At The Fix, Janell Ross explains “What Hillary Clinton’s massive win among black voters [in SC] really says“: “There is evidence of substantial but far from record-setting overall primary turnout there, too. But, there is also this: Black voters turned out and voted in large numbers relative to other Democrats, giving their numerical majority within the party added meaning…Black voters in South Carolina cast 6 in every 10 Democratic primary votes, according to CNN’s exit poll data. That ratio is huge — and sets a record-high in South Carolina black voter participation rate. The previous high was 55 percent, set in 2008…It is a result that should begin to crush the popular and often repeated myth that black political behavior in 2008 and 2012 was nothing more than a blip, a fleeting kind of emotion-only engagement inspired by a singular and history-making black candidate.”
The Associated Press adds: “Six in 10 South Carolina primary voters were women, and 8 in 10 of them said they voted for Clinton. She was also supported by about 7 in 10 men…Six in 10 white women supported Clinton, while a majority of white men said they voted for Sanders…Clinton ate into Sanders’ advantage among young voters. Although he was supported by a slim majority of primary voters under 30, she was supported by about three-quarters of those between the ages of 30 and 44, as well as 8 in 10 of those 45 and older…Two-thirds of white voters under 45 supported Sanders, but among blacks, that group went overwhelmingly for Clinton.”
More demographic breakdowns of the SC Democratic primary vote exit polls right here.
Looking forward, Politico’s senior politics editor Charlie Mahtesian has useful guide to Super Tuesday, “Breaking down Democrats’ Super Tuesday map:What to watch for in the biggest day of the Democratic presidential race so far.”
The Upshot’s Nate Cohn adds, “The results in South Carolina — as well as in Nevada, where Mrs. Clinton also won black voters by a wide margin — suggest that she can count on big wins in six Super Tuesday states where black voters represent an above-average share of Democratic voters: Alabama, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia. The polls say the same thing…As a result, the Sanders campaign has effectively conceded the South on Super Tuesday. The campaign is not airing advertisements there, according to NBC News data.”
From RMuse’s PoliticusUSA post, “Two Respected Liberal Journalists Issue An Important Warning To Democrats“: “Maddow and Capehart both note that regardless the incompetent and hate-mongering Republicans seeking their party’s nomination, “the Republican field is consistently making more people turn out to vote. Republicans have voted in four states so far this year and in every single one they have broken the voter turnout record for that state.” Maddow then pointed out, again, that voter turnout for Democrats is down substantially. In fact, it was down 28 percent in Iowa, it was down 13 percent in New Hampshire, and it was down 33 percent in Nevada…It is noteworthy that 41 percent of one Democratic faction would not support the “other Democrat” if their candidate is not the nominee..”
E. J. Dionne’s syndicated column, “Working-class slump stokes Trump” illuminates a major reason for the GOP front-runner’s success with one of the largest demographic groups: “…Trump embraces positions on economics and foreign policy anathema to most conservative politicians. He is an ardent critic of recent free-trade agreements, opposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, has been even more vocal than many Democrats in criticizing President George W. Bush and the Iraq War and even endorses the Democrats’ long-standing call for government negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to drive down drug costs…This mix has allowed Trump to win votes from self-described moderates and conservatives alike, but his strongest support comes from voters at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale.”

Bridget Bowman reports at Roll Call that petitions bearing 1.3 million signatures urging Republicans to “do your job” and honor “the Senate’s Constitutional duty to consider a Supreme Court justice” have been delivered. Further, adds Bowman, “The Democratic National Committee launched a social media effort with the hashtag #DoYourJob, and hosted daily press calls with lawmakers about how a prolonged vacancy on the court would affect gay rights, immigration, abortion rights, voting rights, and health care.”

