At The Daily Beast Jonathan Alter has a fine idea for Hillary Clinton: “Free College Now! Why Hillary Clinton Needs to Run With Bernie Sanders’s Best Idea: To earn the love of young Democrats, Clinton needs to embrace their guy’s best big idea.” Alter makes a very compelling argument that merits the attention of every Democratic candidate from state legislators on up. Sure, this would be popular with college-age youth. But the big swing constituency here is modest-income parents of middle and high school students. These parents are now looking at reverse mortgages, home equity loans and obliterating their retirement assets to educate their kids. Political leaders who will fight hard to help them avoid economic ruin will win most of their votes.
Pollsters must be relieved about the results of the New York primary. As HuffPo’s senior polling editor Natalie Jackson writes, “The average error is under 5 percentage points for the eight pollsters who polled both the Democratic and Republican races in the last week before the primaries. Two of those polls — the NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll and the Emerson College Polling Society poll — averaged about 2.6 percentage points of error across both Republican and Democratic primaries.”
Also at The Beast, Michael Tomasky has a post, “Hillary’s Army of Women Conquers New York, Occupies the Democratic Party: The obvious is important here: Most Democratic voters are women, and Clinton is winning among them by double digits in most states,” which should make GOP strategists more than a little apprehensive. In one graph Tomasky notes of the New York primary, “…The results tell us a little something about how a general election might play out against Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. It should be pointed out that Trump crushed it among women in New York on the Republican side, since after all as we know he cherishes women and will be the best president for women in history, forget about it. He got 57 percent to John Kasich’s 28 percent and Cruz’s 15 percent. But there, women were only 44 percent of the vote. And in terms of raw vote totals, Clinton hauled in almost exactly twice the number of votes Trump did–1.037 million to 518,000. That means about 665,000 women voted for Clinton, while just 215,000 voted for Trump.”
Here’s an interesting request, from 75 conservative leaders no less, urging Ryan and McConnell to reject the idea of a “lame duck” session to deal with the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination after the election. Tricky politics indeed.
Via “Democrats are winning the Supreme Court fight over Merrick Garland. Big time” by Chirs Cillizza at The Fix (graphic from Democratic pollster Peter Hart):

In his Slate.com post, “How the GOP Is Losing Its Grip on Working-Class Republicans,” Jacob Weisberg explains, “this is a revolt by Republican voters who no longer believe that their party supports their basic economic interests. While the leader of this rebellion is one of the rankest opportunists ever to appear on the American political scene, the white working class’s feeling that it has been seduced and abandoned by the GOP is perfectly justified.”
“We are clearly out of practice,” argues Jelani Cobb in his New Yorker article, “Working-Class Heroes: The 2016 election shows that, when talking about class, Americans and their candidates are both out of practice” Cobb continues “The current language of “income inequality” is a low-carb version of the Old Left’s ‘class exploitation.’ The new phrase lacks rhetorical zing; it’s hard to envision workers on a picket line singing rousing anthems about “income inequality.” The term lacks a verb, too, so it’s possible to think of the condition under discussion as a random social outcome, rather than as the product of deliberate actions taken by specific people. Bernie Sanders has tended to frame his position as a defense of an imperilled middle class, but he has also called out the “greedy billionaires” and “Wall Street”–a synecdoche for exploitation in general.”
Toss-up in NH Senate Race. You could check out Democratic senate candidate and Governor Maggie Hassan’s ActBlue contributions page right here.
CBS Poll: National Support For Marijuana Legalization Reaches All-Time High. “According to a new CBS News poll, 56 percent of Americans support the legalization of the drug, up three points from 53 percent. More Americans admit to have tried marijuana too — with 51 percent saying they have tried the drug — up from 43 percent last year.” Time to free the captives, Democratic Governors?

