech of his political career. The suspense will be in how much he reads from the teleprompter script vs. going off on an extemporaneous rant. Trump is not very good at working the teleprompter, as was the GOP’s sainted Ronald Reagan. If the convention substance so far is any indication, his addresss will be long on Obama/Clinton-bashing, but very short on ideas.

Meanwhile, Clinton and her fellow Democrats can only be encouraged by President Obama’s improving approval rates, a pretty reliable indicator of the success of the party in the White House in upcoming elections.

For those who couldn’t bear to watch another day of the GOP convention after the opening night mess, The New York Times offers “Republican Convention Day 2: Analysis,” a roundtable featuring real time commentary by their team of political reporters, including Nick Confessore, Maggie Haberman, Adam Nagourney and Alan Rappeport.

Their overall consensus is that Day 2 was a comparatively tame affair, with the exception of Chris “Bridgegate” Christie’s Hillary-bashing, even though Christie himself still faces a federal investigation. Ed Kilgore probes the weird and poorly stage-managed strategy behind the formal nomination of Trump on Day 2. Other than that, there were a couple of yawners by McConnell and Ryan, an endless parade of no-namers, along with “my dad is a nice guy” speeches by Trump’s children, who the NYT panel says did well enough.

The ‘Trump is a nice guy’ meme, which was painstakingly inserted into Monday night speeches as well, seems to be an ongoing concern of his image gurus, probably because Democrats have banked plenty of videos indicating otherwise (This one will do for exhibit “A”). No presidential candidate in history has been more thoroughly exposed on video as mean-spirited at the core, and projecting him as a ‘nice guy’ is going to be a very tough sell.

That’s the short explanation why so many Republican Senate candidates are keeping their distance. Not that they care all that much about Trump’s lack of compassion and decency; they just don’t want to be his  collateral damage on election day. In his post, “Is distance from Trump a good reelection strategy for GOP senators?” at The Monitor, Aidan Quigley explains:

As Republicans from across the country gather in Cleveland for the party’s convention, several vulnerable Republican senate incumbents have decided to sit out the convention in an effort to distance themselves from presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump.

As Democrats try to tie these incumbents to their party’s standard-bearer, Republican senators are staying in their home states to campaign instead of making the trip to Cleveland. Four of the seven Republican senators running for reelection in states that President Obama won twice are staying home..

“For the ones who are running in swing states or Democratic leaning states, it’s a necessary strategy to survive,” Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University, tells The Christian Science Monitor.

Increases in polarization, partisanship and straight-ticket voting make it difficult for Senate incumbents to escape the “downdraft” from Trump at the top of the ticket, he says. He expects Trump to lose in most of the Senate battleground “swing states”, which will force the incumbents to try to gain votes from voters who vote for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for president. This is a very difficult challenge, he says.

“Pretty much all of them, to varying degrees, are trying to distance themselves from Trump to run on their own record and separate themselves as much as possible, to try to localize the election,” he says. “The problem is that voters increasingly see these choices they’re making in Senate and House elections as not just choices about who they want to represent them in their own state, or their own district, but as which party do they want to control the House or Senate.”

Quigley explains the art of Trump avoidance, as practiced by Republican Sens. McCain, Toomey, Portman, Rubio and Ayotte. Quigley closes with a salient observation by Abramowitz: “Republican candidates will try to separate themselves from Trump as much as possible, and try to localize the races. Democrats are going to try to nationalize the races,” he says. “In recent elections, the side that tries to nationalize the race has generally been more successful.”

For Democratic strategists, the hope is that Republicans will over-invest in doomed Senate candidates, while under-investing in endangered House seats. If that scenario unfolds in a blue wave election, the Republican legislative blockade will crumble into memory.

If the Republican Convention’s opening day is an indication of the acrid tone Trump’s campaign will pursue leading up to the election, Hillary Clinton will have no trouble projecting herself as the only presidential candidate with a positive vision for America’s future.