As we all wonder exactly how far Donald Trump will go to offend Establishment Republicans, and how far Establishment Republicans will go to stop him, a disreputable voice from the past is suddenly heard. I wrote about it this week at New York:

Twenty-five years before Donald Trump’s hostile-takeover bid for the Republican Party, an outlandish figure in Louisiana exploited racial tensions, hard economic times, and the estrangement of blue-collar whites to throw a huge scare into the political and civic leadership of his state and his country. In the first round of Louisiana’s 1991 all-parties “jungle primary,” former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke trounced the chosen gubernatorial candidate of his Republican Party and an incumbent governor who had recently joined the GOP. At one point he seemed about to win a runoff against the ethically tarnished three-term former governor Ed Edwards. It was being called “the Race From Hell.”
Louisiana’s business community, fearful of an economic boycott and global opprobrium, decided to say “no” to Duke. At the same time, opposition researchers figured out that while white Louisianans were willing to overlook the white sheets in the candidate’s closet, they weren’t so forgiving when confronted with photos showing him in full Nazi regalia while he was a grad student at LSU (an image Edwards shrewdly brought up during a debate, saying he had been working on welfare reform “back when you were still goose-stepping around Baton Rouge”). And finally, the national Republican Party, led by President George H. W. Bush, decided to disavow Duke, who lost decisively in the runoff thanks to heavy minority voting, a massive Edwards financial advantage, and a broad coalition that found its emblem in that greatest of all bumper-sticker slogans: VOTE FOR THE CROOK. IT’S IMPORTANT.
So when Duke came out of the woodwork this week (after doing some federal prison time, around the same time Ed Edwards did, in fact) to encourage what’s left of his fan-base to support Trump, he was just another white supremacist excited by Trump’s willingness to “tell it like it is” when it comes to the dusky threat of immigration. At his very worst, Trump is not much like Duke at his very best. But Duke’s example should serve as a reminder to Trump that there are limits to what the people running and financing his party will endure. Maybe they’ll finally find Trump’s Achilles heel, just as their predecessors finally found Duke’s.

Or maybe they’ll instead swallow their concerns and come to terms with Trump just as Chris Christie did today.

At Brookings, John Hudak, Senior Fellow for Governance Studies, explains why “If Clinton wins in November, she’ll have Sanders to thank“:

Sanders has managed something Clinton has been ill-equipped to do: connect with a variety of demographic groups who love Barack Obama but feel left behind by Obama’s recovery. Clinton has cloaked herself in the Obama record, and, in the process, she has alienated those who have not reaped the fruits of his progressive labor.
…No one expected that so many Americans would “feel the bern.” Media, the party, voters, and Brooklyn were all caught off guard by Sanders’ appeal. Yes, Sanders can be labeled a one issue candidate, or too extreme, or unelectable, but there is a reality in his message. He’s tapped into a growing discontent among liberals, moderates, and conservatives that the system is stacked against them and change was necessary. Americans are angry, and love him or hate him, Bernie Sanders has effectively talked to those angry voters. Hillary Clinton has not.
Although Bernie Sanders is less likely to be the Democratic presidential nominee now than he was even a week ago, that should not diminish his importance in this race and the impact he has had on Secretary Clinton.

Hudak adds that “He ran and continues to run a campaign of big ideas that connects with many voters…young voters, voters of color, moderates, conservatives, and anyone who feels betrayed by the current state of American politics. That is a big group that most candidates–Clinton and every Republican candidate but Trump–has underestimated.”
As the first woman candidate for president to be widely-considered a front-runner, Clinton deserves great credit for her impressive accomplishments and it would be folly for any of her adversaries to underestimate her capabilities. She has survived a couple of decades of relentless villification and emerged tougher, battle-tested and well-prepared to prevail over the most obstructionist political party in U.S. history.
But, like all candidates, Clinton has her vulnerabilities, and Hudak credits Sanders with helping her face her shortcomings as a candidate:

…He has injected passion into the Democratic race–a passion Clinton would not inspire if she marched to the convention in Philadelphia devoid of competition, readying herself for a coronation…Sanders supporters have pushed Clinton in directions she never expected to go. They have made her change her language, her message, and her campaign style. It is not the path she wanted, but it is probably the path that best serves her. Bernie Sanders has pushed her to the left on many issues, but he has also made Clinton a better candidate. And my guess is she knows it.
…He brought to the surface a variety of issues that Clinton had to address–income inequality, corporate power, campaign finance, and others–that she may have only paid lip service to but for a legitimate primary challenge. Sanders may not have changed Clinton’s mind, but he surely changed her message, and that is a good thing for any Democrat.
She has been forced to take on a series of issues that matter to Americans of all stripes, and she will enter the general election campaign stronger for it. Combine all of that with the passing of Justice Scalia and the prospect that the Senate may hold up the confirmation of his replacement, the Clinton candidacy and its prospective Supreme Court pick becomes all the more important in the grander scheme of American politics. The desire to overturn Citizens United seems almost liturgical to the Sanders campaign and must now be a central part of the thinking of a future Clinton administration…He pushed Secretary Clinton to think and talk and address a series of issues that will make her a better candidate in November. That rhetoric will ultimately help bring many Sanders supporters into her corner.

“Sanders’ insurgence may not have been the external shock Clinton wanted or expected,” adds Hudak, “but it may have been the medicine she needed.”
Hudak is not worried that Sanders supporters will not vote if Clinton is nominated. Even though Clinton may not inspire them like Sanders, “the prospect of a Trump or Cruz or Rubio candidacy will.” Further, concludes Hudak, “In 11 months, if Hillary Clinton stands on the West Front of the Capitol to swear the presidential oath, she should thank the junior senator from Vermont for part of that success.

At Politico Burgess Everett’s “Democrats resist total retaliation in Supreme Court fight” includes an update on emerging Republican and Democratic strategies regarding senate action on President Obama’s nominee to fill Scalia’s seat.
Here’s a good collection of earlier Mitch McConnell quotes explaining why it’s wrong to obstruct Supreme Court nominations for purely political purposes.
In “Why Obama is vetting Nevada’s Republican governor for the Supreme Court,” at Vox, Matthew Yglesias explores the political chess behind the Sandoval trial balloon: “…Floating Sandoval’s name in the press as a way to bait Republicans into batting it down could be a savvy strategy for Democrats to underscore exactly how rigid the GOP is being about the confirmation battle.” On the other hand, adds Yglesias, “filling the seat with a moderate Republican might actually be worse from the standpoint of labor unions who are currently looking forward to a tie on the Friedrichs case.” Thus far, Democrats have been far too willing to overlook the economic views of Republican nominees to the high court.
Julia Hirschfeld Davis and David M. Herszenhorn report at The New York Times that “Mr. Obama predicted that Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and other Republicans would not be able to sustain their refusal to acknowledge or act on his nominee, adding that in his private conversations with some of them on the matter, it was clear to him that they were not comfortable with that stance. He added, “I think it will be very difficult for Mr. McConnell to explain, if the public concludes that this person is very well qualified, that the Senate should stand in the way simply for political reasons.”
GOP message guru Frank Luntz tweets “This race is Trump’s to lose. Unless he has a meltdown in one of the remaining 5 debates.
But NYT’s Alexander Burns still sees five ways Trump could blow it in the weeks and months ahead.
Meanwhile Republicans Mitt Romney and George Will have suggested that Trump’s tax issues could sink his candidacy. “Either he’s not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is,” says Romney, “or he hasn’t been paying taxes we would expect him to pay or perhaps he hasn’t been giving money to vets or to the disabled like he’s been telling us he’s been doing,” Adding to the delicious irony of Romney dissing Trump’s personal tax-paying, Trump responds by calling Romney “goofy.”
Meanwhile, “Nearly 20% of Trump Fans Think Freeing the Slaves Was a Bad Idea,” reports Daniel White at Time magazine. More on the bigotry of sizable percentages of Trump voters here.
There are good reasons “Why Democrats (probably) shouldn’t worry about record Republican primary turnout” thus far in the caucuses and primaries, explains Jeff Stein at Vox.

