The New Yorker’s John Cassidy explains “What Bernie Sanders Has Achieved“:

…To gauge his influence, you need only listen to one of Clinton’s campaign speeches. On issues like inequality, trade, the environment, corporate offshoring, and bringing Wall Street miscreants to justice, the former Secretary of State has adopted Sanders’s language–and, in some cases, his policies. Clinton had undoubtedly always intended to run as a center-left progressive in 2016, just as she did in 2008, but Sanders has forced her onto ground she hadn’t originally intended to occupy.
It isn’t just Clinton, either. Even Republicans have been taking up some of Sanders’s themes. “The top one per cent under President Obama, the millionaires and billionaires that he constantly demagogued, earned a higher share for our national income than any year since 1928,” Ted Cruz said earlier this year. Donald Trump has talked about the need to raise taxes on hedge-fund managers and leveraged-buyout tycoons. John Kasich has rebranded himself as a champion for the poor and excluded. Of course, the regressive tax policies that Cruz, Trump, and Kasich are advocating would exacerbate inequality, rather than reduce it, but the fact that Republicans have felt obliged to address these issues at all surely owes something to Sanders and the populist wave that he represents.

Cassidy credits Sanders with doing more than any other candidate to raise the issue of money in politics, a growing concern with all demographic groups. It may be a while before the needed reforms to prevent further abuse are achieved. But when it finally occurs, Sanders will deserve some of the credit. Cassidy adds,

It’s too early to say what Sanders’s legacy will be, or whether some of the ideas that he is pushing–such as breaking up the big banks, introducing a single-payer health-care system, and returning tax rates on the rich closer to the levels that F.D.R. introduced–will eventually be adopted. Given the Republicans Party’s grip on Congress and the centrist mindset of Clinton’s advisers, it is hard to see much movement in this direction any time soon.
But it is also evident that, in the past ten months, Sanders has defied the pundits, alarmed the comfortable, and inspired the young. He has turned what looked to be a political coronation into a lively and hard-fought contest, forcing his opponent to modify her positions and raise her game. He has demonstrated that Presidential campaigns don’t have to be beholden to big donors…

Sanders’ path to victory has narrowed, considerably. But in a fragile political environment, there are several scenarios that could shift the political winds in his favor and lots of delegates are still available.
Many Democrats would like to see Sanders fold, so Clinton could save her money for the general election. But that benefit should be measured against the added credibility Clinton would have as a result of winning a hard-fought nomination — Sanders has killed the “coronation” rap the GOP hoped to pin on her. If Sanders quit now, the youth vote he has mobilized could evaporate into apathy.
More of consequence, Clinton’s policies have improved from being honed in the forge of competition with an adversary who has some popular positions. As an added benefit, she has also sharpened her debating skills. And if she picks Sanders for her running mate, she will likely get the benefit of a more unified party than would be available to her via the ‘coronation’ route.
Perhaps most importantly, concludes Cassidy, Sanders “has shown that, surprisingly enough, there is still a place in American politics for an independent-minded speaker of uncomfortable truths. What’s more, he isn’t done yet.” And that is likely a good thing for the Democratic Party.

