At HuffPo Julia Sagebien writes about the politics underlying President Obama’s visit to Cuba: “…Senator Marco Rubio, a second-generation Cuban-American hard-liner, lost the Republican primary and retired from the race. On that day, for the first time since the ‘Triumph of the Revolution’, both Florida primaries were won by pro-engagement candidates (Trump and Clinton). With Florida on board, the electoral threat that made it nearly impossible for either party to ease the embargo in any significant manner – has been dealt a near mortal blow. The only contest left, if it comes to that, is a Ted Cruz vs. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fight…This new ‘friendship’ between Cuba and the U.S. (this is, after all, also a family visit with sightseeing, baseball games and a symbolic arrival on the first day of spring) is one of the few ‘feel good’ stories of the second decade of the 21st century. But despite high levels of approval and generalized cheer in both nations, there is still a long hard way to go.”
Recent opinion polls by Gallup and other major pollsters indicate large majorities favor the resumption of normal diplomatic and trade relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
Hillary Clinton’s impressive strength with senior voters during the primary/caucus season mirrors Sanders edge with young voters. As Amy Chozick writes at The New York Times, “In her sweep of the states that voted last week, she captured voters 65 and older by large margins, ranging from 39 percentage points in Missouri to 54 in Ohio. In Virginia, Texas and other Southern states that voted earlier, she won more than 80 percent of these voters, often matching or beating the support Mr. Sanders received from voters 18 to 29.” It would be interesting to see some trial heat polls of seniors, pitting Clinton and Sanders against remaining GOP candidates. Clinton has learned that her campaign must have better educational outreach to young voters, while Sanders has to reach senior voters more effectively.
Eric Bradner< of CNN Politics has a good preview of tonight's debate, "What to watch for on ‘The Final Five’ Monday night,” hosted by CNN and aired from 8 to 11 p.m. ET.
Matthew Yglesias notes in his post “Why experts think Trump could hand Democrats a House majority” at vox.com that “The high odds of a Trump nomination and the fact that any alternative to a Trump nomination would almost certainly entail some kind of party-crushing convention hijinks mean that a Democratic wave is definitely on the table in a way it wasn’t previously.”
“Simply getting to the polls is a problem for some – particularly black Americans. In the Census Bureau data, 6% of black Americans said they didn’t vote because of “transportation problems” compared with 3% of white Americans,” — from The Guardian’s “Why doesn’t anyone care about voter turnout?” It’s complicated” by Mona Chalabi.
Kira Lerner reports at ThinkProgress that “Students Are Being Rejected From The Polls Because Of North Carolina’s Voter ID Law.”
At Salon.com Sean McElwee discusses “America’s disturbing voter-turnout crisis: How inequality extends to polling place — and why that makes our country less fair. The U.S. leads rich nations for disparity in turnout across income and education levels. This has consequences.”
WaPo’s Dan Balz explores the politics of a Clinton vs. Trump general election: “With a focus on trade issues and by tapping anti-establishment anger, Trump would seek to energize white working-class Americans, who Republicans believe have been on the sidelines in recent elections in substantial numbers..At the same time, Clinton could find Trump a powerful energizing force on her behalf among African Americans and Latinos, which could help to offset the absence of Obama on the ticket after two elections that drew huge minority turnout. That could put off-limits to Trump some states with large Hispanic populations where Republicans have competed intensely in recent elections…A Washington Post-ABC News poll from earlier this month showed stark divides among those backing Trump and Clinton. Overall, the former secretary of state led 50 to 41 percent among registered voters. Trump led 49 to 40 percent among white voters, while Clinton led 73 to 19 among non-whites. Trump led by five points among men, and Clinton was up by 21 among women. Trump led by 24 points among whites without college degrees, while Clinton led by 15 among whites with degrees.”

