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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the killings in Minnesota and Louisiana and then the massacre in Dallas seized national attention, it looked for a while like Donald Trump was going to stomp all over his fellow Republicans’ efforts to keep the focus on the Clinton email saga as it began to slip away. I wrote about the implications for the general election at New York:

It’s been noted far and wide that Donald Trump has managed to use the extraordinary force of his personality to dominate several news cycles with discussion of possible anti-Semitic imagery in his Twitter feed, the sunny side of Saddam Hussein, and other distractions. This has to have been extremely frustrating to Republicans who very badly wanted these same news cycles to be all about Hillary Clinton’s emails and FBI director James Comey’s censorious language about her conduct.

But there’s more to this problem than the opportunity costs of missing a chance to damage HRC. Trump is extremely dependent on earned media, to an extent we haven’t seen in a modern presidential candidate. NBC’s First Read today did one of its periodic updates of paid-media expenditures from SMG Delta, both nationally and in battleground states. And it’s pretty shocking:

“[T]he Clinton campaign and its allies are currently outspending Trump and his supporting groups over the airwaves by a 15-to-1 margin, $45 million to $3 million. And in the nine battleground states — now including Pennsylvania — it’s a 46-to-1 margin, nearly $43 million to $929,000.”

Speaking of Pennsylvania, remember all of the recent talk about Clinton not paying enough attention to the Keystone State? She’s still outspending Trump on P.A. media by more than a five-to-one margin.

Now, maybe this lopsided situation will be redressed somewhat thanks to Trump’s purported new fundraising success. But the fact remains that the candidate himself appears to hold paid media in low regard as a campaign resource.

That’s all well and good, and many political scientists think the value of paid-media spending is overestimated in presidential general elections so long as one side doesn’t have unchallenged command of the airwaves, making the other helpless to stop the bombardment. But Trump needs to get a move on to meet that challenge. And even if he does, his residual and habitual reliance on earned media means message discipline is absolutely crucial to his odds of victory in what is already an uphill battle. In a general election, he’s not going to be able to blot out the sky with fascinated and often positive media attention the way he did during the primaries. So his apparent inability to know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em when it comes to commanding media attention is a real problem.

 

Patrick Healy reports at The New York Times that “Bernie Sanders Is Expected to Endorse Hillary Clinton Next Week.”

“Is the Working Class Really Furious at the Upper Middle Class?” asks Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. ” wouldn’t be surprised if members of the lower middle class are more resentful of elites today than they were in the past. But I’m awfully tired of hearing this asserted endlessly based on nothing much at all. Throw me a bone, folks. Give me some real evidence that the working class is angrier than it’s ever been. Anything will do. Polls. Surveys. NSA wiretaps. Something—other than the fact that Donald Trump has a following among a group of Republican voters who have been mad at the eggheads forever and mad at Democrats ever since the Civil Rights Act was passed. What have you got?”

“My independence is pretty clearly demonstrated when I de-endorsed Donald Trump,” the Illinois Republican told a local radio station. “I felt Donald Trump was too bigoted and racist for the land of Lincoln.” – from Jordain Carney’s post, “GOP senator touts break from Trump” about Sen. Mark Kirk’s 180 degree flip-flop on Trump at The Hill. Political observers believe Democratic candidate Rep. Tammy Duckworth has an excellent chance to defeat Kirk in November.

Esther Yu-Hsi Lee reports that a “New Poll Reveals That Americans’ Anti-Immigrant Attitudes Are Fueled By Racism.” Lee notes “…According to the poll commissioned by Vox in partnership with Morning Consult, a nonpartisan media and technology company, American voters are worried about immigrants mostly because they have racialized fears of crime and terrorism…The poll, which looks at Americans’ views on immigrants from various countries, found that white Americans tend to have negative opinions about immigrants from non-European countries. They’re least positive about immigrants from the Middle East, and also hold negative views about immigrants from Latin America and Africa. At the same time, however, white Americans have a much more positive view of European immigrants and Asian immigrants.”