At HuffPo Julia Sagebien writes about the politics underlying President Obama’s visit to Cuba: “…Senator Marco Rubio, a second-generation Cuban-American hard-liner, lost the Republican primary and retired from the race. On that day, for the first time since the ‘Triumph of the Revolution’, both Florida primaries were won by pro-engagement candidates (Trump and Clinton). With Florida on board, the electoral threat that made it nearly impossible for either party to ease the embargo in any significant manner – has been dealt a near mortal blow. The only contest left, if it comes to that, is a Ted Cruz vs. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fight…This new ‘friendship’ between Cuba and the U.S. (this is, after all, also a family visit with sightseeing, baseball games and a symbolic arrival on the first day of spring) is one of the few ‘feel good’ stories of the second decade of the 21st century. But despite high levels of approval and generalized cheer in both nations, there is still a long hard way to go.”
Recent opinion polls by Gallup and other major pollsters indicate large majorities favor the resumption of normal diplomatic and trade relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
Hillary Clinton’s impressive strength with senior voters during the primary/caucus season mirrors Sanders edge with young voters. As Amy Chozick writes at The New York Times, “In her sweep of the states that voted last week, she captured voters 65 and older by large margins, ranging from 39 percentage points in Missouri to 54 in Ohio. In Virginia, Texas and other Southern states that voted earlier, she won more than 80 percent of these voters, often matching or beating the support Mr. Sanders received from voters 18 to 29.” It would be interesting to see some trial heat polls of seniors, pitting Clinton and Sanders against remaining GOP candidates. Clinton has learned that her campaign must have better educational outreach to young voters, while Sanders has to reach senior voters more effectively.
Eric Bradner< of CNN Politics has a good preview of tonight's debate, "What to watch for on ‘The Final Five’ Monday night,” hosted by CNN and aired from 8 to 11 p.m. ET.
Matthew Yglesias notes in his post “Why experts think Trump could hand Democrats a House majority” at vox.com that “The high odds of a Trump nomination and the fact that any alternative to a Trump nomination would almost certainly entail some kind of party-crushing convention hijinks mean that a Democratic wave is definitely on the table in a way it wasn’t previously.”
“Simply getting to the polls is a problem for some – particularly black Americans. In the Census Bureau data, 6% of black Americans said they didn’t vote because of “transportation problems” compared with 3% of white Americans,” — from The Guardian’s “Why doesn’t anyone care about voter turnout?” It’s complicated” by Mona Chalabi.
Kira Lerner reports at ThinkProgress that “Students Are Being Rejected From The Polls Because Of North Carolina’s Voter ID Law.”
At Salon.com Sean McElwee discusses “America’s disturbing voter-turnout crisis: How inequality extends to polling place — and why that makes our country less fair. The U.S. leads rich nations for disparity in turnout across income and education levels. This has consequences.”
WaPo’s Dan Balz explores the politics of a Clinton vs. Trump general election: “With a focus on trade issues and by tapping anti-establishment anger, Trump would seek to energize white working-class Americans, who Republicans believe have been on the sidelines in recent elections in substantial numbers..At the same time, Clinton could find Trump a powerful energizing force on her behalf among African Americans and Latinos, which could help to offset the absence of Obama on the ticket after two elections that drew huge minority turnout. That could put off-limits to Trump some states with large Hispanic populations where Republicans have competed intensely in recent elections…A Washington Post-ABC News poll from earlier this month showed stark divides among those backing Trump and Clinton. Overall, the former secretary of state led 50 to 41 percent among registered voters. Trump led 49 to 40 percent among white voters, while Clinton led 73 to 19 among non-whites. Trump led by five points among men, and Clinton was up by 21 among women. Trump led by 24 points among whites without college degrees, while Clinton led by 15 among whites with degrees.”

One of the most unusual things about this unusual presidential cycle is the disconnect, especially on the Republican side, between campaign money and candidate performance. I discussed this topic in connection with Donald Trump’s strange candidacy at New York.

[C]andidates other than front-runner Donald J. Trump have spent a lot more money on themselves and against him than he’s had to expend, enabling him to pose as the guy too rich (and too popular with small donors) to be vulnerable to “bribery.” This was exemplified by the failed effort by Marco Rubio and an assortment of conservative groups to take down Trump in Florida. Anti-Trump “independent” ads alone in the Sunshine State cost an estimated $35.5 million. Total spending by Trump and his supporters for the entire campaign nationwide is at $25.8 million.
Trump’s difference-maker financially, of course, has been his massive advantage in “earned media” (or what used to be called “free media,” because it’s provided by media coverage free of charge). MediaQuant, a firm that measures and values unpaid media coverage, estimates that Trump has harvested nearly $1.9 billion in earned media this cycle. That’s about twice as much as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush combined have received, and within shouting distance of being twice as much as the two Democratic candidates combined as well.
But general-election campaigns are a lot more expensive than primaries. So it’s not surprising that Trump has hedged on repeating his “no special-interest contributions” pledge beyond the Republican Convention in July, and CNN is reporting that he’s already planning a big fund-raising blitz for the general election.
At The American Prospect, Eliza Newlin Carney puts all this together and suggests that total campaign costs are about to become too high for Trump to perpetually surf earned media to victory:

So far, Trump has enjoyed an extraordinary political ride, fending off millions worth of hostile attacks, prevailing against opponents who out-organized and outspent him, and sparing himself the punishing grind of high-dollar fundraisers. He’s also gotten considerable political mileage out of his claim to be above the big money fray. It remains to be seen whether Trump can continue playing by his own rules, or whether he will be forced to get his hands dirty in the messy business of campaign financing–and answer for it to voters.

But there are two factors that undercut this possibility. For one thing, Trump could liquidate some of his assets (estimated independently as having a value of about $4.5 billion) and self-finance to a considerable extent. And for another, this long nominating contest season in both parties is shortening the general-election campaign and the time and cost of any “air war.” Additionally, earned media is much easier to come by in presidential general elections than any other mode of politics, sometimes dwarfing paid media even when there’s not a wildly entertaining and galvanizing figure like Donald Trump in the fray. So it might make sense for Trump to wait and see if he even needs to spend a lot of money.

If he doesn’t, that means the news media’s fascination with Trump is still paying him dividends.

This is a good start, from the DSCC:

This week, the DSCC launched the “Party of Trump” campaign, a sustained campaign that will feature spending across platforms including television, radio, online, Twitter and Facebook, as well as up to the minute “Party of Trump” news alerts, highlighting Republicans’ continued support of Donald Trump as the nominee. With another big round of victories on Tuesday, Trump is even closer to becoming the Republicans’ nominee. Republican Senate incumbents and candidates are to blame for the rise of this toxic, divisive element that has overtaken their party, and they’ve all pledged to support Trump as the nominee. The DSCC’s “Party of Trump” campaign will remind voters that Republican Senate candidates are running in lockstep with Trump and his toxic rhetoric.

And here’s an opening ad to help the kick-off:

Not bad for openers. It appears that the DSCC is putting more brain-power and video muscle and into the effort to take back the Senate, which is long-overdue. There is enough material to make many such ads anchoring GOP senators and senate candidates to Trump and policies that are even worse than some of his positions.
With respect to Trump, there are gobs of clever amateur videos already up on Youtube, and the DSCC should be mining them on a daily basis. Now that Facebook has become the town square for ever-increasing numbers of Americans, the party that masters its potential will likely be well-rewarded in November.