Few believe Merrick Garland has a chance of actually being confirmed in this session of congress. But, in the highly unlikely event he is confirmed, according to the “Martin-Quinn scores” ranking judicial ideology, Garland would make the High Court “the most liberal in decades,” report Alicia Parlapiano and Margo Sanger-Katz at The Upshot. The authors show that Garland or Justice Stephen Breyer would become the new ‘swing vote’ on the Court.
AP’s Josh Lederman argues that “By nominating an uncontroversial 63-year-old judge, President Barack Obama handed Republicans an unwelcome election-year proposition: Give in or risk letting Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump pick a Supreme Court justice the GOP might like even less…Republicans loathe Clinton, but they recognize that if she wins the presidency, she could nominate someone far more liberal than Garland, who’s regarded as a centrist.”
A couple of weeks ago Jesse Wegman noted in his NYT editorial page editor blog, that “In the weeks since Justice Scalia’s death, at least half a dozen polls have asked Americans who they think should pick the next justice. Each one has found that people want President Obama to name a choice. A CNN/ORC poll released Thursday found that two-thirds of Americans, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents, want the Senate to hold hearings on an Obama nominee.”
In his Daily Beast post, “D.C.’s Dueling Supreme Court Strategies,” Jay Michelson notes, “”They are establishing a precedent, if they do this, that if you don’t like the president, you never have to have a vote. Ever,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who argues that the obstruction flies in the face of the constitutional order of government. “What this is about is, ‘We don’t like this president and so we are going to refuse to entertain any discussion of the president’s nominees.'””
Carle Hulse explores how “Supreme Court Showdown Could Shape Fall Elections.” Hulse writes that, in one scenario, a Democratic takeover of the Senate in the November elections might force a lame duck session confirmation: “That possibility led some jittery Senate Republicans to suggest they might be willing to take up the nomination of Judge Garland in a postelection lame-duck session, preferring the relatively moderate and known commodity of Mr. Garland to the uncertain choice of a future Democratic president.”
Ed Kilgore calls the Lame Duck idea a “convoluted scenario whereby Garland might be confirmed. However, observes Kilgore. “Even then, many conservatives in the Senate would shrink from the intraparty consequences of voting for a baby-killing defender of executive tyranny. But that could be the only way Garland makes it to the Court.”
The New York Times editorial board says, “If you tried to create the ideal moderate Supreme Court nominee in a laboratory, it would be hard to do better than Judge Merrick Garland…In his 19 years on the bench, Judge Garland has established a solidly centrist voting record that reflects no strong political ideology. He has sided with the government in cases involving habeas corpus petitions from detainees at Guantánamo Bay, and has voted against criminal defendants more often than his liberal colleagues have. He has generally voted in favor of deferring to the considered decisions of federal agencies. In civil rights cases, he has voted in favor of plaintiffs who have claimed rights violations.”
If you needed further evidence of President Obama’s prowess at political chess, try this paragraph from Lincoln Caplan’s New Yorker article “Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Sensible Supreme Court Choice“: “The day the President told Kagan that he planned to nominate her for the Supreme Court, in May of 2010, the Times ran a story saying that Garland “was widely seen as the most likely alternative to Ms. Kagan and the one most likely to win easy confirmation”; that Senator Orrin Hatch, the Republican from Utah, “privately made clear to the president that he considered Judge Garland a good choice”; and that “Mr. Obama ultimately opted to save Judge Garland for when he faces a more hostile Senate and needs a nominee with more Republican support.”
As an election ploy, Garland’s nomination should shine an unwelcome spotlight on GOP obstructionism, causing Republican senators in blue states to cringe, hem and haw as they struggle to justify opposing such a highly-qualified centrist. John Healey’s L.A. Times op-ed “Garland nomination to Supreme Court could put GOP in no-win situation” illuminates the other half of their dilemma: “if Republicans allow Garland to be confirmed, their core constituencies are likely to feel betrayed regardless of what anyone says about how reasonable and non-ideological the judge may be. And with control of the Senate hanging in the balance, and Republicans having more incumbents facing reelection than Democrats do, the last thing the Senate GOP can afford to do is to discourage its political base.”

A few months ago James Vega posted a strategy memo at TDS addressing the GOP’s “standarized strategy for manufacturing bogus Democratic ‘scandals'” most recently used to gin up outrage about former Secretary of State Clinton’s alleged email improprieties. The memo held the New York Times and other MSM outlets to account for allowing themselves to be manipulated by a “profound fear of reporting anything that contradicts the notion that both political parties are basically equivalent” and suggested strategies for Democrats to respond effectively. As Vega put it,

…Once the GOP grasped the fact that the mainstream media would not honestly report the fact that they were engaging in an asymmetric extremist warfare against the Democrats, Republicans realized that they could use the traditional journalistic standards for reporting information given “off the record” or “on deep background” to easily manipulate the press without fear of exposure or censure.