“Democrats Plan Early Attacks Tying G.O.P. Candidates to Trump” reports Alexander Biurns at The New York Times. Burns explains, “The attacks, set to air on cable television and online, are an unusually early effort to nationalize the battle for control of Congress. They target 10 incumbent Republican lawmakers in areas where Mr. Trump is expected to run poorly, including Denver, San Antonio and the Chicago suburbs…In one of two ads, the Democratic committee accuses Republicans of enabling a “bully” with “ideas that threaten our country’s security.”…“Republicans in Congress are just standing by him,” the ad says. “But shouldn’t they really be standing up to the bully?”

“Trump may be trailing in the polls,” writes Zachary Roth at NBC News, “and his cash-strapped campaign may be struggling to build a viable operation in key swing states. But the new wave of Republican-backed restrictions on voting — which look set to keep Democratic voters from the polls — could wind up being Trump’s ace in the hole if the race is close this fall. Tight voting laws also could boost the GOP in a host of House, Senate, governor, and state legislative races.

Greg Sargent sums it up succinctly at The Plum Line: “Trump’s con game is simple. He is trying to win over working class whites with anti-China, anti-free-trade bluster and a vow to crush the dark hordes who make them feel threatened culturally and economically, while simultaneously retaining just enough good will (via his other proposals) from GOP-aligned elites to remain the nominee and be competitive. This is not ideological heterodoxy. It’s a smorgasbord of policy ignorance and indifference, opportunism, making-it-up-on-the-fly, and of course, good old fashioned flim-flammery….Now, to be sure, Trump probably will win a sizable victory among working class whites. But it is also likely that he won’t be able to win among them by a large enough margin to offset countervailing demographic realities…”

Campaign for America’s Future’s Dave Johnson has more to say on this topic in his post, “Exposing Trump’s Trade Appeal to Working-Class Voters for What It Is” (reposted) at Alternet.

Also at Mother Jones, Patrick Caldwell rolls out the rationale for the play-it-safe Democratic running mate option: “He’s No One’s Idea of a Liberal Hero, But Tim Kaine Is a Natural Fit for Clinton: Behind the Virginia senator’s moderate reputation is a history of quiet progressive activism.”

An incident involving strange images on Twitter all but engulfed the Trump campaign this week.  I tried to go a little deeper than the usual interpretations in explaining it at New York.

It’s difficult to believe Donald Trump is anti-Semitic. For one thing, his adored daughter Ivanka is a convert to Judaism, out of solidarity with her Jewish husband. For another, as a New York–based business tycoon, Trump has interacted frequently and cordially with Jewish colleagues, employees, investors, politicians, and members of the news media throughout his career.

That’s all the more reason to puzzle over the weaselly reaction of Trump and his campaign to allegations one of his Twitter blasts at Hillary Clinton borrowed anti-Semitic imagery from one of Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters. Trump has gone to great lengths to claim that the image in question isn’t what it is, and has in general done everything other than the obvious: apologize for screwing up and forcefully disassociate himself with his alt-right fan club.

In a thorough examination of the incident, Matt Yglesias hit on an important insight about Trump that goes beyond anti-Semitism:

“Trump has not acted to distance himself in any way from the anti-Semitic behavior of his followers. There’s been nothing remotely in the vicinity of Barack Obama’s famous race speech from the 2008 campaign, and Trump has consistently appeared angrier about being criticized for ties to anti-Semites than about the anti-Semitism expressed by many of his fans.”

Some might associate this reluctance to admit error, apologize, and then move on to Trump’s narcissism — those who endlessly admire themselves in every mirror are not prone to see or admit flaws.

But there’s something else going on that makes Trump’s supporters share the same reluctance to say they are sorry. He’s developed a cult of “political incorrectness” in which any sensitivity to others’ feelings is considered weakness, and the impulse to apologize for offensive remarks or behavior is dismissed as a surrender to bullying by elites and their minority-group clientele.

In his long, sympathetic meditation on Trump’s supporters for the New Yorker, George Saunders noticed this same phenomenon:

“Above all, Trump supporters are ‘not politically correct,’ which, as far as I can tell, means that they have a particular aversion to that psychological moment when, having thought something, you decide that it is not a good thought, and might pointlessly hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore decline to say it.”