Speaker after splenetic speaker at the convention attacked the Democratic nominee-apparent, and several of them called for her imprisonment to the cheers of delegates on the floor, some of whom could fairly be likened to near-rabid Salem witch-hunters. Some speakers vented their outrage against African Americans protesting against police brutality and illegal immigrants, blaming Hillary Clinton/President Obama even for tragic accidents that occurred during the Obama Administration.

Paul Begala observed at cnn,.com, “The first night of Donald Trump’s convention was as messy, undisciplined and undignified as Trump himself. If Donald Trump’s hairdo held a convention it would look like this.” Begala credits Melania Trump with the only grace notes of the evening, but adds that some of her best lines were plagiarized directly from Michelle Obama. “I do not blame Mrs. Trump for this,” said Begala. “She is a political neophyte. But her husband and his team should have been especially sensitive after The New York Times reported on Trump Institute’s plagiarism a few weeks ago.

Tonight, it would be hard for the Republicans to match the orgy of sulphurous contempt that defined their opening night. But some will surely try. Tonight’s speakers include Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker Paul Ryan, N.J. Gov. Chris Christie and Dana White. Trump will officially become the nominee tonight, and “each state will ceremoniously announce how their delegation will vote, and since Trump has secured enough delegates through the primaries and caucuses…He’ll be the man in the general election starting Tuesday night,” reports Eliza Collins at USA Today.

When the GOP presidential campaign kicked off last year, no one could have imagined that the 2016 Republican convention would be boycotted by both Bush presidents, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain and John Kasich and that the GOP nominee would be disparaged by nearly every conservative pundit. These politicians and pundits now look wise in comparison to the Trump puppets who have now  seized control of the Republican Party.

TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore previews the GOP convention in his Daily Intelligencer post at New York Magazine: “The general feeling here in Cleveland a day before the formal opening of the 2016 Republican National Convention is that any drama is most likely to occur outside the arena, in some configuration of a three-cornered battle involving pro- and anti-Trump protesters and the Cleveland police…It’s the general disorder in the planning of this convention that sustains some speculation about the possibility of the unexpected occurring inside the arena…But in terms of efforts to loosen the grip of Trump and the RNC over the convention’s rules and platform, it’s probably all over but the shouting…”

In his syndicated column “GOP, RIP?” E. J. Dionne, Jr. has an eloquent take on the coarsening of the Republican Party as they begin the Trump convention. “…Republicans who are not in the least progressive have reason to mourn what is likely to come to pass this week: the transformation of the Party of Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower into the Party of Trump. Some are bravely resisting this outcome to the end — and good luck to them. A fair number of leading Republicans have stated flatly that they will never vote for Trump. Their devotion to principle and integrity will be remembered.” Citing Trump’s “politics of flippant brutality,” Dionne adds, “hypocrisy really is the tribute vice pays to virtue and so it does mark a decline in simple decency that Trump has shouted out his prejudices openly…He substitutes bullying for choosing, bluster for strength…”

In terms of issues and themes, expect increasingly shrill calls for “law and order” to dominate the GOP quadrennial convention, in the wake of the shootings of police in Louisiana and Dallas. As Alexander Burns reports at The New York Times, “Mr. Trump has campaigned on the theme of “law and order” since the assassination this month of five police officers in Dallas, and he is likely to amplify that message in the coming days…While Republicans often run on law-and-order themes, an indelicate approach could carry considerable danger at a moment of such unusual political instability…But some local officials have expressed concern about the possibility of violence owing to Ohio’s open-carry gun laws. Though demonstrators and others in the convention district have been barred from possessing a range of items, including gas masks, there was no prohibition on the brandishing of firearms…On Sunday, the president of Cleveland’s police union called for additional measures to protect the security of the event, and urged Mr. Kasich to suspend open-carry gun rights.” Kasich, thus far, has refused to do so.

