In his insightful post “Black Democrats Want To See Bigger, Earlier Voter Turnout Efforts,” Darren Sands notes at BuzzFeed News, “Many of the political committees and campaigns seem to be a standstill when it comes to planning and moving money into programs that will turnout base democratic voters,” Quentin James, a Democratic strategist said. “Coming out of the 2012 cycle, we saw African-American voters cast ballots at a higher rate than white voters for the first time. I’m not a rocket scientist, but it seems a smart strategy would be to double down on turning out that demographic.”…”People are tired of the last-minute money,” one well-connected Democrat said, alluding to a trend in recent years to put resources into black outreach beginning in the fall. “That is a huge concern and they don’t want that. They want see that early investment. It needs to happen on the ground and now.”
Catastrophoic visions and squirmage epidemic in GOP over Trump’s doubling down on Latino-bashing.
But Trump’s attack against Judge Curiel may be more about creating a distraction from his growing fear that the ‘Trump University’ scandal can get even uglier, as the press uncovers the outrageous details, notes Heather Digby Parton at salon.com.
“Top Republicans in the state legislature are seeking to block Mr. McAuliffe’s sweeping order, which re-enfranchised 206,000 Virginians who have completed sentences, probation or parole. Last week, the Supreme Court announced a special session to hear arguments in July — in time to rule before the November election…Still, race is a powerful subtext; African-Americans make up 19 percent of Virginia’s population, but 45 percent of those covered by the governor’s order. The Sentencing Project, a Washington research organization, says one in five African-Americans in Virginia cannot vote because of felony convictions…But what Mr. McAuliffe granted, the Virginia Supreme Court may now take away.” – from Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s NYT article, “Virginia at Center of Racially Charged Fight Over the Right of Felons to Vote.”
Significant pros and cons about this idea. But keeping Biden close makes a lot of sense.
Politifact says “For median income, we found that 95 of the 100 poorest counties were located in red states” and “For percentage of residents in poverty, we found that 93 of the 100 poorest counties were in red states.” In the spirit of false equivalence, Politifact adds stretchy yada yada about Republicans doing well in rural areas and these counties being poor way back when the states were Democratic, but the fact nonetheless remains that Republican dominated state government has utterly failed to reduce poverty in these areas.
At The Atlantic Michelle Cottle explains why “There’s No Escaping the Top of the Ballot,” and notes “The level of split-ticket voting between the presidential race and races in the House and Senate is down to about 5 percent at this point,” said Richard Pildes, a law professor at NYU who has written on the nationalization of U.S. elections. Getting that number up much higher, predicted Pildes, “will be like pushing a boulder up a hill.”
Well, this is encouraging: “Senate Democrats are doing everything they can to link candidates in swing states to Trump, launching their “Party of Trump” campaign in March aimed at vulnerable GOP incumbents. The DSCC has reserved about $50 million worth of television airtime in the fall to hammer that message home,” reports Alexander Bolton at The Hill.
Will violence at demonstrations against Trump help him? Jose A. DelReal and Sean Sulivan address the concern at the Washington Post.

Intrepid poll-watchers have been waiting for the much-revered Field Poll to come out before laying any bets on next Tuesday’s California Democratic presidential primary. It’s now out, and I wrote about the findings at New York as soon as it was available.

Clinton has led in all 18 public polls of California taken this year, and still leads in the RealClearPolitics polling average by six points (49-43). But the much-awaited final poll by the Field Organization, probably the most respected public-opinion operation in the country, shows Sanders pulling to within the margin of error, with Clinton hanging on to a 45-43 lead.
The coalitions put together by the two candidates are very familiar to anyone following the Democratic race. Sanders is running up big margins among under-30 voters (75-15) and to a lesser extent registered independents (54-27), while Clinton is dominating among over-65 voters (56-28) and holding a healthy lead among registered Democrats (49-40). Clinton’s traditional strength among minority voters is ebbing a bit; she leads among African-Americans (57-36) and Latinos (46-42), but trails Sanders among Asian-Americans (34-47), who represent a higher percentage of the likely primary electorate (11 percent) than do black voters (9 percent). Clinton actually leads overall among non-Latino white voters 44-43, probably a tribute to the relatively advanced age of white voters. There’s the usual gender gap as well, and it, too, is strongly influenced by age: Sanders leads among under-40 men by 71-19, while Clinton leads among women over 40 by 57-29. Regionally, Clinton is ahead in Los Angeles County and the Central Valley, while Sanders’s top regions are the San Francisco Bay and the Central Coast.
Since Field showed Clinton’s lead in April at a slim 47-41 margin, there aren’t any big late trends apparent, other than a Sanders surge among Asian-Americans. Of the 23 percent who reported having already voted by mail by the last week of May, Clinton has a nine-point (47-38) lead, which is almost certainly explained by the higher propensity of older voters to vote by mail. Field estimates that two-thirds of the vote will ultimately be cast by mail, which is actually a bit less than in the 2014 primary.
Overall, Field’s two-point Clinton margin matches that of another late-May poll released Wednesdayday, from NBC-Wall Street Journal-Marist; PPIC had the same finding last week.
Certainly the perception is that Sanders has the momentum, although you have to wonder if his heavy dependence on younger voters makes further gains difficult. And there’s really zero evidence that Bernie is on the brink of the kind of big landslide victory he needs to cut deeply into Clinton’s pledged-delegate lead.