At The New York Times Alexander Burns sums up Hillary Clinton’s victory in the New York primary thusly:

Mrs. Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont by crushing him in New York City and its suburbs, easily winning black and Hispanic voters and holding down his margins in friendlier upstate areas. Her political coalition simply looks more like the national Democratic base than his does. In a big state like New York that is more closely reflective of national demographics, that is a decisive advantage.
Even in upstate cities where Mr. Sanders might have been a more natural fit, like Syracuse and Buffalo, Mrs. Clinton won or fought him to an effective tie.

Hillary Clinton received 1,037,344 votes in the New York primary, while 752,739 New Yorkers voted for Sanders and Donald Trump got 518,601. That’s a pretty strong indication that, if nominated by the GOP, Trump will lose his home state in the general election.
Looking at the delegate horse race, AP’s Julie Pace writes that “of the 247 Democratic delegates at stake in New York, Clinton picked up about 135, compared to 104 for Sanders.” Further,

Among Democrats, Clinton now has 1,893 delegates to Sanders’ 1,180. Those totals include both pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses and superdelegates, the party insiders who can back the candidate of their choice regardless of how their state votes. It takes 2,383 to win the Democratic nomination.

Put another way, Clinton now has about 79.4 percent of the delegates needed to clinch the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, while Sanders has 49.5 percent of the qualifying total.
Clinton also took New York City proper with an impressive 63.4 percent to 36.6 for Sanders. Matthew Bloch and Wilson Andrews have a fun map at the Times, “How Every New York City Neighborhood Voted in the Democratic Primary,” which includes “find your neighborhood” and “enter address” search widgets. They also have maps showing breakdowns by precincts forcusing on race and income.
Pace notes that exit poll surveys conducted by Edison Research for The Associated Press and television networks “suggested Democrats were ready to rally around whomever the party nominates. Nearly 7 in 10 Sanders supporters in New York said that they would definitely or probably vote for Clinton if she is the party’s pick.” It’s hard to imagine Clinton’s share of Sanders voters not increasing when they address the question, “Do I really want to risk turning control of America’s military defenses over to Donald Trump?”

From Steven Shepard’s Politico post “How New York Will Be Won“:

In the Democratic presidential primary, about half the vote will come from New York City’s Five Boroughs — a percentage that increases to nearly three-quarters of the vote when the entire New York media market is included.
By contrast, the city accounted for only 13 percent of the votes in the 2012 Republican primary. And of the 34 counties across the state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats (out of 62), only one — Putnam County — is located near New York City.

Ford Fessenden and Sarah Almukhtar note in their New York Times article, “The Battle for New York’s Key Voting Blocs in the Primaries“:

Whites with money on the Upper West Side, in Chelsea and in brownstone Brooklyn are the Democrats’ liberal base. They have opened their wallets for Hillary Clinton — she has a 10-to-1 advantage over Bernie Sanders in contributions — and they turn out reliably.
The voting center of Democratic New York in high-turnout elections is farther east, in black neighborhoods in places like central Brooklyn and southeast Queens. Mrs. Clinton has done well here in the past, even in 2008 against Barack Obama.
“If Hillary Clinton were running against someone other than Barack Obama in 2008, she likely would have swept the city,” said Steven Romalewski, mapping director at the CUNY Graduate Center.
The most liberal Democrats in New York could be the gentrifiers in hipster Brooklyn, but there aren’t many of them…Mr. Sanders raised more money than Mrs. Clinton in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick, Brooklyn, but this territory is split among three congressional districts, making it difficult to translate votes into delegates.
Despite Mrs. Clinton’s success throughout New York in 2008, Mr. Skurnik says Mr. Sanders has a shot in rural upstate districts, where “despite popular belief, Democrats are not farmers, but are instead teachers and government workers.”