In other words, there’s a tendency in Trumpland to view what most of us consider common decency as “political correctness,” which is to be avoided at all costs, most especially when the opprobrium of liberal elitists is involved.  It’s no accident, then, that Trump sometimes seems to court the appearance of impropriety, and defend examples of rudeness, crudeness, and bigotry even when he’s not personally guilty of perpetrating them.

Trump did not invent this strange mindset, of course. Right-wing talk-radio types have made a living from baiting liberals and women and minorities and then inciting listeners to express umbrage at the resulting outrage. Trump’s former rival and current supporter Dr. Ben Carson could not go five minutes on the presidential campaign trail without attacking “political correctness” as the source of all evil and as a secular-socialist stratagem for silencing the Folks by shaming them….

To use a phrase beloved of Trump’s great predecessor in political sin George Wallace, the mogul does not “pussyfoot around” in offending his detractors and those people — the pushy feminists and entitled minorities whose very presence profanes America in the eyes of many Trump supporters. Trump tells it like it is, which means he is not inhibited by a civility that masks nasty but essential truths.

Inevitably, this nasty but essential explanation of Trump’s appeal will annoy supporters and enemies alike, who insist on ascribing purely economic motives to those who have lifted him so shockingly high in American political life. Sorry, but I don’t think uncontrollable rage at having to “press 1 for English” or say “Happy Holidays” can be explained by displaced anger over wage stagnation or the decline of the American manufacturing sector. As Saunders said in another of his insights into Trump supporters:

“[T]he Trump supporter might be best understood as a guy who wakes up one day in a lively, crowded house full of people, from a dream in which he was the only one living there, and then mistakes the dream for the past: a better time, manageable and orderly, during which privilege and respect came to him naturally, and he had the whole place to himself.”

Such a guy may well be old enough to remember a time when he and people just like him could behave as though they had America to themselves. Nowadays that gets you hostile looks, a rebuke from HR, a shaming from moral authorities, and sometimes worse. But Donald Trump will fight for your right to offend in your own damn country. And some offenders will love him for it.

 

 

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight post, “Election Update: Swing State Polls And National Polls Basically Say The Same Thing,” should give Dems reason for optimism, but not overconfidence. Here’s the scary graph:

Nonetheless, Trump’s overall position has improved slightly. He has a 22 percent chance to win the election according to the polls-only forecast, as compared with a 19 percent chance when we launched last Wednesday. And in polls-plus, which also accounts for economic conditions, his chances have improved to 29 percent from 26 percent.

Boo!

Yes, that’s right, Dems. One of the top analysts of political statistics rates Donald Trump’s chances of being elected President at better than one out of four and only slightly less than one out of three on the eve of the GOP convention. It could happen.

Imagine a range of unlikely, but not-out-of-the-question scenarios, like a stock market/401K meltdown, a brutal terrorist attack, Clinton hitting the banana peel, or Trump somehow starts listening to smarter advisors etc. Or a perfect storm of all of the above, and yes, it could get worse.

But don’t bet on it. Silver is not giving due consideration to unquantifiable factors like: the Democratic ad storm that is about to cover Trump with a tsunami of well-earned shame; nor the bizarre circus that the GOP convention is getting ready to present; nor the ad campaign introducing Hillary Clinton as a person of exceptional seriousness, accomplishments and actual likeability. And then there will be the debates, which will spotlight the intellect and temperament of the two candidates. Oh, and don’t forget the impressive competence and management of the Clinton campaign in stark contrast to that of her Republican rival. Weighing all of that, a Democratic landslide is far more likely than a Trump upset.

The takeaway from the rest of Silver’s nuanced analysis offers a much more optimistic picture of Clinton vs. Trump polling, and he notes that “Clinton’s state polls tell a stronger story for her than the national polls do.” Given the realities of political polarization in America, she is doing as well as could be expected in early July.

Still, shite sometimes happens. The worst thing would be for Democrats to drift into complacency and overconfidence. That’s the danger.