At Post Politics John Wagner’s, “As GOP convenes, Clinton plans to launch major voter mobilization drive” observes “Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton plans to announce a major voter mobilization effort on Monday that will aim to add more than 3 million people to rolls by November to bolster her odds against Republican Donald Trump…Aides to Clinton said they intend to make voter registration a major focus at every level of the campaign, including among coordinated Democratic drives in key states. This week alone, they said, more than 500 registration-themed events will take place across the country.”

Meanwhile, from The Brennan Center for Justice: “Today, senior congressional lawmakers introduced the Automatic Voter Registration Act of 2016, a transformative bill that would add up to 50 million new voters by automatically registering eligible citizens to vote…In the past 16 months, five states, several with bipartisan support, have adopted automatic registration, through the department of motor vehicles. Oregon, the first state to fully implement the plan, is now a national leader in voter registration rates, and has quadrupled its rate of new registrations at the DMV compared to previous years.”

“Democratic strategists are now talking up not only Illinois and Wisconsin but also Indiana as easy wins, a scenario which leaves Democrats just one seat short of Senate control if Clinton beats Trump. Republicans fear their party could be letting one go if it doesn’t respond to Bayh and the $10 million he already had sitting in his old campaign account when he announced his new run last week. — from “Vulnerable Senate Republicans outpolling Trump” by Burgess Everett and Kevin Robillard at Politico.

In her Los Angeles Times op-ed “The Democrats’ demographic firewall is under attack,” Emory University professor Carol Anderson writes: “A recent study by political scientists at UC San Diego found that in elections held between 2008 to 2012 in states with strict voter ID laws “turnout among Democrats in general elections dropped an estimated 7.7 percentage points, while Republican turnout dropped 4.6 percentage points.” Even more telling, strong liberals’ voter turnout rates plummeted 10.7 percentage points, whereas the decline for strong conservatives was only 2.8%…Four of seven key swing states in the upcoming election, as well as North Carolina, Indiana and Wisconsin, which were crucial in either 2008 or 2012, have Republican-sponsored disenfranchisement statutes in place. We’ve already seen a dress rehearsal for what might happen in November. The midterm 2014 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections in Texas, North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama were all decided in favor of Republicans by a margin smaller than the number of disenfranchised voters in each state.”

Greg Allen explains why “Which Way Florida Goes Hinges On Puerto Rican Voters.” Allen notes, “According to the Pew Research Center, Puerto Ricans make up 27 percent of eligible Hispanic voters in the state, rivaling the 31 percent of eligible Hispanics who are Cuban-Americans…”This year is one of the tests of how strong the Puerto Rican vote has gotten,” says Esteban Garces, with the voter education group Mi Familia Vota. “Eventually, Puerto Ricans, if this trend continues, may outnumber the number of Cubans we have in this state.”…State Sen. Darren Soto represents the area in the legislature. He says Puerto Ricans have been a key swing vote in the state’s most important swing region — central Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor — since at least 2008. “We helped put President Barack Obama on top and helped him win his re-election,” Soto says. “At the end of the day, it’s no secret that the candidate that wins the I-4 corridor, so goes Florida.

For those who were wondering about the cultural/entertainment offerings of the GOP convention, read “Scrambling, Planners of the Republican Convention Put ‘Showbiz’ Off to the Wings” by NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Jeremy W. Peters. The authors report that Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson is the headliner, and “actors from “The Young and the Restless,” “General Hospital” and “Charles in Charge” will also participate. Martin and Peters also quote Tommy Valentine, a delegate from Virginia, who dryly observes “This is not what I’d call A-list.” Trump has reportedly caved on his insistance that boxing promoter Don King address the convention, after “Reince Priebus, the Republican national chairman, firmly explained to Mr. Trump why Mr. King should not be invited: He once stomped a man to death and was convicted of manslaughter,” which might not go so well with the expected calls for “law and order.” At The Daily Beast Betsy Woodruff profiles this charmer, who has reportedly been given a speaking slot at the convention. But whatever levity can be, ahem, goosed out of the looming potential for disaster the GOP convention provides will likely be found at The Late Show, where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will riff on the proceedings. As Frank Zappa once observed, “Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.”