Pre-election polls have not exactly had a great year in the primary season. But it is significant that Clinton leads Sanders by double digits among eligible New York Democratic voters in key polls. As Jonathan Easley writes at The Hill that “Surveys in the state have consistently shown Clinton holding a lead of somewhere between 10 and 17 points in the state. Sanders has yet to climb to within single digits of Clinton in any poll of New York so far this cycle.” Fivethirtyeight.com’s NY Democratic primary forecast has a weighted polling average of 21 polls show a 53.2 percent average for Clinton, vs. 39.7 percent average for Sanders.
But Sanders, notes Jose A. Delreal in the Washongton Post, “has drawn tens of thousands of supporters at rallies in recent days.” Barring an upset, it will be the size of Clinton’s margin of victory that pundits will be watching to assess the Sanders and Clinton campaigns’ momentum going forward.
All other factors being in a predictable range, what may prove to be the most interesting statistics coming out of the New York primary are the raw vote tallies of Clinton and Trump

Paul Waldman has an interesting post up at The American Prospect, “Why Hillary Clinton Could Be the Kind of President Bernie Sanders Supporters Will Love.” As Waldman frames his argument:

It’s frustrating to be a Bernie Sanders supporter right now. Your candidate has plenty of impressive wins behind him, Hillary Clinton is still far from having the nomination wrapped up, and yet everyone is talking as if the race is over. First they didn’t take your guy seriously, and now they want to push him out of the race. With the expectedly raucous New York primary coming up Tuesday, it’s no wonder that there’s no small amount of animosity coming from Sanders fans toward Clinton. In fact, in a recent McClatchy/Marist poll, 25 percent of Sanders supporters say they won’t vote for Clinton if she’s the party’s nominee.
They may not want to hear it yet, but those who support Sanders might start thinking about how they could exert influence over Clinton’s presidency. Because some of what they don’t like about Clinton–her caution, her propensity for difference-splitting, her inclination to seek the path of least resistance–is exactly what will enable liberals to pull her to the left once she’s in the White House.

Waldman notes that Clinton’s earlier “centrism” was partly anchored to the prevailing trend of her party in the 1990s. “Who she was then,” says Waldman, “was a combination of her natural inclinations and a keen eye for the political risks and possibilities of the moment. On that basic level, she hasn’t changed, but the environment has.”
But now, adds Waldman,

The Democratic Party has moved to the left on many issues, from gay rights to immigration. At a time when the parties and their voters are polarized, and Democrats have significant demographic advantages at the national level, there’s little to be gained by moving to the center. So Hillary Clinton is a much more liberal politician than she was twenty years ago.

It is a mistake for progressive Democrats to assume that Clinton is an ideological centrist. One can make a case that she was always a notch or two to the left of her husband, but those instincts were reigned in, rightly or wrongly, by pragmatic caution.
However, says Waldman, “If liberals can move the country’s debate and the Democratic Party’s fulcrum to the left, then Clinton will move with them.” For Sanders campaign supporters, “that means that when the Sanders campaign is over, their work will just be starting. As president, Hillary Clinton will be as liberal as liberals force her to be. If they do their job, that could be quite liberal indeed.”

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I have long believed that progressive economic policies are far better for most businesses than the policies of the modern Republican party. Oh, sure, Republicans will do a good job of taking care of their biggest contributors and closest special interest cronies — the Koch brothers won’t have to worry much about pollution laws or anti-trust enforcement if the people they support control the government. But for most businesses, progressive policies are going to help them a lot more than they hurt them. As I have written in the past:

Higher wages mean more disposable income for customers. Paid sick leave and decent health care benefits mean more stability in the workforce for most companies. Breaking up the biggest banks and fair rules for the financial industry would mean far more investment and better terms on loans for most small businesses. Better schools mean more productive workers.
Converting to a green economy and making adequate investments in infrastructure and R&D would mean the creation of thousands of new businesses and millions of new jobs, a lot of them high wage. Vigorous enforcement of anti-trust laws and prosecuting businesses that manipulate markets mean that honest businesses can better compete with big corporations who have an unfair advantage.