I was reading a BuzzFeed post by Ben Smith on how Hillary Clinton just had to run a nasty general election campaign because she had nothing positive to build on when I just snapped at the idiocy of it all. I made an effort to contextualize “negative campaigning” at New York:

Smith is suggesting that going negative (or “comparative”) is the ugly person’s ugly alternative to the positive, inspiring kind of campaign Americans want and deserve.
But this year, at least, campaigning on the unicorns you will ride to Happyland on the cheers of millions of previously unheard Americans is, arguably, offering an illusion, if not a lie. That is indeed what Hillary Clinton keeps saying about Bernie Sanders’s message that he is uniquely capable of overcoming gridlock by conjuring up a mass movement that we’ve never seen before. Whether you agree with Clinton on that or you don’t, there is far less doubt about what Republicans will be able to accomplish if they win the White House while hanging on to control of Congress (and if the former happens, the odds of the latter are very high). A single executive order and a single (if big and very fat) budget-reconciliation bill could wipe out much of the Obama legacy in a matter of weeks. And that’s before you even get to executive-branch and judicial appointments — including perhaps multiple SCOTUS nominations — and the GOP’s own “positive” agenda of high-end tax cuts, tight money, “deregulated” fossil-fuel use, harassment of abortion and contraception providers, restricted voting rights, and (depending on the nominee) global unilateralism and adventurism.
This year’s Republican nomination contest is creating a vast storehouse of ripe targets for Democrats in a general election. Should they reject it all because it’s “negative?”…. I don’t think so.
Truth is, Bernie Sanders is just as likely as Hillary Clinton to “go negative” in a general election, and with good reason: His entire agenda depends on arousing so much popular anger at conservative perfidy that a “political revolution” — currently a complete nonstarter — becomes feasible. Even if Team Sanders has little but disdain for “centrism,” it will realize that even in this era of polarization, there are enough swing voters out there to justify a major effort to make sure Republicans can’t “occupy the center” themselves. And that means painting a lurid picture of what the country will look like if President Trump or Rubio or Cruz is allowed to stride into the White House at the head of an angry mob of activists who are infuriated they haven’t been allowed to turn the policy clock back to 1933.
No matter how much both parties talk about Barack Obama this year, he won’t be on the ballot in November and thus this cannot entirely be a referendum on his tenure in office. That makes it a “comparative” election almost by definition. If your opponent looks like a ravening wolf at the door, saying so early and often might be the best way in the current environment to make yourself look pretty.

As the saying goes, it has the added advantage of being true.

Greg Sargent has a perceptive post at The Plum Line, making a point that has largely been overlooked by the mainstream media — that Sen. Bernie Sanders has a long-term strategy that will continue even if he loses the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. As Sargent notes in his comment on Sen. Sanders’ extraordinary success in winning the support of younger voters:

Clinton will need to get all those young voters to start supporting her in big numbers. Even if turnout is down this year, Sanders — to a far greater degree than Clinton — seems to hold the key to engaging this constituency. He has somehow conveyed to a whole lot of young people that politics can matter in their lives. And remember, Democrats are betting on a new generation of young voters to give them a demographic edge that lasts beyond 2016.
So you could see Sanders playing a role at the convention; in helping shape the agenda for the fall campaign; and in helping engaging young voters, this time in preparation for the general election. As MSNBC’s Seitz-Wald reports, the Sanders camp sees such a role as a crucial part of his “political revolution.” Even if he doesn’t win.

Sanders is of course fighting to win the presidency, and he believes he has a good chance to do so. But he was an energetic social activist long before he won any elective office, and devoted his time and efforts to civil rights, peace and economic justice going back to his days as a college student. Few contemporary political leaders can match the lifelong commitment to social reforms that permeates his personal narrative.
That commitment will continue, whether he wins or loses the Democratic nomination. And even if he loses, he will still be in good position to recruit young people to join the long-haul struggle for social change and to help organize them into a force for effective action. For this reason, Sargent believes that Sanders will likely campaign all the way to the Democratic convention, where the coalition he has mobilized will be able to lay some of the foundation for a lasting social movement.
Sargent is certainly right. That this seems to be hard for the horserace-focused MSM to grasp is a sad commentary on their limited perspective about social movements. But if Sen. Sanders is able to mobilize a critical mass of young activists to become engaged in political and social change beyond 2016, he will have done a great service for America, regardless of who is elected President in November.