Instead, Democrats must create more of a sense of urgency and excitement about this election, less based on fear of Donald Trump in charge of the world’s economy and the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile than on the opportunity to secure a working majority for progressive change. We’re not likely to see a better one for a long time.

Let’s not settle for a Clinton victory and a modest Senate majority. That’s a recipe for continued gridlock and political frustration. What is needed is an explosion of grassroots Democratic activism, including  energetic voter registration, education and turnout campaigns of unprecedented intensity. For those who want a better future for their children and a better America, that’s the challenge of the hour.

Yesterday J. P. Green flagged a post by Sam Wang, an expert on probability statistics,  who pinpoints North Carolina as the only state he could rate a genuine toss-up at this political moment.

Today President Obama will join Hillary Clinton in Charlotte to help boost her campaign and see if they can move NC into the “leans Democratic” category. Obama won the state’s electoral votes in 2008, but lost it in 2012. In their Bloomberg.com post on the changing political views of educated white voters in the tarheel state, Margaret Talev, Jennifer Epstein and Gregory Giroux note that African Americans are expected to be about one in four NC voters in November.

Since 2012 the demographic winds have shifted in a slightly more favorable direction for NC Democrats. Perhaps even more significantly, the NC Republican establishment has made an awful mess of their prospects by cranking up hysteria on the transgender bathroom “issue” with the ‘HB2 law,’ which has cost the state significant business revenues and embarrassed NC residents.

Talev, Epstein and Giroux quote Morgan Jackson, a Raleigh consultant to the Clinton campaign, who notes the effect of the publicity and other trends favoring Clinton and the Democrats in NC, which also has a GOP governorship and Senate seat being contested:

…We are growing in a more diverse way, the electorate’s getting less and less white, and more urbanized, and more folks have college degrees. All those things are connecting together. And there’s a huge out-of-state migration into these areas. People move to where the jobs are.”

Meanwhile, Jackson said that that the HB2 law had “turned off all of suburbia” and represented “a big mistake” for Republicans. A number of artists, from Bruce Springsteen to Cirque du Soleil, nixed plans to perform in the state, while some, like Cyndi Lauper, said they would donate proceeds from their shows there to LGBT causes.

“It very quickly went from being about bathrooms, or even discrimination, to jobs and the state’s reputation nationally,” said Jackson. “Exactly the voters Trump needs to bring over not only are turned off by his rhetoric, but the water is poisoned by HB2.”

The authors also quote TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of major works on changing political demographics and political attitudes in the U.S., who sees Democrats making significant inroads with white educated voters: “The moment [Trump] became a serious candidate, it immediately presented itself as a hypothesis…” Further,

Texeira said Clinton isn’t expected to win a majority of the white, college-educated vote in North Carolina, and that she doesn’t have to to carry the state. He said she just needs to do better than Obama did in 2012, when he took about 30 percent of that vote. “If the minority vote’s very strong for Clinton and she can even do somewhat-less-bad among the white, college-educated vote, then that should be enough,” he said. “If she got 40 percent it’s almost a lock that she wins the state.”

The authors add that Clinton is now doing much better with white educated voters:

Recent national polls of registered voters show Clinton leading with college-educated whites, a group that Obama lost by 14 percentage points nationally in 2012 and by four points in 2008. The size of her advantage in late June varied from just one point in a Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey, to an eight-point edge in a Washington Post-ABC News poll, to 10 points in a Quinnipiac University survey.

…If the shift in the white, college-educated vote nationally holds in swing states, Texeira predicted Trump is “toast.” “Trump would have to carry the white, working class vote by something like 36 points or 40 points,” he said.

…White, college-educated voters could also help Clinton strengthen Democrats’ prospects in states like Colorado and Virginia, which rank No. 1 and No. 9, respectively, in a Bloomberg analysis of 2014 U.S. Census Bureau data that calculates the percentages of non-Hispanic whites age 25 or older who hold bachelor’s degrees or higher. They are 44.4 percent of the population in Colorado and 40.3 percent in Virginia.

