Yesterday in Political Strategy Notes I flagged Jonathan Alter’s Daily Beast post urging Hillary Clinton to embrace an idea promoted, though not originated, by Sen. Bernie Sanders — free college education.
Alter’s point was well-argued, though it should be noted that Clinton has done alright with her current advisors, having won about 3 million* more votes than her adversary. But also give Sanders due credit for running a great campaign that has profoundy transformed the 2016 election, and made affordable education a leading issue.
Alter’s argument works for Clinton because it can connect her in a more substantial way to a couple of needed constituencies, youth and their parents. And if Clinton needed even more unsolicited advice, today we have Tomothy Egan’s NYT column on “Hillary’s Big Idea,” urging the Democratic front-runner to embrace “something grand and unifying and bigger than herself.”
That’s never a bad idea. But the challenge is to keep it grand without sounding grandiose and big, without sounding YUGE. Fortunately, Dems do have a role model who knows how to work such a tone, President Obama.
The President’s measured, dignified tone in making his arguments sets a noteworthy standard for any Democratic candidate. He can turn on the inspirational heat, and even attack when the occasion calls for it. But he understands what looking “presidential” is all about.
“If nothing else,” writes Egan, “the astounding presidential election of 2016 has shown that Americans are ready to junk the present system and try something bold, even reckless. Small ball is out. Incremental change is a nonstarter. Big will beat little.”
I vote we skip the “reckless” part. Republicans seem to have that market well-cornered, and that’s a good thing for Dems. Let’s not emulate one of their most glaring weaknesses, nor forfeit one of Clinton’s strongest assets — that she is sober and serious about policy.
Egan takes pot shots at all the presidential candidates. But his zingers directed at Clinton make some points worth considering, including “no one in the United States is more qualified to be president than the former madam secretary. And yet, her trumpet is barely a bugle; she’s the shrug candidate…She’s not a natural politician, as she admits, though her game was sharp in New York. And Clinton fatigue is no passing hangover.” Further,

But compared with the monumental flaws of Trump, Clinton is in great shape. You don’t need the oratorical gifts of Barack Obama, the élan of John F. Kennedy or the kinetic spark of Teddy Roosevelt to be president.
What you do need is a big idea, something much greater than the personality of the politician. As John Kasich admitted on Wednesday: “If you don’t have ideas, you got nothing, and frankly my Republican Party doesn’t like ideas.”
Hillary Clinton has ideas, but what is the overarching one? “Fighting for us,” her slogan, sounds like poll-driven pablum.

If Egan is right, Job One ought to be a better slogan that somehow encapsulates more vividly why she should be president. As for the ‘first woman pesidentt’ thing, Egan says “The novelty is meh.” There is great merit in having a woman at the helm of the Democratic Party, as far as inspiring woman voters and candidates. But being closely-identified with a highly-popular economic reform is significant value added to her campaign, the kind that can win swing voters.
Egan is surely right that Clinton could benefit from projecting a more inspiring vision, and Alter’s suggestion is a good start. But she has shown impressive management, planning and decision-making skills already. She has recruited an extraordinary campaign team, which has gotten good results. More than any other candidate in recent memory, Clinton has demonstrated capacity for learning from mistakes, and doing better going forward. That’s something many voters want to see in their president.
The other thing President Obama has taught through his example, in appointing Clinton Secretary of State, is the power of embracing your former adversaries in a creative way. Clinton has recently indicated that she has learned that lesson. And if she wins the nomination, she should find a way for Sanders to help empower her presidency with his political integrity, grace and policy insights.
*Correction; Clinton has a popular vote lead over Sen. Sanders of nearly 2.7 million, not 3 milion as is stated in the second paragraph. I regret the error.

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?