Vega cites proposals by Norm Ornstein, which gems can use to help prevent media from being so easily-manipulated in the future, including:

• Sources that provide information that turns out to be false and defamatory should lose any “off the record” protection whatsoever and have their identities exposed.
• Reporters should not be allowed to publish information provided by a source that refuses to allow the writer to honestly describe relevant information about the sources’ partisan ties and affiliations.
• Reporters or editors who fail at this fundamental public responsibility should face dismissal, suspension or other consequences from their publishers severe enough to dissuade them from continuing to abuse the public trust.

Vega concludes that “If editors and reporters in the mainstream media aspire to be objective, they can start by refusing to allow themselves to be manipulated by the GOP.” In effect argues Vega, “Failing to do this is represents the endorsement and support of pro-Republican partisan dishonesty in their reporting that is different from the partisan propaganda of Fox News and talk radio commentators only in degree and not essential character.”
Since Vega’s memo and mounting criticism against biased reporting that elevates bogus “scandals,” it appears that some major media outlets are doing some constructive soul-searching. In her Public Editor’s Journal article, “Tightening the Screws on Anonymous Sources” in The New York Times, Margaret Sullivan explains that “Times editors are cracking down on the use of anonymous sources…Although the policy does not ban anonymity, it is intended to significantly reduce…an overreliance on unnamed sources.” Further, adds Sullivan,

It requires one of three top editors to review and sign off on articles that depend primarily on information from unnamed sources – particularly those that “hinge on a central fact” from such a source…
The policy also requires any other use of anonymous sources to be approved by a desk head – for example, the ranking culture, metro or international editor – or that person’s immediate deputy. It also “underscores what has been our policy”: that an editor must know the identity of an unnamed source.
The new policy also aims to significantly “ratchet down the use of anonymous quotation,” Mr. Purdy said. It would make such quotation relatively rare. Too often, he said, such direct quotations allow sources to express “their impression, their spin, their agenda” without accountability. And, he said, they don’t allow readers to evaluate motive because they don’t know where the information is coming from.

Sullivan warns that “the devil, of course, is in the enforcement.” She notes that recent experiments using the new policies have been encouraging. More rigorous standards for using anonymous sources is a welcome change in America’s most prominent newspaper, and it’s likely that the better newspapers, and perhaps some electronic media outlets, will follow suit.
But no one should be deluded that such well-intentioned policy changes will automatically prove to be permanent. It will require constant vigilance and monitoring both inside — and outside — major media outlets against equal constant pressure from partisan scandal-mongers.
For now, however, give the Times credit for addressing the issue in a credible way. May their example be contagious.