The two big takeaways from recent polling of California are this: despite all the talk about HRC’s strength among nonwhite voters and Bernie’s strength among white voters, the two candidates are running just about dead even in both categories, basically because age is dominating every other demographic “split.” And so long as they are running pretty much even, a win for Bernie Sanders won’t cut much ice except as a matter of symbolism.

Hillary Clinton turned a corner in San Diego yesterday. She opened up a fierce, broadside attack on Donald Trump that left the GOP’s presidential nominee-apparent sputttering weak cheap shots and resembling a schoolyard bully who just got a fat shiner from a kid half his size.
Clinton’s speech was a genuine masterpiece. It was exceptionally well-written, and brilliantly-delivered. Here it is:

Few who saw Clinton’s speech would doubt that she is more than tough enough to win a one-on-one battle with Trump. She accomplished what President Carter tried and failed to do in 1980 — portray his GOP adversary as dangerously unprepared to conduct U.S. foreign policy and serve as commander in chief.
Credit Clinton’s staff with an impressive job of crafting her speech. Even the optics were compelling, with Clinton delivering her address in front of 19 U.S. flags. Everything about her presentation conveyed the impression that this is a candidate for president who has the gravitas, maturity, judgement and work ethic Americans want in the White House, in very stark contrast to Donald Trump. As Clinton put it in lacerating comments about Trump in her speech:

“He is not just unprepared — he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility,” Clinton said…This isn’t reality television. This is actual reality,” Clinton said as she chided the real estate mogul and political novice for his lack of experience on the world stage.
“He says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Russia…The stakes in global statecraft are infinitely higher and more complex than in the world of luxury hotels…He believes we can treat the U.S. economy like one of his casinos and default on our debts to the rest of the world, which would cause an economic catastrophe far worse than anything we experienced in 2008”

As AP’s Julie Pace observed, “Gone was the wonky, meandering policy speech Clinton has delivered to lukewarm reviews in primary campaign appearances. Instead, she was focused and direct, lacing her remarks on the Islamic State group and Iranian nuclear accord with bumper sticker-worthy slogans about Trump.”
Stephen Collinson and Dan Merica noted at CNN Politics, “She attempted to convince voters that Trump’s ideas are a mix of “bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.” She lambasted his “bragging” approach to foreign policy based on a string of “nasty tweets” and accused him of harboring a “bizarre” affinity for authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Communist rulers of China and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.”
“It wasn’t just an incredibly well written speech, it was arguably Clinton’s most compelling public moment of the entire campaign so far,” said Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of NDN, a Democratic think tank,” quoted in Alex Sewitz-Wald’s nbcnews.com post, “Did Clinton Just Finally Figure Out How to Hit Trump?”
Until now, Trump has pretty much dictated presidential campaign news coverage with his daily barrage of tweets, insults and half-baked pronouncements. Clinton’s speech changes that dynamic, challenges the media to provide more thoughtful coverage and shames Republicans who are cowering in Trump’s shadow. She also eloquently challenges American voters to do some serious thinking about what kind of nation and world they want for their families, and to face the danger presented by the Republican’s nominee.