Christopher Ingraham’s Wonkblog post, “The non-religious are now the country’s largest religious voting bloc” provides a number of interesting observations about the role of religion in U.S. politics. It’s an evolving role, made more complicated by demographic transformations underway in particular states. But there are a couple of overriding points of interest, including:

More American voters than ever say they are not religious, making the religiously unaffiliated the nation’s biggest voting bloc by faith for the first time in a presidential election year. This marks a dramatic shift from just eight years ago, when the non-religious were roundly outnumbered by Catholics, white mainline Protestants and white evangelical Protestants.

These numbers come from a new Pew Research Center survey, which finds that “religious ‘nones,’ who have been growing rapidly as a share of the U.S. population, now constitute one-fifth of all registered voters and more than a quarter of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters.” That represents a 50 percent increase in the proportion of non-religious voters compared with eight years ago, when they made up just 14 percent of the overall electorate.

My hunch is that it is a mistake to call the religiously unaffiliated a “voting bloc,” at least in the sense that they are not monolithic supporters of Democrats, Republicans or any other party. Indeed, as the above quote notes, only about one out of seven of them actually vote. It’s also a mistake to think of them as heathens, in that many will tell you they are believers, but they distrust “organized religion.” So it’s not like all of those who bother to vote are casting ballots that reflect atheistic convictions.

Nor are the religiously-affiliated paragons of high voter turnout. (I kid you not, in an interesting coincidence a few mintues ago, I was interrupted by the knock on the door by a member of  Jehova’s Witnesses, who do not vote at all as a matter of principle.) Ingraham shares the following Pew Research Center chart indicating the voter registration trends of the religiously affiliated subgroups and unaffiliated since 2008:

So the misnamed non-religious Americans are now 21 percent of registered voters, a 50 percent uptick from 2008, while “other religions” have increased their share of RVs from 9 to 11 percent and Catholics, white evangelical protestants and white mainline protestants have seen a decline in their share of the nation’s RVs.

Ingraham adds further,

The growth of the non-religious — about 54 percent of whom are Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 23 percent at least leaning Republican — could provide a political counterweight to white evangelical Protestants, a historically powerful voting bloc for Republicans. In 2016, 35 percent of Republican voters identify as white evangelicals, while 28 percent of Democratic voters say they have no religion at all.

It doesn’t seem like this alone will force much change at the ballot box, especially in the context of 2016 politics. Trump, for example, is doing well with white evangelicals at the moment. But it’s not hard to imagine a significant decline in their support for him once the ad campaigns hit high gear and media coverage makes voters more aware of the Trump’s lifestyle and their minimal religious involvement.

Ingraham cites the “underperformance of the non-religious” at the ballot box as a key factor. But that should be a washout for the two parties, neither one reaping much advantage because of it. There is not much that can be done to target them as a group, outside of crafting political ads, even if their politics were monolithic, which is not the case.

But Dems should keep an eye on Latino Christian voters, many of whom may be inspired by Pope Francis’s commitment to social activism, coupled with Trump’s animosity towards their aspirations. Latino organizations are important, but it would be a mistake to assume they alone can increase voter turnout and ignore the Hispanic churches.

Even more consequential, however, are the votes of African American Christians, who tend to cast their ballots favoring Democrats by as much as a 9 to 1 ratio. The ‘Souls to the Polls’ movement could be influential this year, particularly in states that have not enacted voter supression measures to squeeze early voting opportunities and registration deadlines. The Republicans fear the ‘Souls to the Polls’ movement as much as any religious trend in America, and there is not much they won’t do to obstruct it, legal and otherwise.

There has been speculation recently that even Georgia could be in play in 2016 in terms of electoral votes, owing to the accelerating demographic transformation favoring Democrats in recent years. I will be surprised if that happens. But if it does, credit ‘Souls to the Polls’ and Black church activism in Georgia.