NYT’s Trip Gabriel explains why “Ohio Looms Large in Both Races on Tuesday,” and notes, “Ohio has emerged as a critical contest, the one large state voting this week where Mr. Trump appears vulnerable. A victory here by Gov. John Kasich would complicate Mr. Trump’s attempt to gather a majority of delegates needed for the nomination…On the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont hoped for a repeat of his stunning upset over Hillary Clinton last week in Michigan, as he hopscotched the Midwest to push his central message that American workers have suffered too much under trade deals.”
In the wake of the Clinton-Sanders debates, Jared Bernstein has a NYT Op-Ed explaining why “The Era of Free Trade Might Be Over. That’s a Good Thing.”
Alan I. Abramowitz offers “A Simple Model for Predicting Hillary Clinton’s Vote in the March 15 Democratic Primaries” at Crsytal Ball. Abramowitz notes, “A simple model based on two predictors — the racial composition of the Democratic primary electorate and a dummy variable for region — explain over 90% of the variance in Hillary Clinton’s vote share in this year’s Democratic primaries through March 8.” Abramowitz evaluates outcomes based on this model.
From Daily Kos Elections “Morning Digest: Can Team Blue retake the House in 2016? Only if they completely run the table“: “We rate just 52 seats as potentially competitive as of today, and the Democrats hold 16 of them. In other words, if Democrats hold all their vulnerable seats, they’ll need to sweep 29 of the 36 GOP-held districts we have on the big board to retake the House. Needless to say, this is an extremely tough task…However, a Donald Trump nomination could scramble the general election outlook in unexpected ways–just as he’s upended the Republican primary–so we could see more revisions to our ratings than we would in a typical election year.”
James Hohman’s Daily 202 notes “Obama could announce his Supreme Court pick as early as this week” and “sources tell The Post that the president has narrowed his choice down to three finalists,” including Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Sri Srinivasan, a judge on the same court; and Paul Watford, a judge on the federal Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
At The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza ponders “The Great Divide: Clinton, Sanders, and the future of the Democratic Party.” Lizza quotes Simon Rosenberg, president anad founder of New Democratic network, who adds “Sanders is speaking to a rising generation who want both a better and more responsible capitalism and a better and more ethical politics…Unrigging the system will be a central focus of Democratic politics for years to come–as it should be.”
Michael J. Mishak’s TNR post, “Have Republicans Already Lost Florida?” takes a clear-eyed look at GOP prospects in the November election the Sunshine state: “Once dominated by conservative Cubans in South Florida, the Latino electorate is growing more diverse and more Democratic–driven in large part by a booming Puerto Rican diaspora in the central part of the state. Nearly 400,000 Puerto Ricans have settled in the Orlando area, with thousands coming from the island each month. Still others are relocating from the Northeastern U.S., and they now make up 27 percent of Florida’s Hispanic vote. (Hispanics of other ancestry, such as Mexico and South America, now make up 42 percent, while just 31 percent are Cuban American.) Puerto Ricans in Central Florida played a key role in helping put Barack Obama over the top in 2012, though they also have a strong independent streak…Among these folks, the Trump message comes across like a warning siren.”
Eric Bradner of CNN Politics provides “Your guide to Super Tuesday 3,” and notes, “Clinton is all but assured of finishing her sweep of the South by picking up wins in Florida and North Carolina…The real battleground will be the Midwest. Sanders will try to replicate his stunning victory in Michigan last week by winning similar big, manufacturing-heavy, states: Illinois, Missouri and Ohio.”
Daily Beast columnist Olivia Nuzzi raises an issue Trump’s fellow Republican candidates would rather forget in her post, “Weak GOP Rivals Fail to Condemn Donald Trump’s Thugs.”