Melanie Trottman and Brody Mullins report at The Wall St. Journal on the labor movement’s efforts to challenge Trump’s inroads with a key constituency: “Unions spend heavily to support Democrats in elections and wield great influence over whether their members support those candidates. But labor leaders fear many of their members could be drawn to Mr. Trump. Merged Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling data from the first four months of the year show that among white union households, support is split evenly between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton, at 44% each, in a potential general-election matchup…The AFL-CIO is preparing an education campaign to highlight some of Mr. Trump’s statements–such as that wages are too high–and lesser-known things about how he has run his businesses and treated employees, said Mike Podhorzer, political director of the nation’s largest federation of labor unions…More than half of the collective membership in AFL-CIO unions identify as Democrat, while about one-third identify as Republican and the rest as independent. The latter group is the one organized labor is most concerned about.”
Greg Sargent’s “Can Trump ride white anger into the White House? A new analysis suggests it’s a fantasy” at The Plum Line all but shreds one of the Trump campaign’s most treasured myths.
WaPo’s Ed O’Keefe and Mike DeBonis take a look “Inside Democrats’ Trump-fueled scramble to take back the House.” Most credible observations: “It’s unlikely that Democrats win back the House, but we can’t completely rule it out,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor of the Rothenberg & Gonzales political report. “Donald Trump puts enough volatility into the national political environment that we have to keep an open mind to lots of different scenarios. Gonzales anticipates that Democrats will gain at least 10 more seats, but he said that picking up the 30 needed for the majority will be “a challenge.”…House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) boasted recently that she thinks she could reclaim the speaker’s gavel. If the election were held today, she said, “We would win. We would pick up more than the 20, we could get to the 30. But it’s not today.”…Privately, some Democrats say the party waited too long to find potential candidates.”
At nasdaq.com Marshall Gittler explains why “Dollar, US Economy, Stocks: They All Do Better Under Democrats.” National Democratic leadership really ought to make an ad using the numbers Gittler offers.
At cnbc.com Jake Novak opines about “The three biggest mistakes Hillary Clinton is making right now,” including: “1. She’s taking a dive off of the platitude plateau…2. She’s letting Trump drive the agenda…3. She’s not breaking with President Obama… on ANYTHING.”
Paul Singer’s “USA TODAY VP Power Rankings: Kaine tops the list for Clinton’s running mate” features the picks of a panel of 20 political observers.
Republicans don’t just depend on voter suppression; They brag about it.
Zachary Roth’s msnbc.com post “In Ohio, battle rages over access to voting” provides an update on GOP suppression in a key state for Democrats.
Weather wonks predict high voter turnout in CA, NJ primaries on Tuesday.

There’s been some buzz in connection with Hillary Clinton’s big speech tomorrow on foreign policy that she may aim her pitch at “responsible Republicans” who fear entrusting Donald Trump with the nuclear codes, much less putative “leadership of the free world.” But there’s a problem with the usual centrist strategy in this particular year, as I discussed today at New York:

The rapid and overwhelming consolidation of the Republican rank and file behind Trump is the first big story of the general-election campaign to come, and the most obvious reason for his suddenly strong standing against Clinton in early general-election trial heats. Unlike other “noises” from such polls, this isn’t a finding anyone should necessarily dismiss as “too early.” After all, self-identified Republicans are the voters most likely to have paid close attention to Trump and what he does and does not stand for during the primary season. Yet for all the high-profile (if quickly shrinking) elite Republican resistance to Trump, actual voters seem to be emphatically over all that.
The degree of rank-and-file consolidation behind Trump was nicely dramatized today by Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight, who compares Trump’s level of support (excluding third-party candidates) among self-identified Republicans to that of other non-incumbent GOP candidates a month after they secured the nomination. Trump’s at 85-7 against Hillary Clinton. That’s slightly better than George W. Bush in 2000 (83-7), and significantly better than Poppy Bush in 1988 (81-13) or Bob Dole in 1996 (79-18). But here’s the shocker: Trump’s doing better initially among Republicans than St. Ronald Reagan in 1980 (74-14)! The only nominee with higher early GOP support than Trump is Mitt Romney (87-6), who also benefited from the hyperpolarized atmosphere of the Obama presidency.
The general consensus of analysts is that Hillary Clinton has lost her polling lead over Trump because he’s already unified the GOP, while she’s still struggling to put out the Bern. If so, does it make a lot of sense for her to devote a major speech to exploiting a rift in the Republican ranks that no longer exists? I don’t think this strategy is terribly consistent with what she needs to do to unify her own party, particularly Sanders supporters who are not comfortable standing on the common ground Clinton shares with “responsible Republicans” (which once included, lest we forget, support for the Iraq War).
Maybe the Clinton campaign has unpublished evidence that she can reopen the divisions of the competitive Republican primaries via her own efforts. If not, she might want to avoid any conspicuous “move to the center” toward a party united in antipathy toward her and her party, particularly since any overt maneuvering could reinforce doubts about her honesty and constancy that are probably her biggest problem.