The late Rev. James Orange, one of the AFL-CIO’s star union organizers, once told me that the first thing he does when he begins a labor campaign anywhere in the south is visit the most influential preachers in town and make an appointment to meet with their congregations. No doubt the same should be true for Democratic political candidates. Clinton should work every major African American church in NC, FL and GA, and really in all of the swing states.

The Clintons have thus far done an excellent job of leveraging the power of the African American electorate in this campaign. For the remainder of the campaign, however, an even more energetic outreach to Black and Latino congregations can lead the way to victory in November.

House Democrats will work a new theme to win seats in November, reports Carl Hulse at the New York Times: “After months of polling, focus groups and consultation with experts, Democrats have settled on “Stronger America: A New American Security Agenda,” unveiling it just in time to give lawmakers a chance to test it out over the coming seven-week break…All of that research comes down to one thing,” said Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York, who is in charge of the party’s communications and messaging. “We are in an intense security environment. People are concerned about their security.”

“A massive new poll by Morning Consult finds Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, would collect 320 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 212, far more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House,” reports Gabrielle Levy at U.S. News. What makes this poll with results for all 50 states a little more credible than other recent Trump-favorable polls trumpeted by conservatives is the sample size: 60,000.

“…The Sanders campaign will not further contest the makeup of the Democratic platform at the convention, even though Sanders did not get all the changes to the platform he had hoped for,” notes Greg Sargent at The Plum Line. “Previously, the Sanders campaign had intimated that — even after he endorsed Clinton — it would file minority reports indicating his disagreement with various aspects of the Dem platform, which could have perhaps led to continuing disillusionment among his 13 million voters, whom Clinton very much wants to win over starting now…This matters for two reasons: First, it shows that Sanders actually did get a great deal of what he had hoped for into the platform. And second, it suggests that, while there may still be some lingering conflicts over various matters involving rules, the convention will go a lot more smoothly than many had expected — and so will the process of Democratic unity.”

The Monkey Cage’s Josh Putnam explains why the “Never Trump” grumblers in the GOP are not likely to get much traction at the Republican convention.

A list of speakers for the GOP convention released this morning includes: Pastor Mark Burns; Phil Ruffin; Congressman Ryan Zinke; Pat Smith; Mark Geist; John Tiegen; Congressman Michael McCaul; Sheriff David Clarke; Congressman Sean Duffy; Darryl Glenn; Senator Tom Cotton; Karen Vaughn; Governor Mike Huckabee; Mayor Rudy Giuliani; Melania Trump; Senator Joni Ernst; Kathryn Gates-Skipper; Marcus Luttrell; Dana White; Governor Asa Hutchinson; Attorney General Leslie Rutledge; Michael Mukasey; Andy Wist; Senator Jeff Sessions; Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn; Alex Smith; Speaker Paul Ryan; Congressman Kevin McCarthy; Kerry Woolard; Senator Shelley Moore Capito; Dr. Ben Carson; RNC Co-Chair Sharon Day; Natalie Gulbis; Kimberlin Brown; Antonio Sabato, Jr.
; Peter Thiel; Eileen Collins; Senator Ted Cruz; Newt Gingrich; Michelle Van Etten; Lynne Patton; Eric Trump; Harold Hamm; Congressman Chris Collins; Brock Mealer; Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn; Governor Mary Fallin; Darrell Scott; Lisa Shin; Governor Rick Scott; Chairman Reince Priebus; Tom Barrack; Ivanka Trump; Attorney General Pam Bondi; Jerry Falwell Jr.
; Rabbi Haskel Lookstein; Chris Cox; Senator Mitch McConnell; Tiffany Trump; Governor Chris Christie; Donald J. Trump Jr.
; and Governor Scott Walker. Trump’s running mate will also get a slot and others will likely be added to the program. No Bushes, McCain, Kasich, Fiorina or Graham, and hey, where’s Palin? Don’t expect an empty chair, but there will be plenty of empty suits.