After watching returns from New York Tuesday night until just past midnight EDT, I offered this take on the Republican primary for, appropriately, New York:

Anyone who made the mistake of predicting that Donald Trump’s defeat in the Wisconsin primary two weeks ago finally sounded the much-anticipated death knell for his candidacy needed to eat a big plate of crow Tuesday night, as Trump crushed John Kasich and Ted Cruz in his home state. The mogul won a sizable majority of the vote in every part of the state and took 90-91 of the 95 available pledged delegates. He seems to have nailed what he needed to accomplish (according to a finely calibrated estimate by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver) in order to stay on the track — or perhaps it’s better described as a tightrope — to a first-ballot majority of pledged delegates.
Because Trump has almost certainly lost hope of winning on anything after the first ballot in Cleveland, he has no margin for error. So his immediate challenge is to maximize his potential delegate haul in the five northeastern states holding primaries a week from now. One of those states, Delaware, should give all its delegates to Trump on a winner-take-all basis. Two others, Connecticut and Maryland, award some delegates to the statewide plurality winner and the rest to the plurality winner in congressional districts. Trump could sweep all the delegates in both states or instead get picked at from both directions in the odd CD by Cruz or Kasich. Rhode Island is a sort of throwaway proportional-delegate-award state, and Pennsylvania (like West Virginia in May) elects a majority of its delegates directly, with no binding candidate preferences.
Trump needs to cook in the Northeast because, afterward, the terrain gets more difficult, with Indiana providing another midwestern winner-take-all-by-congressional-district test in early May and then several winner-take-all primaries in plains and western states where Ted Cruz should clean up. Trump is almost sure to sweep winner-take-all New Jersey on June 7, and then it will all come down to another state where plurality winners statewide and in congressional districts take the jackpot in 172-delegate California.
Unsurprisingly, given his comments about “New York values,” the Empire State was not good to Ted Cruz, and not just because his rival Trump did so well. Cruz finished a poor third in New York with no delegates, and his long-standing effort to create a one-on-one contest with Trump was once again delayed by a relatively good Kasich showing. The Ohio governor will now naturally make a big push in the northeastern primaries just ahead and will then probably concentrate on trying to win a few California districts where a close three-way race could yield a three-delegate harvest.
We can expect a lot of hype from team Kasich in the days just ahead, along with dismissive sounds from team Cruz of anything happening other than its steady progress in picking off uncommitted delegates and later support from delegates bound to Trump on the first or second ballots. The closer Trump gets to a first-ballot victory, the greater the pressure will be on Kasich to get out, particularly if he’s failed to reduce the Donald’s northeastern-delegate haul. Even as the Kasich campaign celebrates its relatively good showing in New York, it should pay attention to the exit-poll finding that 70 percent of New York Republicans think the candidate with the most votes should win the nomination.

Don’t bet the farm on any particular outcome just yet. And Democrats, don’t pop the popcorn just yet, but do keep it handy.

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 Nation’s editor Katrina vanden Heuval argues that “The Welcome Rebellion in the Democratic Party: The rambunctious political discussions currently roiling the Democratic party will only make it stronger come November.”
Allie Yee of The Institute for Southern Studies reports that “Young Latino voters rising in the South.” Yee notes, “Between 2014 and 2016, 500,000 Latino youth in the South will have turned 18 and become eligible to vote, adding to the region’s 8.7 million voting-eligible Latinos in 2014.”
HuffPollsters Natalie Jackson, Ariel Edwards-Levy and Janie Velencia explain why, via David Rothschild of the oprediction markets, “Donald Trump has a 62 percent chance of being the Republican nominee for president of the United States of America, Hillary Clinton has a 92 percent chance to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America, and the Democratic nominee for president has a 74 percent chance to win the general election. It may be surprising that Trump is still at 62 percent to win the nomination despite all of the doom-and-gloom in the press about him failing or not wanting it. But, Trump has 742 pledged delegates to Ted Cruz’s 529 and he is about to go on a roll….He is heavily favored in New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.”
In case you were wondering Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley explain “House 2016: How a Democratic Wave Could Happen” at the Crystal Ball.
Also at The Crystal Ball, Alan I. Abramowitz argues that “Higher Voter Turnout Alone Is Unlikely to Change the Outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election.”
From Conor Lynch’s Salon.com post, “The Democrats need to stop being the “lesser of two evils” party — starting now“: “According to a report from Pew Research Center, the least financially secure Americans largely preferred Democrats in 2014, but a majority of them did not vote. There is an understandable political apathy among lower class Americans — not to mention voter suppression, which tends to hurt poor people and minorities. After all, both parties supported corporatist trade deals that eliminated working class jobs, both parties supported Wall Street bailouts, both parties are largely dependent on big money donors — it goes on and on.”
Marlow Stern’s post at Daily Best, “John Oliver Blasts GOP Over Lead Poisoning Our Children” includes Oliver’s excellent video rant rant on an infrastructure upgrade issue we can’t ignore much longer. And Vox has got the map to prove it.
To the delight of Democratic Party strategists, Republicans are doubling down on the transgender bathroom “issue,” notes the New York Times editorial board, and now the GOP crazy about bathrooms is spreading to beyond the southern states to KS and MN.
Not to pile on, but Chuck Todd shreds NC’s Republican Governor Pat McCrory for his warped defense of transgender bathroom hysteria, as Caitlin MacNeal notes at Talking Points Memo.