I’ll probably have my own card-carrying “centrist” credentials pulled for saying all this, but that’s how I see it at this moment. Another year might be totally different, and it’s also possible Trump will do something so egregious as to squander the rank-and-file GOP unity he currently enjoys.

In his Huiffpo post “Can Democrats Avoid the Circular Firing Squad?,” Robert Kuttner, cofounder and co-editor of The American Prospect discusses one scenario for an upset win of the Democratic nomination:

…Hillary Clinton could still lock up the nomination by the last primaries on June 14, but not without relying on super-delegates. Here are the numbers:
Clinton has 1,769 pledged delegates won in caucuses and primaries, out of 2,310 delegates required for nomination. There are 913 yet to be awarded in the last round of primaries. To go over the top before the convention, not counting super-delegates, Clinton needs to win 541 more delegates, or well over half. But with Sanders surging nearly everywhere, that seems extremely unlikely.
So the state of play after the six states vote June 7 (DC votes June 14, but has only 20 delegates) is likely to show Clinton with 50 to 100 votes short, Sanders with momentum, and the Sanders campaign mounting a last ditch effort to persuade most of the 712 super-delegates (541 of whom have already declared for Clinton) to reconsider, on the premise that Sanders has the better shot at beating Trump.

I’ll leave it to others to analyze this delegate math. But the nightmare scenario for Democrats would be if one of the two candidate wins the popular vote majority, while the other wins the delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. No matter which candidate is nominated under those circumstances, it would be tainted, perhaps fatally.
It is the popular vote that confers moral legitimacy on a candidate. That’s one reason why the Bush II presidency will always be viewed as a failure of democracy, and one which led to horrific consequences.
If Clinton wins the popular vote but loses the nomination, many of her supporters will call it out as yet another example of systemic denial of women’s rights, and not a few will stay home on election day. Some may even write her in.
If Sanders wins the popular vote, but not the necessary delegates, many of his supporters may stay home on election day, vote for a write-in or third party candidate or, worse, support Trump as a protest.
Either one of these “winning ugly” scenarios will cast the dark shadow of the ‘Dems in Disarray’ narrative over the election, and dramatically reduce the possibility of a Democratic victory. It would almost certainly gut hopes for a Democratic landslide that extends down ballot.
It’s possible that separate winners of the Democratic popular vote in the primaries and delegates would not necessarily lead to a Trump presidency, and that a Democrat could win. Trump in the White House is such a frightening prospect, that a Democratic nominee just might be able to win without having first won a majority of the party’s primary votes. But that’s a pretty high-stakes gamble.
At present Clinton leads Sanders by about 3 million popular votes. It would be a tall order for Sanders to finish with more popular votes in the Democratic primaries, but it could happen. He has some momentum.
But, if Sanders and Clinton made a mutual pledge to ask their delegates to support the candidate who wins the most popular votes when the primaries and caucuses are all finished, it would affirm the Democratic Party’s commitment to democracy and enhance Democratic voter solidarity. it would show that both Democratic candidates support the will of the people over super delegate politics.
It’s really not such a radical idea. The super delegate system is a train wreck in waiting. It should be dumped at the earliest opportunity. But both candidates can render it harmless right away with a popular vote pact that doesn’t require a rules change.
Polls indicate that Sanders and Clinton can both beat Trump, assuming Democrats unify behind their nominee. A popular vote pact between them could promote Democratic unity. It’s a good choice both Democratic candidates can make with little or no downside, and the timing is about right.