Not a shocker, but Alexander Bolton reports at The Hill that Gov. Mike Pence is the favorite running mate choice of the GOP estabs.

A tidbit from Laurie Goodstein’s NYT article on a Pew Research poll indicating that white evangelicals favor Trump by nearly 4-1 ratio: “The poll also found that Roman Catholics favored Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, over Mr. Trump by 17 percentage points — a significant shift from the 2012 presidential race, when Election Day exit polls showed Catholics split almost evenly between Mr. Romney and the Democratic incumbent, President Obama…The change is largely because of the support of Hispanic Catholics, who make up about one-third of Roman Catholics in the United States and favor Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Trump by an overwhelming 77 percent to 16 percent. White Catholics narrowly favor Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton, 50 to 46 percent, but Mrs. Clinton has a 19-point advantage among all Catholics who say they attend Mass weekly.”

Regarding recent horse-race polls, E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his syndicated column: “There is also no doubt that Hillary Clinton has suffered some damage from FBI Director James Comey’s sharp criticisms of her use of a private email server…Still, there is reason to believe that Clinton, like Bush and her husband, has an opportunity to win over new sympathizers, especially since voters have revised their judgments in her favor before. Her favorable ratings in the Gallup poll reached as high as 67 percent in late December 1998, and 66 percent in May 2012…Clinton almost certainly has more room to grow than Trump does, given her past high marks and the fact that even at her lowest points this year, Clinton’s favorability still has outpaced Trump’s in most surveys.”

Turns out Justice Ginsburg does regret making “ill-advised” comments about Trump, including calling him “a faker” following a GOP-driven media storm. But she didn’t say her comments weren’t true.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has provoked the ire of Donald Trump by calling him out on not releasing his tax returns. In so doing she also took a well-deserved poke at the media:

How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that.

Trump, Ryan and other Republicans are bent out of shape about her breaking with the “nonpartisan” tradition of not having anything to say about presidential candidates. But that’s a pretty archaic tradition, considering how politicized the court has been under Roberts and Rhenquist, both of whom served as highly-partisan GOP voter suppression errand boys before their appointments as Chief Justice and who continued to vote for the Republican agenda during their terms (Roberts slightly less so). And no one has accused Justices Thomas, Alito or the late Justice Scalia of being insufficiently supportive of Republican priorities.

Then there was Alito’s mugging and head-shaking in disgust at President Obama’s comments on the court’s campaign finance ruling in the state of the Union speech back in 2010. You can go back a little earlier, to Bush v. Gore, if you need the emblematic partisan decision favoring the GOP.

Never a stickler for fussy notions about “decorum,” Ginsburg’s refreshing candor on Trump is no doubt driven by her concern that a “leader” of his calibre is a serious threat to our democracy. Her comments are well-protected by the first amendment, which for our Republican readers, is the one that comes before the half of the second amendment they so ardently embrace.

Republicans will surely continue blasting away at Ginsburg. But her point about Trump’s failure to release his tax returns is inarguable. As tax expert David Cay Johnston put it in his Daily Beast article, “New Evidence Donald Trump Didn’t Pay Taxes“:

The disclosure tradition dates to when Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president in 1973 and then plead guilty to a tax crime. President Richard Nixon was an unindicted conspirator in a felony for which his tax lawyer Edward L. Morgan went to prison for creating a fraudulent $576,000 tax deduction on his behalf—one of the specifications in the impeachment proceedings that never came to a vote because Nixon resigned in August 1974.

The way Trump plans to move past this is the same way he ducks every other controversial issue: he’ll restate his bogus excuse as often as is necessary until the press gives up. He’s going to wait it out or gin up some other controversial distraction to divert the press’s attention away from the issue. Past experience has given him every reason to believe that whatever questioning he’ll receive on the tax issue will be cursory, shallow, and easily ducked. Trump is, at this point, just taunting the press, and he has every confidence that they’ll react the way he wants them to.