At The Plum Line Greg Sargent quotes from an interview he conducted with pollster and Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg, focusing on white working-class voters and Hillary Clinton’s prospects: “Michigan will end up making her a stronger candidate, both in the primary and the general election,” Greenberg told me this morning. “It will lead her to be focused more on change and the economy…This will enable her to unite the party, and compete for working class voters in the general against Trump,” Greenberg concluded. “She’s going to win. She’ll be stronger when she wins in the right way.”
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein of Brookings write, “”The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier–ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” That passage, which framed a core part of the argument of our 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, was vilified by conservative commentators, called a rant and a parody…Fast forward to 2016. Incredibly, Republican destructiveness is even worse than it was four years ago–and the party is paying for it with a surge of anti-establishment populism that is tearing apart its coalitional base…The Trump disaster, especially if it leads to a Democratic sweep of the 2016 elections, may provide the basis for a major rethinking and realignment of a deeply dysfunctional Republican Party.”
Naturally the media is full of let’s-you-and-her-fight yada yada about how tense and angry was last night’s Democratic presidential debate. For a more level-headed take, however, read “Anti-Trumpism Won the Democratic Debate: Both Sanders and Clinton went all-in on pro-immigrant policy, making a good long-term bet for Democrats.” by Pat Garofalo at U.S. News.
Lots of agonized hand-wringing from pollsters and poll analysts about the utter failure of polls in Michigan. Carl Bialik does a painful post-mortem in his FiveThirtyEight post “Why The Polls Missed Bernie Sanders’s Michigan Upset.”
Sorry GOP establishment whiners. Trump is not winning your decaying party’s presidential nomination because Dems are crossing over in the primaries.
For a more in-depth look at underlying issues presaging the collapse of the GOP, read “Why Donald Trump Is Winning and Why His Nomination Could Shatter the Republican Party” by Alan I. Abramowitz, Ronald Rapoport, and Walter Stone at the Crystal Ball. Among the authors’ observations, reporting on their national survey of 1,000 registered Republican and independent voters: “…We examined the relationship between Trump support and a variety of factors that have been identified as possibly explaining reactions to Trump’s candidacy: authoritarianism, nativism, and economic liberalism. The results…show that there were strong relationships between all three of these predictors and where respondents ranked Trump among 11 possible Republican candidates…In addition to authoritarianism and nativism, economic attitudes also predicted support for Trump. In contrast to most other Republican presidential candidates and, indeed, most other prominent Republican officeholders, Trump has sometimes veered from conservative orthodoxy on economic issues…If we combine authoritarianism with nativism and economic liberalism we get an even stronger prediction of Trump support…a Trump candidacy would almost certainly produce serious divisions among GOP leaders and voters, potentially leading to the election of a Democratic president and major Republican losses in down-ballot contests, including key U.S. Senate races.”
Need a lift from the political doldrums? Try David Nir’s Kos post, “In a miraculous set of victories, Kentucky Democrats keep their state House out of Republican hands.”
One of the stronger arguments for Democrats nominating Hillary Clinton is that her presidency would serve as a source of inspiration for more women to get into politics. It seems obvious, which may be why there has been surprisingly little discussion about it. I say stronger because the gross underrepresentation of women in federal, state and local elective offices is highly consequential. How can we have legislatures that do a good job of serving American families and children when women are largely locked out of the decision-making process? Of course all of the caveats apply, e.g. – women can be reactionary leaders too (Palin, Bachman etc.) and, yes, a progressive male is going to be more family-friendly than a right-wing female. But overall, we can’t expect balanced decision-making in our democratic institutions when women are only 20 percent of the U.S. Senate, 19.3 percent of the House of Reps, 12 percent of Governors, 24.5 percent of state legislators, and 19 percent of the mayors of America’s 100 largest cities? (sources also at: Center for American Women in Politics) Getting more women into elective office across the U.S. should be a much higher priority for voters. A Clinton presidency can only help that and the argument is made stronger by her impressive experience. When girls and young women see a woman leader in the white house, more of them will see themselves as potential leaders. America needs that.
You can make a case that the real “Super Tuesday” is March 15, when FL, OH, IL, NC and MO pick their delegates. That’s not as many states as the 13 on March 1, but it does include 4 of the 11 most populated states. Plus MO ranks 17th in population. That’s a big bundle of delegates, and it includes several major swing states. Further, writes Leada Gore at Al.com: “The day is particularly important as it marks one of the first times a winning candidate can take all of a state’s delegates. Past primaries awarded proportionately, with the highest vote getter getting the most delegates. The March 15 primaries include some winner-take-all states – Florida, Missouri and Ohio,” with FL as the largest of the 50 states to award all of its delegates to one candidate.

Hillary Clinton won the most delegates for the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, adding 84, compared with a net gain of 67 for Sanders. Clinton now has 1,234 of the 2,383 delegates needed to win the nomination, while Sanders has 567 delegates.
Clinton won an 83-17 percent blowout in Mississippi, but Sanders won an upset victory in delegate-rich Michigan, where “every poll leading up to Tuesday’s election showed Clinton with a double-digit lead and a vast institutional edge with African-American voters,” report Todd Spangler and Kathleen Gray of the Detroit Free Press.
CNN’s exit polls provided one clear indication of why Sanders won — an amazing 81%-18% edge among 18-24 year-old voters.
“Sanders also did well among black voters under the age of 45 in Michigan, splitting their support with Clinton — however Clinton performed well with older black voters, winning roughly 8 in 10,” note Tom LoBianco and Jennifer Agiesta of CNNPolitics.
Exit polls reveal that In Michigan, nearly 7 of 10 Democratic voters were white, while about 2 in 10 were African American. In Mississippi, however, only one-third of voters were white and more than 6 in 10 were black voters. It’s unclear, however, whether the African American voter turnout percentage was higher or lower than in previous years in MI.
While Clinton attacked Sanders for failing to vote on one occasion for funding of the auto bailout in the wake of the Bush economic meltdown, Sanders may have benefitted more from well-crafted economic messaging. He argued, for example that she had supported trade deals which exported Michigan jobs. Further, “CNN exit polls showed that Sanders outperformed Clinton among voters who are “very worried” about the U.S. economy, 56% to 40%. Among voters who believe international trade takes away American jobs, Sanders also led Clinton, 56% to 43% — a sign that Sanders’ populist economic message resonated in Michigan,” according to MJ Lee, Jeff Zeleny, Dana Bash and Dan Merica at CNN Politics.
At WaPo’s The Daily 202, James Hohman explains,