The question is, can Trump offset Clinton’s inroads with educated white voters with equivalent or better performance with white voters who have less than a college education? Trump’s prospects are further diminished by Clinton’s clear edge with Latino voters in NC and other swing states.

Much depends on the respective voter turnout operations of the two campaigns. Given the signs of increasing disarray in Trump’s campaign and the impressive management displayed by the Clinton campaign, the smart money favors the Democrats.

Dave Weigel’s post at The Fix “Democrats have a bad habit of giving away Senate seats” should be required reading and thoroughly discussed by strategists in the Clinton campaign, as well as the DNC.

Sen. Sanders is calling on Clinton delgates to the Democratic convention to clarify their opposition to a vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the lame duck session of congress. Michael Edison Hayden reports at ABC News that “The Clinton campaign responded to ABC News’ request for comment by forwarding a recent statement the candidate made on TPP in response to criticisms from the Trump campaign: “Hillary Clinton opposes TPP today, she will oppose it in November, and she would not move it forward in January. Hillary Clinton has made clear that she is not interested in tinkering around the margins with TPP. As she has said repeatedly, she believes we need a new approach to trade that protects American jobs, raises incomes for American workers, and strengthens our national security.”

“The crown jewel of Obama’s machine, an email list of supporters that included 20 million addresses in 2012, is now fully available to Clinton. That list had been closely held within an Obama campaign committee that still exists to pay off old debt. Democratic groups and even Obama’s Organizing for Action nonprofit had to rent the list for a hefty sum…Now a copy of that list, which helped propel Obama to record-breaking fundraising, is controlled by the Democratic National Committee, which can send emails at will without going through Obama’s campaign…” — from Josh Lederman of the A.P.

Those who would like a little more political wonk with their morning coffee should try Sam Wang’s “The Presidential Meta-Analysis for 2016” at The Princeton Election Consortium. After analysing all of the data, Wang sees only one state, NC, in the toss-up category. Here’s one of his nifty graphics:

Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com is also providing data-driven updates in their feature, “Who will win the presidency?”

Economist Neil H. Buchanan makes a case at Newsweek that “Republicans Should Embrace a Hillary Clinton Presidency” and notes, “They will significantly increase their chances of winning in the future if they are seen as the party that is big enough to put partisanship aside in the best interests of the country…The entire political conversation would change from, “Wow, the Republicans are literally willing to do anything to win,” to an outpouring of plaudits for Republicans’ genuine patriotism.”

At The American Prospect Joshua Holland explains why it is unlikely that Hillary Clointon will move toward the political center to get elected. “..Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six elections, and in the past two they did it with what’s been called the “Rising American Electorate”—African Americans, Latinos, urban and suburban college-educated whites, and unmarried women. According to [Stan] Greenberg, those groups constituted 51 percent of voters in 2012, and he estimates that they’ll represent 53 percent of voters this year. But he also thinks that secular voters should be considered part of that new majority. Their inclusion, he says, expands the universe of voters who lean toward Democrats—and who are not moved by conservative messaging—to more like 64 percent of the electorate…“If they are consolidated and voting in large numbers, then that gives you a huge election,” says Greenberg. “For me, step one is to consolidate those voters and energize those voters, and if you look at the margin right now, many of the Sanders voters and many of the millennial voters have not yet consolidated. So [Clinton] has gains to be made by energizing that broad progressive base.”

Allie Yee crunches some numbers at Facing South and explains why “With deportation relief at stake, South’s Latinos could swing presidential race”

At Vox Caleb Lewis reports that “2 weeks out, and Trump’s convention is a total mess. Sad!” But at least it may not be as boring as the last couple of GOP quadrennial conventions, with all of the loons expected to participate.

Greg Sargent’s “The Plum Line Opinion: A Sanders endorsement of Clinton could still make a big difference” reports that a new battleground state poll from Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg’s Democracy Corps finds that “among likely voters in nine key battleground states, Clinton leads Donald Trump by eight points, 49-41.” Further,

…Trump’s Rust Belt strategy may be failing: In the aggregate of five of the states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire — Clinton leads by eight, 44-36. A second is that Clinton may be able to expand the map because she’s also doing well in the more diverse remaining states: In the aggregate of North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, Clinton also leads by eight, 47-39.