As the Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus becomes more of a target for abuse and a figure of fun each day, you have to wonder how long he can survive. I speculated on that subject a bit at New York earlier this week:

As recently as the beginning of last year, Reince Priebus was riding pretty high as chairman of the Republican National Committee. He was reelected with little opposition to a third term as chairman, the first to do so with a Democrat controlling the White House. Republicans had made big and historic gains in the 2014 midterms. Party finances were looking good. Priebus’s famous 2013 “autopsy report” after the 2012 presidential loss, with its call for a more diverse and less angry GOP, was still the prevailing wisdom in the GOP.
Now, 15 months later, you get the sense Priebus is going through the motions, sure to be replaced the next time his party reaches a resting point. To the Trump and Cruz partisans dominating the GOP presidential nominating context, Priebus is the face of the hated Republican Establishment, eyeing their presidential candidates with bad intent and doing what he can to set the stage for a stab in the back in Cleveland or soon thereafter. Just yesterday Trump called Priebus a “disgrace” who “should be ashamed of himself” for the “rigged” rule of the nomination process. But to anti-Trump and anti-Cruz Republicans, Priebus is an empty suit babbling about party unity when he should be taking a stand. Today’s Washington Post has not one but two columns kicking the man in the slats.
First there is journalist and snark-master Dana Milbank, who acidly notes that the more Priebus’s party sinks into the mire of Trumpism, the more its chairman engages in vapid uplift:

Priebus failed to act to stop Trump when he could have, or to coordinate Republicans to clear the field for a mainstream alternative. And now he compounds the damage by sticking with the same moral neutrality and happy talk of GOP unity that allowed the situation to develop.
After the Jan. 14 debate, in which Trump said he would “gladly accept the mantle of anger” and traded charges with Cruz about their constitutional eligibility for the presidency, Priebus tweeted: “It’s clear we’ve got the most well-qualified and diverse field of candidates from any party in history.”
In the Feb. 13 debate, Trump blamed George W. Bush for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and said Bush “lied” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Trump, Cruz and Marco Rubio took turns calling one another liars, and Rubio ridiculed Cruz’s Spanish skills. “Our well-qualified & experienced candidates continue to put forth serious solutions to restore prosperity & strength to America,” Priebus tweeted.
And after the March 3 debate, in which Trump spoke about the size of his genitals, Priebus tweeted that “Republican candidates are the only ones offering the course correction voters overwhelmingly want.”