And there is a ton of data that show the economy consistently does better under Democratic governance than under the Republicans:

Now, though, in the post-apocalyptic moonscape that is the Republican party of 2016, it has become clear that the modern Republicanism of Trump and Cruz is even worse for the business community than the numbers suggest they historically have been. If, as the saying goes, the corporate world craves stability, the Republican party of today threatens instability on a mass scale. It’s bad enough for the business community if the man who has offended almost every demographic group in America outside of non-college educated white men is the Republican nominee.
If the convention becomes a mess, the fight is between Trump and Cruz and some yet to be named establishment savior, then you have the specter of the riots Trump promised if he doesn’t get the nomination — and riots are rarely good for business. The potential of this going from ugly to violent is all too real, and that doesn’t exactly bode well for consumer confidence. We are already seeing this remarkable dynamic play out, as corporate America is in a state trying to figure out what the hell to do about the Republican convention this summer. Check out this rather remarkable article by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman in the NYT the other day.
In it, they say:

Some of the country’s best-known corporations are nervously grappling with what role they should play at the Republican National Convention, given the likely nomination of Donald J. Trump, whose divisive candidacy has alienated many women, blacks and Hispanics.

And they go on to discuss the organizing work being done by some of the leading progressive organizations in the country, including Color of Change, Ultraviolet, and other major groups representing Latinos, Muslims, and the array of other constituencies deeply offended by Trump and Cruz’s rhetoric.
The fundamental problem is this: the U.S.A. is becoming more and more diverse in its racial and ethnic background, its religion, its lifestyle choices and its thinking. Businesses of all stripes want to appeal to those consumers (not to mention markets in the rest of the world) and hire the best people they can from those constituencies. Meanwhile, the Republican party has become the party of reaction against what America has become. The Trump/Cruz party openly embraces racism, nativism, misogyny and lack of toleration. They want to ban Muslims from entering the country and turn their neighborhoods into cordoned off war zones. They want to build walls to keep the rest of the world out. They are enthusiastic and unrepentant about insulting everyone not like them. And this is not good for business.
This conflict for business keeps coming up in different battles. The fights we have seen in Indiana, North Carolina, and Georgia over LGBT rights are not going away, and we will see this play out in all kinds of other ways as well.
What is good for business is customers with money in their pockets, young people able to enter the workforce with a good education backing them up, more federal dollars for R&D, 21st century roads and bridges and airports, and a financial system that invested in entrepreneurial start-ups rather than being focused on financial speculation. A good business climate requires communities that welcome every kind of person that wants to work hard and play by the rules, which is why the most diverse and welcoming cities in America tend to be the healthiest economically. Most businesses don’t need lobbyist-crafted special tax loopholes or sweetheart deals, they just want to be able to compete on a level playing field. And this kind of America is what progressives and Democrats are offering them.
I have been in business for most of the last two decades. My partners and I at Democracy Partners have built our business around the idea of embracing, working with, and supporting progressive constituencies. I would suggest that most businesses in America would be well served to do the same.
The Republican party of 2016 has jumped the rails and is about to crash. The business community needs to make sure it doesn’t crash along with them.

At Brookings, William A. Galston analyses data from “a massive rolling survey of more than 42,000 Americans conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute” and concludes it could mean some very bad news for Republicans.
Galston, a former policy advisor to President Clinton and presidential candidates and Brookings Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, explains that “strong majorities of Americans–Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike–favor immigration reforms that would allow immigrants living in the United States illegally to qualify for citizenship if they meet certain requirements.” Further,