“A large majority of Democrats call income inequality a very important issue, and half of them think regulation of financial markets after the 2008 financial crisis did not go far enough, according to a new poll suggesting that many in the party are receptive to economic issues championed by Bernie Sanders in his bid for the White House,” reports the Associated Press. The poll, which was conducted Jan. 14-17 by the A.P. and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, has a 3.6 margin of error.
Further, adds the AP, more than three-quarters of Democratic poll respondents agree that “reducing the gap between rich and poor is a very or extremely important issue for the next president to address.” Also 8 in 10 Democrats and 3 in 10 Republicans, believe that “it’s the government’s responsibility to reduce those income differences. Overall, 56 percent of Americans say so, while 42 percent think it’s not.”
With respect to the minimum wage, the poll found more agreement with Hillary Clinton’s support of a $12 hourly minimum wage than the $15 standard favored by Sen. Sanders:

Among all Americans, slightly over half favor increasing the minimum wage to $12 an hour from the current $7.25, while just a third support increasing it to $15 an hour. Even Democrats are much more likely to favor a minimum wage increase to $12 an hour (68 percent) than to $15 an hour (49 percent).

When it comes to regulating financial markets, the poll found that 42 percent of all those surveyed and half of Democrats Americans believe that regulations put in place in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown “did not go far enough,” while 31 percent of all the respondents felt they were “about right,” with 25 percent saying “they went too far.” Only a third of Republicans surveyed felt that financial regulations put in place did not go for enough.
For more in-depth findings of the poll, read here.