In addition, Sargent concludes that ” Sanders’ endorsement [of Clinton] could, in fact, still have a real impact, meaning he may still have some genuine leverage to try to win more concessions designed to continue pushing the party’s agenda in a more progressive direction.”

Sargent notes that, while 89 percent of Democrats in the nine states are already supporting Clinton,

…Peek below the toplines, and it’s clear there’s plenty of room for a Sanders endorsement to help Clinton. This becomes clear when you look at the breakdown of numbers among not just Clinton and Trump, but also with libertarian Gary Johnson factored in, because apparently, a lot of Sanders supporters are now going for Johnson.

The poll finds that among voters who supported Sanders in the primary in the nine battlegrounds polled, 69 percent support Clinton, while six percent back Trump and another 17 percent support Johnson. What’s more, among millennials, it’s even more stark: 46 percent support Clinton, 24 percent back Trump, and 22 percent support Johnson.

Sargent quotes Greenberg, who adds

“It’s quite possible that many Sanders voters and millennials may be identifying as independents…Millennials, and white millennials in particular, are still out there and have not consolidated behind her.”

“Of his vote, there’s still a significant bloc voting for the Libertarian Party,” Greenberg continues. “Ninety percent of Sanders voters should be voting for Hillary.” If Sanders were to succeed in consolidating his voters and millennials behind Clinton, Greenberg adds, “it could kick her lead into double digits.”

And a double-digit victory for Clinton in November, some political observers believe, would result in a wave election that would likely provide Democratic majorities in both houses of congress and many state legislatures now controlled by Repubicans.

A strong endorsement by Sanders, who has already stated he will vote for Clinton, could well make the difference between a Clinton victory checked by continued Republican obstruction in congress, and a Democratic landslide which launches a new era of progressive change that improves the lives of millions of Americans. Providing the leadership needed to achieve the latter result would make Sen. Sanders one of the most influential political figures of our times.

As we observed the beginnings of leadership fights in both of the UK’s major parties, it gave pause to some of the disputes we’ve been having over the presidential nominating process here, and particularly in the Democratic Party. I offered some compare-and-contrast notes at New York:

In the U.K., the party leaders (i.e., those who will compete to be prime minister in national elections) are chosen by dues-paying party members. The Tories charge 25 pounds a year — with lower rates for youth and military — and Labour has a standard monthly dues rate of 3.92 pounds, though the party recently created a cheaper “registered supporter” option at 3 pounds a year that carries with it the right to vote in leadership elections. The system also includes the equivalent of the U.S. Democratic Party’s “superdelegates.” Members of Parliament (the House of Commons, and in the Labour Party also Members of the European Parliament) determine the field for leadership contests by a nomination process; Tory MPs have the responsibility to narrow the field to two candidates before members get involved. In both parties, MPs can trigger a leadership contest by a vote of “no confidence” in the leader and then the nomination of one or more challengers. That’s the process currently in motion in the Labour Party, where Jeremy Corbyn will soon face a challenge and a new leadership election even though he has only been leader since September of last year.

While the left in the United States tends to oppose closed primaries at present, and the right tends to favor them, both left and right in the U.K. have their base in the dues-paying party membership. Indeed, the socialist Jeremy Corbyn won his leadership election — in an upset, yet by a landslide — on the basis of a big surge in party membership (and/or “registered supporter” membership), and it remains possible that he will hang on to his position in a second election despite the extraordinary and bitter opposition to him among Labour MPs and signs that his leadership and issue positions are not that popular with Labour voters or the new voters the party needs.

If the British system for nominating leaders seems, well, anti-democratic, it used to be far more restricted. Before 1998, Tory MPs completely controlled their party’s leadership contests. And before Gordon Brown proposed a new “one member, one vote” system for Labour in 2010, that party used an “electoral college” in which MPs had one vote, party affiliates (mostly unions) had one vote, and then party members had the final vote.