A message of economic populism, particularly protectionism, is much more potent in the Rust Belt than we understood.
Most Michiganders feel like they are victims of trade deals, going back to NAFTA under Bill Clinton, and they’re deeply suspicious of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Outsourcing has helped hollow out the state’s once mighty manufacturing core…Trump and Sanders both successfully tapped into this.
Six in 10 Michigan Democratic primary voters said international trade takes away U.S. jobs, and Sanders won these voters by roughly 20 points, according to preliminary exit poll data reported by CNN. Only 3 in 10 thought trade creates jobs; Clinton won that group…One-third of voters said Clinton is too pro-business. Sanders won more than four in five of them.

Another dramatic difference between Clinton and Sanders voters: Those who said their “most important priority” is that a candidate is honest and trustworthy voted for Sanders over Clinton by a gaping margin of 80% to 19%.
Another possible clue, Sanders was, ironically, the big Democratic spender in Michigan, pouring $3.5 million into ads, while Clinton spent only $2.6 million. There were also complaints that Clinton didn’t campaign as hard in MI, as she did in NV and SC.
Clinton edged Sanders in Michigan’s emblematically white working-class Macomb County by a margin of 48.8 percent to 47.41, according to the Detroit Free Press. Trump received 60,492 votes in Macomb, compared to Clinton’s 47,597 and 46,242 for Sanders. Given Sanders’s strong turnout among younger voters, it would be interesting to know if they also made him competitive with white working-class voters.
Republican presidential candidates received 124,896 votes in Macomb, compared to 97,528 for Democratic candidates.

Among Eric Bradner’s “5 takeaways from the Democratic debate“: “The debate was a strong sign that both candidates still see room to gain or lose ground among liberal voters. They spent so much time jockeying to get to each other’s left that there was virtually no talk of Republicans at all…Clinton and Sanders defended government spending and intervention, teachers’ unions, gun control, clean energy programs and efforts to fight climate change.”
For the time-challenged: “CNN’s Flint Democratic Debate in 90 Seconds.”
NYT’s Trip Gabriel explains why “Michigan Primary Puts Donald Trump’s Rust Belt Strategy to a Test.” Gabriel writes, “Mr. Trump’s signature issues of opposition to free trade and a crackdown on illegal immigration, which Republican leaders once dismissed as outside the mainstream, have brought him a populist following, including independents and some Democrats…Stanley B. Greenberg, whose research in Macomb County in the 1980s popularized the term “Reagan Democrat,” said Mr. Trump might put the Rust Belt into play. “There’s no doubt there’s new voters coming into the Republican primary process,” he said.”
In “The GOP Establishment Now Faces Its Nightmare Scenario: Trump Versus Cruz,” The Nation’s John Nichols puts the Republican predicament in perspective — a choice between their two most deeply-flawed candidates, the most obnoxious lout ever to achieve front-runner status vs. a theocratic extremist who has zero understanding of or regard for mainstream social values.
An interesting AP-GFK poll on what may soon become a major infrastructure issue, nationwide — the safety of tap water.
Another sleeper issue, and one that could resonate with high-turnout senior voters: At Slate.com Helaine Olen explains why “The Retirement Crisis Is Getting Truly Scary: It’s time for the presidential candidates to give it the urgency it deserves.”
Getting down to recent cases, “It’s already looking like a different Supreme Court,” writes Robert Barnes at the Washington Post. Make that profoundly different. As Barnes reports in one example, “Dow Chemical, for instance, announced that it would settle a nearly $1 billion antitrust judgment instead of pursuing its plans to take the fight to the high court….”Growing political uncertainties due to recent events with the Supreme Court and increased likelihood for unfavorable outcomes for business involved in class-action suits have changed Dow’s risk assessment of the situation,” the company said.”
At The American Prospect, Paul Waldman addresses a question of overarching importance: “Could Donald Trump Deliver Congress to the Democrats?” Says Waldman: “…What had looked like seats where Republicans had a clear advantage could be up for grabs, particularly if Democrats come out in force, moved to the polls by the ghastly prospect of Donald Trump becoming president. Combine that with a potentially dispirited Republican electorate, and Democrats could win more seats than anyone predicted. “We can’t have a nominee be an albatross around the down-ballot races,” Senator John Cornyn recently told CNN. “That’s a concern of mine.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr. observes in his WaPo column that “The 2016 Republican primary campaign is now on track to be the crudest, most vulgar and most thoroughly disgusting in our nation’s history…the whole Republican race is now a moral and electoral wreck, a state of affairs that one conservative after another mourned during and after Thursday’s encounter…For decades, conservatives have done a great business assailing liberals for promoting cultural decay. Sorry, guys, but in this campaign, you have kicked away the franchise.”