There are partisan differences, of course. 72 percent of Democrats support a path to citizenship for immigrants living here illegally, compared to 62 percent of Independents and 52 percent of Republicans. Conversely, 30 percent of Republicans opt for identifying and deporting them, compared to 19 percent of Independents and only 11 percent of Democrats. Still, support is strong across the board. For example, 54 percent of white evangelical Christians favor a path to citizenship.
…In a possible harbinger of the general election this fall, views on immigration vary widely by geographical location. The West and Northeast are more positive than negative about the impact of immigration; the reverse is true for the South and Midwest. Majorities of Americans in 21 states believe that immigration is a net plus for the country, as do pluralities in 20 additional states. Pluralities in 6 states endorse a negative view of immigration, while 3 states are statistically tied.
…On the other hand, the positive view of immigration enjoys majority support in crucial swing states such as Colorado and Florida and a near-majority of 49 percent in Virginia. Support for this view is strong even in long-time red states such as Arizona (55 percent), Texas (52 percent), and Georgia (50 percent)…

“So Republicans may have a fight on their hands in states they have long taken for granted,” says Galston, “especially if immigration becomes a more prominent issue in the campaign.” And if first or second generation Americans organize opposition to restrictive immigration policies, “Republican candidates who are eager to discuss their opposition to comprehensive immigration reform may ultimately regret that strategy come November.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary with 56.5 percent of the vote to his adversary’s 43.1 percent, his sixth straight primary victory. “The preliminary Wisconsin results gave 45 pledged delegates to Mr. Sanders and 31 to Mrs. Clinton, who maintains a lead of roughly 250 delegates,” notes Amy Chozick in the New York Times. “Mr. Sanders would need an estimated 56 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to overtake Mrs. Clinton.”
Sanders also outpolled Republican Ted Cruz, who won the GOP primary, while Democratic runner-up Clinton ourtpolled Republican runner-up Trump. Sanders got about 36 thousand more votes than did Cruz and Clinton got 47 thousand more votes than did Trump. However, Cruz, Trump and Kasich received over 54 thousand votes more than did Sanders and Clinton together.
AP’s Chad Day and Emily Swanson share some results from AP/Edison Research exit polling in WI:

On the Democratic side, voters chose Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who they saw as the more exciting, inspiring and honest candidate, according to early results of exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and television networks by Edison Research…But even then, more voters view former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the candidate most likely to beat Trump, who has been the Republican front-runner throughout the primaries.
…Nearly 60 percent say Sanders inspires them more about the future of the country…Democratic voters were more likely to describe Sanders than Clinton as honest. About nine in 10 say so of Sanders, while about 6 in 10 say so of Clinton… But more than half also say Clinton is the candidate best suited to beat Trump. Three-quarters say Clinton has realistic policies, more than the two-thirds who say that of Sanders.

Swanson and Day report that Sanders ran ads emphasizing job losses linked to trade agreements during former President Bill Clinton’s administration. Further,

Democratic voters in Wisconsin are divided on the effect of trade on unemployment, but among those who think trade takes jobs, 6 in 10 supported Sanders…About 4 in 10 Democratic voters say trade with other countries takes away jobs in this country, while 4 in 10 see trade as beneficial, exit polls show. Only about 1 in 10 sees trade as having no effect on jobs in the United States.

As for demographics,

Young voters supported Sanders by an overwhelming margin. More than 6 in 10 men voted for Sanders, while women split about evenly between the two candidates…Six in 10 white voters went for Sanders, while 7 in 10 black voters voted for Clinton. Self-described Democrats split about evenly between the two candidates, while about 7 in 10 independents voted for Sanders.

Regarding the upcomming Democratic primaries in delegate-rich New York (April 19th) and Pennsylvania (April 26th), Chozick writes, “…Wisconsin, with a population that is 88 percent white, does not reflect the larger and more diverse populations of New York and Pennsylvania, more comfortable terrain for Mrs. Clinton.” Chozick adds that, In 2008, “Barack Obama defeated Mrs. Clinton in Wisconsin by 17 percentage points.” In that race, however, Obama had the support of younger voters, who are now favoring Sanders, as well as voters of color.
As a former U.S. Senator from NY, Clinton will likely have an edge in that state, although Sanders has some New York roots, and trade is a significant issue in western parts of NY. Sanders may find stronger than expected support in PA, were job losses from trade deals are a continuing concern.