It’s long past time to stop letting that happening, and Trump’s tax returns offer an excellent opportunity to reverse the easy press relationship he enjoys and start persistently challenging him on a matter that cuts to the core of his political identity.

As a master of the politics of distraction, as well as media manipulation, it is no surprise that Trump has tried to avoid complying with the growing demand for transparency on his tax returns. But it is disappointing and a little surprising that the major networks and newspapers have not badgered him until he does so.

Sen Bernie Sanders will join Hillary Clinton tommorrow at a Portsmouth New Hampshire high school, where he is expected to endorse her, reports John Wagner at Post Politics.

Eric Bradner of CNN Politics reports “…The party’s platform committee approved a final draft in the wee Sunday morning hours. Most notably, Clinton embraced Sanders’ call for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage — with Sanders making the concession that it would be phased in “over time.”…And Clinton’s campaign announced her support for a “public option” — a government-run alternative to private health insurance — bringing her closer to Sanders on health care…The result: Sanders is pleased enough with the platform, three Democratic sources said, that he has committed to a joint event with Clinton Tuesday in New Hampshire and is prepared to endorse her…”We got 80% of what we wanted in this platform,” top Sanders policy adviser Warren Gunnels told CNN.” Maybe now Democratic Hillary-haters and Bernie-bashers can give it a rest and get on the victory train.

Speaking of trains, I think this one left the station some time ago, and the platform provision now seems a tad on the timid side.

At The Fix, Aaron Blake discusses a new Pew Research Center poll indicating that Trump could finish behind Libertarian Gary Johnson with 18-29 year old voters. Note to Dems: One way to reduce young voter support of Libertarians is to flush out their “free market” approach to environmental protection, which is identical to the GOP’s “solution,” and point out that only Democratic candidates support anti-pollution measures.

Yet, it looks like young voter turnout may have driven the Brexit referendum outcome, reports at The Guardian’s political editor Toby Helm.

While academics and commentators ruminate about defining white working-class voters, “More millennials identify as working class than any other generation in recent history,” notes telesurtv.net, referencing an article in Jacobin magazine. “…According to data compiled by the General Social Survey over the last 40 years, millennials identify more with working-class positions than any other group. In 2014, about 60 percent of millennials identified as such.” Although about a third of them have a college degree, “they predominantly work in service industries such as retail, hospitality, and healthcare….Highly educated millennials face problems that are typically associated with working-class living conditions: unemployment, underemployment, a precarious work life, high levels of debt, and stagnant wages.”

Speaker Paul Ryan isn’t doing so hot — even with likely Republican voters in his district, according to a recent poll. As his GOP primary opponent puts it, ““Paul Ryan is the most open borders, pro-Wall Street, anti-worker member of Congress in either party,” Paul Nehlen said during a Saturday press conference, which was held in front of Ryan’s border wall surrounding his Janesville mansion. “Everything that Americans despise about their government, Paul Ryan represents…Can you name one time when Paul Ryan fought as hard for you and your family as he’s fought for corporate America?” Nehlen asked…The Nehlen campaign notes that Ryan’s 43 percent “represents a drop of more than 30 points since the Nehlen campaign began polling likely Republican primary voters earlier in the year.”

Mark Binker argues at wral.com that “HB2 unlikely to drive voter turnout, decisions” in NC and cites views that transgender bathroom hysteria issues are a washout with voters who have strong views are already decided on which candidates and parties they arte going to support. “I think the impact of HB2 is already baked into the cake, so to speak,” says NC State poly sci proff Steve Greene, quoted in the post.

Some pretty nasty sexual harrassment allegations are mounting against Fox News creator Roger Ailes, with six new women accusers coming forward, reports David Folkenflik at NPR. But it remains unclear if Ailes will resign or settle out of court, as did Fox star Bill O’Reilly.