If you have been wondering how much of the conflict between supporters of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders is Republican-inspired, you are not alone. There does seem to be a fair amount of internet jabber which appears to be designed to foment conflict between their followers. For example, Gideon Resnick reports in his post, “Trump Trolls Plot to Bait Bernie and Hillary Into Twitter Wars” at The Daily Beast:

“Let’s troll Bernie and Hillary supporters systematically,” the 4Chan thread on a recent weekend in May read.
The plan was simple: get a bunch of people to create pro-Bernie Sanders and pro-Hillary Clinton accounts and go to war on Twitter. The sham accounts would use hashtags to slander the opposite candidate and try to rile up die-hard fans into saying accusatory things to the supporters on the other side. The goal was to create more divisions and somehow use it to help Donald Trump gain more support.
“We need to take advantage of this,” the author of the original post wrote. “This is Trump’s gift. If we’re serious about a Trump presidency we need to start infiltrating their conversations in order to sow more divison. I’m talking systematic and long-term /mischief/, not just a hew [sic] minutes trolling dumbass SJW’s (social justice warriors).”

This particular scam didn’t end so well, since no new threads were launched by it, the stated goal of its proponent. There are other thinly-disguised Republican trolls foraging around on social media, as Resnick notes, quoting a Sanders supporter:

“Dear Admins (or whoever else wants to see what the other side is doing to troll us)… These idiots created a website on specific strategies to troll us,” Tam L. Cocar wrote, referring to the thread in the “Bernie Believers” Facebook group. “Unfortunately, a lot of it seems too familiar as of late. So if you have hours to waste to see how elaborate their trolling strategy has become (they seem deluded enough to fancy themselves as 007 types), please do. Why some moron would post this without the site being password protected I don’t understand.”

Very few Clinton or Sanders supporters take the bait. As Eric Varney, who runs a pro-Sanders Facebook page, explains of another troll ploy:

“An attempt like this would only work with people who are uneducated about the political system and do not know how to debate civilly,” Varney told The Daily Beast. “Neither the majority of Clinton or Sanders supporters are stupid. There are ignorant people on both sides who would fight the wind if it whistled wrong. But that’s the nature of social media.”

Those who are too time-challenged to noodle around on Twitter may notice suspicious posts on Facebook and other social media. Much of it reflects the civility of an unusually-immature jr. high school student. But Dems should probably assume that there are more sophisticated trolls out there trying to juice up divisions between the Sanders and Clinton campaigns.
“Let’s you and her fight” trolls are likely wasting their time, since most Sanders and Clinton supporters are well-aware that their common adversary – the Trump campaign – would like nothing better than to divide Democrats. They recognize that Trump represents a radical departure from progressive values and his defeat should be the top priority for all Democrats after the convention.
None of this is to deny that there that there are some strongly-felt differences on key issues, independent of trollage, that need to be resolved by the two Democratic campaigns. Few supporters of Secretary Clinton or Senator Sanders are going to be provoked by any of it, though both camps are wise to keep an eye out for GOP trolls who are trying to amp up the bickering between them.