At Brookings William Galston sheds light on the ideological value that undergird’s Trump’s enduring strength among Republican voters in opinion polls: “Trump enjoys a large advantage in public support, moreover, despite ranking at or near the bottom on most of the personal characteristics that voters value in prospective presidents–honesty and trustworthiness, caring about people’s needs and problems, sharing their values, and having the right experience. He leads in only one area–strong leadership qualities. It speaks volumes about the current mood among Republicans that the desire for strength appears strong enough to trump all other considerations, even among voters who prize piety and humility.”
Dems can be forgiven a smidgeon of schadenfreude at the utter failure of Jeb Bush’s quest for the GOP nomination, given his role as president’s brother/Governor of Florida in the 2000 election. At Mother Jones Pema Levy’s post, I’ll Be the Judge of That: How Jeb Bush Perpetuated the Sunshine State’s War on Black Voters provides a recap on the effects of ex-felon disenfranchisement in Florida for those who have forgotten: “The 2000 presidential election was ultimately decided by a 537-vote margin in Florida. More than 500,000 ex-felons were barred from the polls, including at least 139,000 African Americans, who vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. Their exclusion almost certainly changed the outcome of the race. The beneficiary, of course, was Jeb Bush’s brother…Under Jeb Bush, Florida undertook a second voter purge–again with a sharp racial skew–in 2004, the next presidential election year. Of the 48,000 people on the second list, 22,000 were black. Just 61 people on the list were Hispanic, at a time when Florida Hispanics, including the Cuban community in Miami, voted solidly Republican. After the media made the list public, and with a potential lawsuit looming, Bush abandoned the purge…According to Edward Hailes, a lawyer with the US Commission on Civil Rights, the number of African Americans wrongfully expunged from the rolls who would have voted for Al Gore was 4,752–nearly nine times greater than the 537 votes that handed George W. Bush the presidency…Ultimately, Bush approved just one-fifth of the 385,522 applications for civil rights submitted during his eight years in office.” Of course felon disenfranchisement was just one element of voter suppression in FL in 2000, in addition to the Brooks Brothers Riot, finagling with voter machines, “lost” registration forms, misinformation and other shenanigans, all under the watch of Governor Jeb Bush.
At The Nation Sean McElwee highlights “The GOP’s Class Divide on Austerity; Even inside the GOP, the working poor don’t support the austerity politics of the party’s elites.” McElwee analyses from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study of more than 50,000 respondents.
In his weekly Syndicated column, E.J. Dionne, Jr. observes, “A good case can be made — and has been made by progressives throughout Obama’s term — that if Democrats said that everything was peachy, voters who are still hurting would write off the party entirely…But ambivalence does not win elections. Running to succeed Ronald Reagan in 1988, George H. W. Bush triumphed by proposing adjustments in Reagan’s environmental and education policies, but otherwise touting what enough voters decided were Reagan’s successes…Democrats need to insist that while much work remains to be done, the United States is in far better shape economically than most other countries in the world. The nation is better off for the reforms in health care, financial regulation and environmental protection enacted during Obama’s term…If Clinton, Sanders and their party don’t provide a forceful response to the wildly inaccurate and ridiculously bleak characterization of Obama’s presidency that the Republicans are offering, nobody will. And if this parody is allowed to stand as reality, the Democrats will lose.”
Peter Dreier’s post “Nine Battleground States that Could Flip the Senate — and the Supreme Court” at The American Prospect puts the 2016 stakes in clear perspective: “If the Democrats win the Senate and a Democratic president gets to replace Scalia and appoint three other justices, they will cement a liberal majority for at least two or three decades. If either Clinton or Sanders wins the White House, Justices Ginsburg (who will be 83 next year) and Stephen Breyer (78) might retire to allow the president to pick their younger successors. Anthony Kennedy, a conservative who sometimes votes with the court liberals, will be 80 in 2017. If he retires and a Democrat selects his replacement, the court could find itself with a 6-3 liberal majority, with only Chief Justice John Roberts (currently 61 years old) and Justices Clarence Thomas (67) and Samuel Alito (65) remaining to carry the conservative torch. (Two other liberals–61-year-old Sonia Sotomayor and 55-year-old Elena Kagan, both Obama appointees–could remain on the court for another two decades…Even with Roberts remaining as chief justice, a court with a 6-3 liberal majority could have more influence in moving the country in a progressive direction than at any time since Chief Justice Earl Warren led the court between 1953 and 1969.”
Hillary Clinton just got a big boost from 20 unions representing 10 million workers — which means her campaign will soon have more money and manpower. Further, “Exit and entrance polls from the Iowa and Nevada caucuses showed voters from union households favoring Mrs. Clinton over Mrs. Sanders by a roughly 10-point margin — greater than the margin by which Mrs. Clinton won those contests overall,” reports Noam Scheiber at the New York Times.
At The Daily Beast, however, Michael Tomasky observes of Clinton’s NV victory, “this win should mean that Clinton will be able to unite the party without anybody’s flesh being ripped…It now looks like Clinton is going to be the nominee, and that this primary will be over sooner rather than later. She should win nine of 12 Super Tuesday states, and maybe 10; I think she could get Massachusetts, while Sanders holds in Vermont and Minnesota. But barring the email-indictment scenario or some totally unexpected thing (and of course those things could happen!), it’s hard to see a scenario where Sanders could steal away any delegate-rich states. So she seems to be on the way.”
Olivia Nuzzi’s Daily Beast post on the SC results has a headline that will make establishment Republicans wince: “Trump Smirks As Beltway GOP Crumbles.” Nuzzi adds this telling insight: “He did not explain what was historic about the evangelical in the race losing the evangelical vote in a state where –according to an exit poll–73 percent of Republican voters said they consider themselves born-again or evangelical Christians. Trump, whose cursing is part of his stump speech, is on his third wife, admitted on TV that he’d never asked God for forgiveness, and this week got into a fight with The Pope.”
From vocativ.com:

Last week I offered some advice to Democrats based on what I perceived to be a weakness exhibited by Sen. Bernie Sanders. This week I’ll do the same with a mistake by the campaign of Hillary Clinton, as I explained at New York:

Those who read this brief “campaign news” story from the New York Times‘ Jason Horowitz early Thursday morning may have missed its significance:

Robby Mook, the Clinton campaign manager, sat at the head of a conference table in the New York office of Clinton donor and Wall Street investor Marc Lasry, according to accounts from people in the room. Joining them for the state-of-the-race conversation over coffee were members of the campaign’s finance steering committee, including Maureen White, the former Democratic National Committee finance chairwoman, Alan Patricof, Michael Kempner, Robert Zimmerman, Betsy Cohen, Jay Snyder and others.
Mr. Mook told the donors that the outcome in Nevada, a state he ran for Mrs. Clinton in the 2008 campaign, was hard to predict and that, depending on turnout, Mrs. Clinton could win by a lot or win or lose by a tiny margin, according to several donors who requested anonymity to discuss the private meeting. But Mr. Mook stressed that the map leaned in Mrs. Clinton’s favor as the race moved to South Carolina, where he was confident she would win, and that she would do well on March 1, when more states voted.

I’m guessing the Times’ ruthless editors took out “Sadly missing the irony” at the beginning of the next sentence:

The collected fundraisers, who for years have bundled checks for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, listened approvingly as Ms. White, who seemed especially frustrated, expressed bewilderment that the campaign’s mobilization of grassroots support had been eclipsed in the news media by Bernie Sanders’s criticism of Mrs. Clinton as the establishment candidate representing big money …
Donors also voiced some frustration with the lack of media scrutiny of Mr. Sanders, who they said was essentially getting a pass. They pressed Mr. Mook to demonstrate that the Vermont senator’s policy proposals were entirely implausible promises and that his responses to essentially all substantive questions drew on excerpts of his stump speech and rants about the “millionaires and billionaires.”

And here’s the kicker:

One donor also asked Mr. Mook to go after the youth vote. With a straight face, attendees said, the operative took the suggestion under advisement.

Yuk Yuk. Yeah, wish we had thought of that.
Now, anyone who has ever worked for an organization that depends significantly on the largesse of rich and self-important people is familiar with the kind of “input” briefing the Clinton campaign conducted here. It’s mostly a courtesy, and, as in this case, it’s mainly an opportunity for donors to bitch and moan and kvetch and play the amateur political consultant, all the while reminding the unfortunate staffers “briefing” them that they help pay the bills. I’m sure their “advice” to Mook — including the brilliant suggestion that Clinton go after the youth vote — went in one of Mook’s ears and out the other, if indeed he was listening instead of taking peeks at his cell phone. The real problem that should have been anticipated — along with the advisability of meeting in a union hall or the back room of a chain restaurant instead of in a donor’s office on Wall Street — is that some of the donors involved would of course run straight to the Times with the story in order to share with the world their important role in Team Clinton. Robby Mook left Nevada at a critical moment to come brief me, the leak advertised. Suddenly a boring and probably meaningless meeting turned into big oppo fodder for the Bernie Sanders campaign.
And Sanders’s people took the cue. Here’s an excerpt from a Facebook post by the campaign:

Jeff Weaver, campaign manager for Bernie 2016 said, “One of the biggest differences between our campaigns is that Bernie’s campaign does not take its marching orders from Wall Street and big money donors. It’s shameful that the Clinton campaign is parroting attacks at Sen. Sanders that The New York Times has documented come right from her big money backers. Now we are beginning to get a glimpse into what goes on in all those closed door meetings with Wall Street interests.”

I doubt that’s the case, but it’s not like the Clinton campaign can come out and say, This was a dog-and-pony show with no impact on our campaign. So they’ve fed one of the central talking points of the entire Sanders campaign and can only hope it’s a one-day story that everybody forgets.