From Kyle Cheney’s Politico article, “Democrats draw plan to shatter the GOP“: “Democracy Corps’ Stan Greenberg, a prominent national Democratic pollster, released data Monday morning that suggest moderate Republicans — nearly a third of the GOP base — are being ignored by their presidential candidates. These Republicans don’t revile Planned Parenthood — in fact, many prefer the women’s health group to pro-life groups and candidates who take hard-line stances on abortion. They’re supportive of same-sex marriage. They’re not enamored of the NRA. They have less rigid attitudes about sex. They accept climate science…”It’s mind-boggling,” Greenberg said. “They’re considered illegitimate within the Republican Party, and no one is speaking to them.”…It’s a dynamic Greenberg said could drive those moderates toward Democrats this fall, and he wants his party to work to make that happen.”
“The Republicans seem to be reeling, unable or unwilling to comprehend that a shady, bombastic liar is hardening the image of their party as a symbol of intolerance and division,” says the editorial board in today’s editorial on “The Party of Trump, and the Path Forward for Democrats.”
“Anti-Trump Republicans Call for a Third-Party Option,” reports Alexander Burns at The New York Times. “Two top Republicans, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, said this week that they would not vote for Mr. Trump in November…William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, said he would work actively to put forward an “independent Republican” ticket if Mr. Trump was the nominee, and floated Mr. Sasse as a recruit…A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey this week found that 48 percent of Republicans who do not already back Mr. Trump said they would probably not or definitely not support him in November.”
NJ Gov. Christie sinks in poll of RVs following his Trump endorsement.
Many have noted that the GOP presidential candidates are collectively out-polling Democratic rivals and setting turnout records in the primaries thus far, while Democratic turnout is declining from 2008 figures. But Democratic front-runner Clinton received more votes than Republican front-runner Trump in the four largest Super Tuesday states (GA, MA, TX and VA).
On that topic, Patricia Sullivan writes that “GOP vote surge in Northern Va. definitely included some Democrats.”
Nate Silver addresses the question of the hour, “Can Republicans Still Take The Nomination Away From Trump?” and concludes that “anti-Trump Republicans ought to look for ways to test their voters’ resolve to back Trump. They could develop better anti-Trump advertising campaigns, which have received shockingly little financial backing so far. Even if they can’t push Trump’s opponents out of the race, they can push back against a media-driven coronation of Trump or a premature consolidation around him. They ought to make Trump fight like hell for the nomination through all 50 states. But if he seems to have earned it, they probably shouldn’t count on taking it away from him.”
“The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand,” notes Thomas B. Edsall in his NYT op-ed, “Why Trump Now?”
At The Nation Ari Berman explains how “Voters Were Blocked From the Polls on Super Tuesday by New Voting Restrictions: The 2016 election is the first in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.”

No major surprises emerged from Super Tuesday vote tallies. It’s clear, however, that regional identity is no longer all that much of a factor in presidential politics, and southern voters, left and right, don’t much care where you come from, as long as you reflect a semblance of their values. That may have some implications when it comes time to pick running mates.
As The Atlantic’s David A. Graham explains, Clinton “scored wins across the South, including in Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Texas. She is projected to take roughly double Sanders’s delegate total.” Trump’s NY persona romped in AL, VA, GA, TN, and AR, and of course they both owned SC going in to Super Tuesday.
But it wasn’t just about the south. Clinton won MA and Trump took VT and MA. Rubio managed a win in MN, but has no bragging rights elsewhere. Sanders, however, won in VT, OK, CO and MN, enough to keep rolling.
Of Marco Rubio’s dismal performance, Jonathan Chait says “He is closer to becoming a joke than the front-runner.” Cruz, however, got a little encouragement from winning his home state and Oklahoma.
In MA, Clinton won a close contest. As The Times wrap-up explained,