In “Can Donald Trump Win? These Battleground Regions Will Decide,” Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns, Trip Gabriel and Fernando Santos focus on “the four regions likely to decide the presidency — Florida, the upper Southeast, the Rust Belt and the interior West.”
Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg explains how “Clinton can crush Trump with one message” and notes, “Her most powerful message against Trump might be a non-ideological one: His lack of knowledge, seriousness and impulse control make him too dangerous to put in the presidency…That strategy would have room for many specific criticisms of him that fit within the overall message of his unfitness. Instead of presenting his $11 trillion tax cut as a typical right-wing scheme, for example, she could tie it together with his speculation about defaulting on the debt and suggest that he is far more reckless than normal conservatives. (His encouragement of other countries to get nuclear weapons also illustrates this point.) And she would have to outsource some potential attacks to others. Calling Trump a “fascist,” for example, would make her rather than him look wild-eyed.”
At Politico David S. Bernstein explores an unlikely scenario, “How Hillary Loses: Donald Trump can actually win if Clinton makes these four mistakes. Spoiler alert: She’s already making all of them.” In his summation graph, Bernstein says “…Trump survives a Latino surge in the South and West; Clinton fails to bring home young voters in the Southeast and Midwest; Libertarians give Trump a foothold in the Northeast; the Rust Belt puts the nail in the coffin–and with somewhere between 274 and 325 electoral votes…” Lots of stretchwork there, and Bernstein does acknowledge that “it’s also possible Clinton wins in a landslide.”
“Pennsylvania and Michigan have voted Democratic in every election since 1988. (Ohio is a swing state, of course, so that’s a bit more realistic.) Central to Trump’s argument is that he’ll increase turnout and support from working-class white voters, enough to counteract votes from heavily Democratic (and less-white) parts of each state…On Thursday, Bloomberg Politics released a poll that cast some doubt on that happening. Pollster Purple Strategies surveyed voters in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan who earn between $30,000 and $75,000 a year — what they call “middle income.” Their choice for president? Hillary Clinton, by 7 points…..the numbers in the Bloomberg survey are not what Trump needs — by a wide margin — if he’s to sweep the Rust Belt or even pick off a couple of states.” – from Philip Bump’s “A new poll has bad news for Donald Trump in the Midwest” at The Fix.
And Dan Balz chucks in a sobering reminder at Washington post Politics that “The methodology of all types of polls is under challenge. There is a serious and urgent debate underway among public opinion researchers about the way forward…For the rest of us, the exchanges lead to common points of agreement, all of which might seem obvious but should not be forgotten. Don’t put too much emphasis on any single poll. Look closely at averages of groups of polls to determine whether there are real shifts in the race. And don’t expect polls to predict the future.”
But this kind of poll ought to be instructive: “Only eight percent of Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in the Republican Party, and 15 percent – in the Democratic Party. Similarly, just 29 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans have any confidence in their own political parties,” notes a new poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Despite the edge Dems have here, when 70 percent of Democratic respondents in a poll say they lack confidence in their party, not doing anything to boost the party’s image, instead of just promoting candidates, indicates negligent leadership. Where, for example, are the ads showing Democratic accomplishments?
Yet another example of frustrating and hard to understand Democratic weakness in a state that ought to be trending purple: “Democrats hold a small minority in the Missouri House with 45 members, and in 66 of the chamber’s 163 districts no Democrats have filed to run. Republicans, with 117 members, have a supermajority and could maintain it with wins in at least 43 contested races. It needs to win only 16 to maintain a majority.” Pathetic.
Kate Stringer reports a little good news from Washington state: “Washington CAN, along with the Washington Environmental Council, recently completed an experiment on how door-to-door canvassing affected voter turnout in south Seattle, which has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the county–as well as some of the highest diversity…The precincts they canvassed are more than 50 percent people of color. The group found that 82 percent of registered voters who consistently voted over the last three years in these neighborhoods identify as White. The experiment, named Operation Spectra, moved chronic nonvoters–or people who hadn’t voted in the eight most recent major elections–to vote in the November 2015 election 13.7 percent higher than other diverse precincts Washington CAN used as a control group…Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College, has conducted dozens of studies on canvassing and is co-author of the book Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns. Her past experiments failed to sway chronic nonvoters. “If [this trend] repeats, then it’s a huge change to what political scientists know about mobilizing nonvoters,” Michelson says.”
Tobias Konitzer, a Ph.D. candidate in communication at Stanford University and David Rothschild is an economist at Microsoft Research present some intertesting (and wonky) findings at The Monkey Cage in their post, “New polls show that more Americans prefer Democrats’ policies.” As the authors conclude, “The general population is much more aligned with Democratic rather than Republican positions. For five issues, the Democratic position is much more popular than either the neutral or the Republican position. Those include increased taxes on high earners, legalizing abortion in cases of rape and incest, having anti-discrimination laws for sexual orientation, federally mandating that businesses offer maternity leave and increased gun control measures…For two issues, the Democratic position and the neutral position are equally popular: whether the government should try to reduce income inequality and whether global warming exists…American voters are decidedly neutral on two issues associated with Republicans: reducing Medicare costs by giving vouchers to subscribers and curtailing government regulations…But they agree with the Republicans on two issues: reducing immigration and considering military options to deal with Iran.”

Was your world rocked by the State Department IG’s report on Hillary Clinton’s email? I didn’t think so. But interpretations varied, and not innocently, as I observed at New York yesterday:

For Republicans and other Hillary haters, it was a huge, shocking blow to the already-reeling presumptive Democratic nominee, portending a long slide toward ignominious defeat in November. Indeed, Donald Trump thought it was such a big deal that he started speculating that Democrats would soon dump her for Joe Biden. For most left-leaning observers who aren’t Hillary haters, it was, in Josh Marshall’s eloquent assessment, a “nothingburger.”
But then there are the reactions of supposedly objective major media organizations. The New York Times‘ Amy Chozick offered this reaction to the IG report:

[A]s the Democratic primary contest comes to a close, any hopes Mrs. Clinton had of running a high-minded, policy-focused campaign have collided with a more visceral problem.
Voters just don’t trust her.
The Clinton campaign had hoped to use the coming weeks to do everything they could to shed that image and convince voters that Mrs. Clinton can be trusted. Instead, they must contend with a damaging new report by the State Department’s inspector general that Mrs. Clinton had not sought or received approval to use a private email server while she was secretary of state.