The more grassroots-y process now in use in the U.K. still gives short shrift to loyal voters who may not be well represented by either dues-paying party members or by MPs. All they can do is vote or not vote for the party as led or misled, and hope things get better. Such people really do have a bigger role in the U.S. system.

So count your blessings, Democrats. Your indie friends may have trouble voting in Democratic primaries in some states, but so far no one is asking any of you to pay for the privilege.

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball Alan I. Abramowitz, author of The Polarized Public: Why American Government is So Dyfunctional, addresses a question on the minds of many political observers: Could Trump’s unique candidacy produce “major shifts in the voting patterns that have characterized recent elections?”

Abramowitz taps into data from the 2016 American National Election Study Pilot Survey, which queried 1,200 eligible American voters between Jan. 22-28, 2016. Read the post to review his methodology, and then evaluate his conclusions.

Abramowitz sets out to determine whether Democratic and Republican voters “remain sharply divided” on economic, cultural and racial issues. He also analyses the ANES data to see if there were “substantial divisions on major issues between supporters of different candidates within each party and whether these intra-party divisions were larger or smaller than the inter-party divisions.”

Among his conclusions:

The largest difference between Clinton and Sanders supporters was not on economic issues, as one might have expected given Sanders’ focus on income inequality, but on cultural issues. This may reflect the fact that Sanders did best in this survey, as in just about every other national survey as well as exit polls of Democratic primary voters, among Democrats under the age of 30 — a group that tends to be somewhat more liberal than older Democrats on cultural issues. However, Clinton supporters were far more liberal on cultural issues than supporters of any Republican candidate.

Not surprisingly, given Trump’s frequent attacks on immigrants and his questioning of Barack Obama’s citizenship and patriotism, the largest difference between Trump supporters and supporters of other GOP candidates was on racial issues. Trump supporters scored significantly higher than other Republicans on our racial resentment scale. However, even supporters of other Republican candidates scored far higher on racial resentment than supporters of either Democratic candidate.

Getting down to numbers, Abramowit devises a “liberal-conservative issues scale,” which “runs from 0 to 10, with a score of 0 representing consistently liberal attitudes and a score of 10 representing consistently conservative attitudes.” He notes:

…On the Democratic side, 89% of Sanders supporters were located to the left of center as were 77% of Clinton supporters. The average score on the scale was 3.0 for Clinton supporters compared with 2.5 for Sanders supporters. On the Republican side, 81% of Trump supporters were located to the right of center as were 78% of supporters of other Republican candidates. The average score on the scale was 7.3 for Trump supporters compared with 7.1 for supporters of other Republican candidates.

Noting the polarization and straight-ticket voting that has characterized presidential elections in recent years, Abramowitz crunches the data into an “ANES feeling thermometer scale” and finds,

…Democrats gave Clinton an average rating of 71 degrees and Republicans gave Trump an average rating of 65 degrees. But the data show that Democrats and Republicans gave the opposing party’s frontrunner extremely negative ratings — Democrats gave Trump an average rating of only 19 degrees and Republicans gave Clinton an average rating of only 12 degrees. Supporters of both parties, but especially Republicans, disliked the opposing party’s frontrunner more than they liked their own party’s frontrunner — a phenomenon that reflects the prevalence of negative partisanship in the contemporary American electorate.

Comparing the voting patterns of 2016 in the data with the 2012 presidential election, Abramowitz finds  “an extremely high degree of consistency in group voting patterns between these two elections. There is a correlation of .99 — an almost perfect relationship — between Obama’s margin over Mitt Romney in the [CNN/ORC] 2012 exit poll and Clinton’s margin over Trump in the 2016 CNN/ORC poll across these voter groups.”

“Based on these findings,” concludes Abramowitz,  “voting patterns in the 2016 general election should closely resemble those seen in recent presidential elections.” For Democrats, that’s reason for optimism, not an excuse for apathy. For the challenge of 2016 is not only to win the white house, but also to build a wave election that can give President Clinton a working majority in congress and Democratic take-overs of state legislatures nationwide.