Massachusetts was perceived as a must-win for Mr. Sanders: If he could not win a progressive Northeast state that had half a million college students and bordered his home state of Vermont, his viability elsewhere would be seriously questioned. And so he poured in resources here, visited twice in the last week and matched the Clinton ground game.
But Mrs. Clinton had a lot going for her in Massachusetts, which has 116 delegates. She won the state in 2008 against Barack Obama by 16 percentage points. She had widespread institutional backing from Democratic officials, including the mayor of Boston, Martin J. Walsh. She raised more than $4 million from residents, almost three times as much as Mr. Sanders. And she significantly increased her television spending in the last week, though he still outspent her by more than two to one.
Mr. Sanders did win over voters under 30 by nearly two to one, according to exit polls by Edison Research. But Mrs. Clinton did better among older voters, and led by double digits among those 30 to 44. Among voters with family incomes below $100,000, Mr. Sanders topped Mrs. Clinton by about 10 percentage points; among those with family incomes above that threshold, Mrs. Clinton won by about 20 points.

Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore highlights an interesting development at in his New York magazine post, “When Everybody Was Distracted, Marco Rubio May Have Just Blown Up the Republican Party.”
In TX, notes the Times, “About three in 10 voters were Hispanic, according to exit polls by Edison Research, and about two-thirds of them supported Mrs. Clinton. Hispanics accounted for about one in three registered Democrats in Texas in 2012, and they participated in the 2014 midterm elections at a higher rate than blacks, according to exit polls….Eight in 10 black voters supported her, according to the exit polls taken Tuesday.”
Looking forward, Ed Kilgore notes, “Sanders has some promising turf not far ahead, from caucuses in heavily white states like Kansas, Nebraska, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, to Rust Belt states where he hopes to make hay over Clinton and Obama administration trade policies. But the reality is that his coalition of white liberals and young voters just isn’t looking like a real threat to Clinton’s nomination anymore.”
NYT’s Gregor Aisch and Josh Katz observe that “If Donald J. Trump keeps winning by the same margins and everyone stays in the race, he could lock up the nomination in May.”
As for the best headlines summing up the morning after, I would give it to the Washington Post for “A nightmarish Super Tuesday for GOP establishment” and “Republicans learn to grieve as Trump nears completion of hostile takeover.” Ouch.

Ariel Edwards-Levy, HuffPo polling director, has some good news for Democrats. In her HuffPo Politics post, “Even If Democrats Support Different Candidates, They Aren’t Divided: Democratic voters say they’re ready to support either Clinton or Sanders,” she explains, that despite tensions between both campaigns and some of their followers,

…Such animosity hasn’t taken much hold among the majority of party voters, who like both their candidates and are already largely willing to rally behind either in a general election.
Exit polls in South Carolina, like those in previous states, show that a strong majority of voters would be satisfied to see either candidate as the nominee. And a national HuffPost/YouGov poll, conducted before the primary, shows Democrats generally happy to accept either candidate.
According to that survey, 77 percent of Democratic primary voters nationwide would be at least satisfied with a Clinton nomination, and 63 percent would be at least satisfied with Sanders as the nominee. Fewer than a fifth would be angry about either outcome.
While Clinton, who continues to hold a small lead in national polls, has the edge, even those who’d be less than happy with a Sanders victory would support him over a Republican rival.
Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly say they’ll stay within party lines come November, with 76 percent saying they’d vote for Clinton and 77 percent that they’d vote for Sanders. The remainder are more likely to say they’re undecided or not planning to vote than that they’d turn out for a Republican.
In fact, the percentage who’ll eventually end up voting along partisan lines is likely even higher. In 2008, after a protracted battle that left some die-hard Clinton supporters vowing that they’d never support Obama, about 89 percent of Democrats ended up voting for their party’s nominee over John McCain.
And most Democratic primary voters have nothing but good feelings for their fellow party members, regardless of whom they’re backing. Seventy-three percent take a positive view of Clinton supporters, while 69 percent feel warmly toward Sanders’ supporters.

That’s very good news for Democrats. And if Dems can stoke the trend and increase solidarity between the followers of both Clinton and Sanders a little bit more, the possibility of a November landslide can become a reality.