At this rate, if the worst happens and Cleveland is a bloodbath of historic dimensions, you figure Priebus’s joy at GOP unity will know no bounds.
Similarly, conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin is enraged at Priebus’s refusal to flat-out oppose Trump. Damning with the faintest of praise the chairman’s refutation of the Trump camp’s claims of being robbed in Colorado this last week, which she attributed to Priebus being “momentarily roused from his stupor,” Rubin cuts loose:

What is missing here — as it has been for months now — is any principled defense against the man threatening to replace the conservative movement’s political apparatus with one that is nothing more than a cult of personality. In the latter, any outcome other than one favoring Trump is “crooked” or “rigged.” Acceptable rhetoric is defined as whatever he says; any efforts to present the party as inclusive go out the window.
Priebus continues to passively allow Trump’s torrent of deception, threats and out and out lies to wash over the party, treating him as just another candidate. It was this attitude that sent Priebus scurrying to Trump Tower with the pledge, now shown to be entirely worthless. Priebus’s collapse into moral relativism led him to forgo speaking out against the vast majority of Trump’s outrageous comments, and to only cryptically frown on violence in the race, which Trump alone has instigated and condoned. Worse yet, without an operative moral compass, Priebus again and again praised the entire field and provided assurance that no matter who got to 1,237 delegates, the entire party would get behind him. In short, he offered Trump carte blanche and now stands accused of running a corrupt and undemocratic outfit. You would think he would show a smidgen of indignation.

There’s an informal bipartisan tradition that a party’s presidential nominee — if it’s not an incumbent president who’s already been running the show — is given the opportunity to name her or his own national chairman. No matter who finally claims the tarnished prize in Cleveland, it’s hard to imagine Priebus will be kept around unless it’s to serve as a scapegoat if things go south.

Nice work, Reince.

While most of the carping about nominating process rules is emanating from the Republican side of the partisan barricades, there’s some interest in reforms in the Democratic ranks as well, as I discussed at New York.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent wrote a stimulating post on the possibility of Bernie Sanders using his leverage over Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to demand changes in the process that will determine future presidential nomination processes. Aside from the pros and cons of such “reforms,” a more basic question is the extent to which the national parties are in a position to implement them. To a surprising extent, they are not.
Nominating-process guru Josh Putnam of the University of Georgia made this clear in his comment on Sargent’s piece at his Frontloading HQ site. After noting that Democrats typically punt rules changes to a post-convention commission, Putnam gets to the heart of the problem in promoting nominating-process “reforms”:

The problem, as always, is that the national parties have only so much control over the presidential nomination process. The system started out and has evolved into a patchwork of overlapping national party rules, state party rules and state laws. In attempting to fix the perceived problems of any given cycle, the national parties have to navigate that patchwork.

Take the question of whether to use primaries, as Sargent prefers, or instead the less “democratic” caucuses. Primaries cost a lot of money. As a result, they are generally financed by state governments, which in turn means that state legislatures, not state parties (much less the national parties), decide whether and under what circumstances to hold them. If a given legislature doesn’t want to use tax dollars for primaries, odds are high the state parties will resort to the much-less-expensive alternative of caucuses. Could the national party play chicken with the states by demanding primaries? Yes, but are they really going to disenfranchise a state if it doesn’t comply? So far, no one has been willing to find out.
Then there’s the whole open-versus-closed primaries issue (again, Sargent thinks “reformers” would prefer open primaries to encourage engagement with indies). The practical implications of this decision depend heavily on state laws governing party registration. Some states make primary- (or caucus-) day changes in party affiliation very easy. Where that’s the case, making a primary formally “open” doesn’t add a lot of value. Conversely, there are 19 states that do not register voters by party. They are automatically going to be “open primary” states.
“Reforms” in the nominating-contest calendar have been a constant issue in recent years, but all the controversy has showed the limited power of the national parties in this area. It has required ever-more-severe sanctions to keep states from moving themselves up on the calendar, and the Democratic Party’s strong preference for proportional allocation of delegates has meant that it cannot offer the inducement of making winner-take-all (or winner-take-most) systems available to states that agree to hold their contests later in the year. And to the extent that state-financed primaries are utilized, changing dates often requires the cooperation of the opposing party since legislatures aren’t generally going to authorize two separate events.
As Putnam notes, one popular Democratic “reform” doesn’t run afoul of state prerogatives, but encounters another problem:

The problem with eliminating superdelegates is a little different. There is no overlap with state party rules or state laws, but nixing those unpledged delegates is an idea that requires superdelegates — members of the DNC — to vote to strip themselves of that power. It is not a nonstarter, but that idea is a long way from being enacted.