Now, as it happens, there is at best limited evidence that voters don’t care about Hillary Clinton’s policy positions because they are transfixed by her lack of trustworthiness. Voters who don’t like a candidate for whatever reason are usually happy to agree with pollsters and reporters who offer negative information about the candidate as an explanation. So what Chozick is doing is arguing that her perception of perceptions about Clinton make every bit of news about the email story highly germane and more important than all the policy issues in the world.
A somewhat different reaction to the IG report came from the Washington Post, which editorially hurled righteous thunderbolts at Clinton:

The department’s email technology was archaic. Other staffers also used personal email, as did Secretary Colin Powell (2001-2005), without preserving the records. But there is no excuse for the way Ms. Clinton breezed through all the warnings and notifications. While not illegal behavior, it was disturbingly unmindful of the rules. In the middle of the presidential campaign, we urge the FBI to finish its own investigation soon, so all information about this troubling episode will be before the voters.

This is beneath a headline that reads: “Clinton’s inexcusable, willful disregard for the rules.”
Words like “inexcusable” suggest that Clinton has all but disqualified herself from the presidency. But if the FBI disagrees, as most everyone expects, then the Post will have done yeoman’s service for that other major-party presidential nominee, and his effort to brand Clinton as “Crooked Hillary.”
Concerns about Donald Trump rarely if ever descend to the level of digging around in hopes of discovering patterns of “reckless” behavior or “willful disregard for the rules.” That’s because he’s reckless every day, and willfully disregards not only “the rules” but most other previously established standards of civility, honesty, and accountability. Yes, voters don’t entirely trust Clinton. But a bigger concern ought to be that Trump fans credit him for “telling it like it is” when the man is constantly repeating malicious gossip, lunatic conspiracy theories, ancient pseudo-scandals, and blatant falsehoods.
Yet we are drifting into a general election where important media sources seem to have decided that Clinton violating State Department email protocols and Trump openly threatening press freedoms, proudly championing war crimes, and cheerfully channeling misogyny and ethnic and racial grievances are of about the same order of magnitude. And that’s not to mention the vast differences between the two candidates on all those public-policy issues that Amy Chozick thinks voters have subordinated to questions of “trust.”
This is the kind of environment in which it becomes easy for a candidate like Trump to achieve “normalization” even as he continues to do and say abnormal things.

If the Sanders-Trump debate becomes a solid go, Hillary Clinton may want to reconsider her decision not to debate Sanders before the California primary and give the OK to a three-way debate that allows her to take on Trump.
Not participating gives her adversaries a free ad with millions of viewers. Neither Trump nor Sanders will miss the opportunity to attack Clinton. That will be the central focus of the debate, knocking off the front-runner. “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
If Clinton just criticizes the Trump-Sanders debate as a bad idea because it breaks precedent, and leaves it at that, she runs the risk of sounding like an ossified traditionalist who can’t cope with change. The spin doctors will pin the “sour grapes” and “scardy cat” labels on her, and in this crazy election year, it just might stick.
Clinton participating in the debate would be better, even though it has a downside — it gives Trump a forum to bash Democrats and perhaps gain some credibility just by being the sole Republican underdog fighting a tag-team. Of course he could likely as not make an even bigger fool of himself.
The upside is Clinton is a strong debater. She will have to debate Trump in the near-future anyway, and she is already well-prepared to win that contest. Sanders will lose some of the stature he would have gotten in a one-on-one debate just by having Clinton on the stage and she has already demonstrated that she can hold her own in debates with him.
The wisest course for Sen. Sanders is to urge that Clinton be included in any debate with Trump. In that way he can look fair-minded and respectful of voters, whether or not she agrees to be in the debate.
It may be that the time is ripening for debates across party lines before the primaries are over. The parties won’t like it much, but it would make for a more engaging primary season. It might have been interesting, if for example, there were a series of one-on-one debates between various presidential candidates, such as Kasich-O’Malley, Trump-Clinton or Sanders-Cruz and other combinations. Those debates earlier on could add clarity to the policy differences between the parties. Coming so late, it just looks like a hail-Mary.