That may be true, but it’s a bet no campaign can afford to lose. Just ask Bruce Braley, a 2014 Senate candidate from Iowa who never recovered from a video posted by a friend that showed him asking Texas trial lawyers to help him keep “Iowa farmer” Chuck Grassley from chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Optics matter.

At The Fix, Philip Bump’s “How the Internet has democratized democracy, to Bernie Sanders’s benefit” sheds light on the power of social media as a force for political education and change. Commenting on the insights of NYU professor Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” Bump explains:

…The gist is this. The two-party system necessarily can’t encompass every viewpoint. So, to hold parties together, some things became unmentionable. As media options broadened and the press wasn’t acting as gatekeeper, candidates could talk to voters more directly. But they still largely needed the resources of the party in order to get elected, so they still hewed to the rules about what couldn’t be mentioned.
Until 2008, when Barack Obama mastered talking to, fundraising from and turning out a large population.
“Reaching & persuading even a fraction of the electorate used to be so daunting that only two national orgs could do it,” Shirky wrote. “Now dozens can. This set up the current catastrophe for the parties. They no longer control any essential resource, and can no longer censor wedge issues.” The result, he says, is the “quasi-parlimentarianism” of the moment: The Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Trump Party and the Sanders Party, all vying for power and the presidency…Trump and Sanders can ignore the established parties by talking directly to the voters.

Thanks to the internet and social media, now candidates can define their political personas without as much help from their respective political parties. The “Internet has “democratiized democracy,” as Bump puts it.
The other factor referenced by Bump is cell phones. Bump quotes from Jill LePore’s New Yorker article describing a recent rally for Hillary Clinton:

The instant Clinton began speaking, dozens of arms reached high into the air, all across the room, wielding smartphones. It was like watching a flock of ostriches awaken, the arms their necks, the phones their heads, the red recording buttons their wide, blinking eyes.

Bump adds, “That ceaseless documentation of the moment made individuals in the crowd often indistinguishable from reporters…The media has a role, as do the political parties. The role of each was once to serve as gatekeeper. Now, the role is often to serve as bullhorn.”
Trump’s TV presence surely fueled his success as a GOP presidential candidate. He began his white house run with name recognition few political leaders could hope to match. Plus, he understood how to leverage media to get free publicity worth millions of dollars.
A few weeks ago, I noted that, with respect to advertising,

Online ad share is growing fast. But broadcast television still rules, when it comes to ad budgets and is projected to account for about $8.5 billion of the $11.4 total ad spending for 2016, compared to about $1 billion for digital media, according to Issie Lapowsky, writing in Wired. But Larry Grisolano, who supervised political ads for the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns, predicts that in 2016 presidential campaigns will allocate “nearly a quarter of their spending to digital media.”

Yet, it’s not as much about the ads, as peer contact and sharing in social media, particularly facebook, which is so easy to use and where anyone can share print, video and photos. You can’t do that in newspapers and TV.
A well-circulated YouTube clip likely meets more persuadable eyeballs than the most carefully-crafted letter to the New York Times. Peer to peer contact is critical for enhancing voter turnout. But it’s also important for forming and changing political attitudes.
The success of the Sanders campaign owes much to social media. Sanders does not have a flashy TV persona, as does Trump, and to a lesser extent, Clinton. His sincerity comes across well on television. But his more effective tool is social media, which helps to explain his soaring popularity with younger voters.
A candidate can get a lot of bang for the buck recycling YouTube clips on facebook and other social media to reach younger voters. Democrats seem to have more leverage with these tools at the moment. I’m seeing a vigorous debate between Clinton and Sanders followers on facebook and twitter.
Hillary Clinton can be an extremely effective communicator, frequently comes across as the most knowledgeable candidate in televised debates, and generally does well in TV, radio and print interviews. But the Clinton campaign has some catch-up to do to reach the youth demographic on social media.
One of the best things about social media is that it can’t be smothered by the Koch brothers or any other wealthy conservative financiers. A staged political ad is always going to have less cred with swing voters than a heartfelt share on fb. This may come in handy in the final weeks of the general election.