The bottom line is that the presidential nominating process isn’t a national contest with some state rules but a largely state-controlled system. If Democrats want to change that they need to deal with it comprehensively.

Greg Sargent’s Plum Line considers “How GOP convention chaos could help Clinton win the White House” and notes that “convention craziness could conceivably hurt the GOP in two ways. First, it could create impressions of a party in chaos even as Clinton (should she win the nomination) begins laying out her general election agenda. Second, even if that blows over, intra-GOP bitterness and recriminations could continue to divide the GOP after the convention has come and gone.”
At Rothenblog Nathan Gonzales reports that Democrats blew a good chance for a pick-up of a U.S. House seat (VA-2) — by failing to field a candidate. Please explain, Virginia Democratic Party.
Could this be the beginning of a right to left party-switching trend? Read “Kirk goes full RINO to save Senate seat” by Seung Min Kim and Bergess Everett at Politico.
The American Legislative Exchange Council has been extremely effective in blocking and undermining needed progressive reforms, like early voting, environmental protection, greater Obamacare access and a modest minimum wage increase, to name just a few causes they have blocked with ‘template’ legislation in the nation’s state legislatures. If you google for a few minutes, you can find some good print reports on ALEC here, here and here, for example. And here is a list of ALEC’s member corporations, and here is a list of companies that have quit ALEC, mostly because of public pressure.
Yet, overall, the mainstream media, particularly television news, has failed to adequately educate the public about the destructive effects of this secretive organization. There are a few exceptions. In national media, Moyers & Company has an excellent 1-hour report on ALEC’s agenda and effects. One exemplary exception at the local level is chief investigative reporter Brendan Keefe of ’11-Alive,’ an Atlanta NBC affiliate. Credit Keefe with a gutsy effort to inform the public about ALEC’s activities in this video:

John Oliver gets medieval on ALEC and does a great job of informing his audience in this short clip. And here’s a good example of a media-savvy citizen’s creative video clip on ALEC, which delves more extensively into ALEC’s issues and activities:

American Prospect Senior Editor Eliza Newlin Carney explains why “Chaotic Primaries Signal Voting Trouble Ahead.” Her lede: “If the long lines, ballot shortages, technical glitches, and poll-worker errors plaguing this year’s presidential primaries are any indication, Election Day 2016 could prove mighty chaotic…the polling place breakdowns in recent primaries, which have drawn just under 30 percent of voters, bode poorly for a general election that is expected to feature double that level of turnout.”
Sanders supporters, please take note: Bernie and Jane Sanders will vote for Clinton, if she is nominated. “If Bernie wins, hopefully Secretary Clinton’s supporters will support him,” says Ms. Sanders. “and if she wins we hope our supporters will support her.” It would be good if both candidates affirmed that they would not only “support” the other Democratic candidate; they would also campaign vigorously for the Democratic nominee. A spirit of Democratic unity at the top could help down-ballot candidates.
At Democratic Underground a poster named “eridani” notes that “Ironically, in 2008 it was Clinton supporters vowing to stay home–or vote for John McCain–if Obama became the nominee. At the time, that same HuffPo columnist warned that “balkanized Democrats could give the White House to John McCain.” That May, primary exit polls found less than half of Hillary Clinton’s supporters in Indiana and North Carolina saying they’d consider voting for Obama in the general election. Even in early July, after Obama had secured the nomination, only 54 percent of Clinton backers said they planned to vote for him…Those self-described “PUMAs”–“party unity my ass”–may have stayed home by the dozens that November, but at the end of the day nine out of 10 Democrats supported Obama in an election that featured the highest turnout in 40 years. A similar dynamic played out with Howard Dean supporters in 2004.”