Few believe Merrick Garland has a chance of actually being confirmed in this session of congress. But, in the highly unlikely event he is confirmed, according to the “Martin-Quinn scores” ranking judicial ideology, Garland would make the High Court “the most liberal in decades,” report Alicia Parlapiano and Margo Sanger-Katz at The Upshot. The authors show that Garland or Justice Stephen Breyer would become the new ‘swing vote’ on the Court.
AP’s Josh Lederman argues that “By nominating an uncontroversial 63-year-old judge, President Barack Obama handed Republicans an unwelcome election-year proposition: Give in or risk letting Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump pick a Supreme Court justice the GOP might like even less…Republicans loathe Clinton, but they recognize that if she wins the presidency, she could nominate someone far more liberal than Garland, who’s regarded as a centrist.”
A couple of weeks ago Jesse Wegman noted in his NYT editorial page editor blog, that “In the weeks since Justice Scalia’s death, at least half a dozen polls have asked Americans who they think should pick the next justice. Each one has found that people want President Obama to name a choice. A CNN/ORC poll released Thursday found that two-thirds of Americans, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents, want the Senate to hold hearings on an Obama nominee.”
In his Daily Beast post, “D.C.’s Dueling Supreme Court Strategies,” Jay Michelson notes, “”They are establishing a precedent, if they do this, that if you don’t like the president, you never have to have a vote. Ever,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who argues that the obstruction flies in the face of the constitutional order of government. “What this is about is, ‘We don’t like this president and so we are going to refuse to entertain any discussion of the president’s nominees.'””
Carle Hulse explores how “Supreme Court Showdown Could Shape Fall Elections.” Hulse writes that, in one scenario, a Democratic takeover of the Senate in the November elections might force a lame duck session confirmation: “That possibility led some jittery Senate Republicans to suggest they might be willing to take up the nomination of Judge Garland in a postelection lame-duck session, preferring the relatively moderate and known commodity of Mr. Garland to the uncertain choice of a future Democratic president.”
Ed Kilgore calls the Lame Duck idea a “convoluted scenario whereby Garland might be confirmed. However, observes Kilgore. “Even then, many conservatives in the Senate would shrink from the intraparty consequences of voting for a baby-killing defender of executive tyranny. But that could be the only way Garland makes it to the Court.”
The New York Times editorial board says, “If you tried to create the ideal moderate Supreme Court nominee in a laboratory, it would be hard to do better than Judge Merrick Garland…In his 19 years on the bench, Judge Garland has established a solidly centrist voting record that reflects no strong political ideology. He has sided with the government in cases involving habeas corpus petitions from detainees at Guantánamo Bay, and has voted against criminal defendants more often than his liberal colleagues have. He has generally voted in favor of deferring to the considered decisions of federal agencies. In civil rights cases, he has voted in favor of plaintiffs who have claimed rights violations.”
If you needed further evidence of President Obama’s prowess at political chess, try this paragraph from Lincoln Caplan’s New Yorker article “Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Sensible Supreme Court Choice“: “The day the President told Kagan that he planned to nominate her for the Supreme Court, in May of 2010, the Times ran a story saying that Garland “was widely seen as the most likely alternative to Ms. Kagan and the one most likely to win easy confirmation”; that Senator Orrin Hatch, the Republican from Utah, “privately made clear to the president that he considered Judge Garland a good choice”; and that “Mr. Obama ultimately opted to save Judge Garland for when he faces a more hostile Senate and needs a nominee with more Republican support.”
As an election ploy, Garland’s nomination should shine an unwelcome spotlight on GOP obstructionism, causing Republican senators in blue states to cringe, hem and haw as they struggle to justify opposing such a highly-qualified centrist. John Healey’s L.A. Times op-ed “Garland nomination to Supreme Court could put GOP in no-win situation” illuminates the other half of their dilemma: “if Republicans allow Garland to be confirmed, their core constituencies are likely to feel betrayed regardless of what anyone says about how reasonable and non-ideological the judge may be. And with control of the Senate hanging in the balance, and Republicans having more incumbents facing reelection than Democrats do, the last thing the Senate GOP can afford to do is to discourage its political base.”

Many Republican Establishment figures are excited if nervous about the possibility of denying Donald Trump and Ted Cruz their party’s presidential nomination via the first “contested convention” since 1976, and the first multi-ballot convention since 1952. But the two candidates are making it clear they cannot both be shut down, as I discussed today at New York:

There’s a big problem with such scenarios, however, and it transcends the unilateral threats Donald Trump is making about the disturbances and defections his followers might generate if he is denied the nomination. A more basic reality is that together Trump and Cruz are likely to command a solid majority of delegates going to Cleveland, even if neither of them has a majority on his own. And if they choose to deny any other candidates a shot at the nomination, they can almost certainly do so.
Their most direct means of control is via convention rules. And as Politico‘s Kyle Cheney reports today, the two camps are already talking about working together to make it a “two-man race” to the very end:

Advisers to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz say there’s no way they’ll allow John Kasich to even compete at a contested national convention — let alone prevail.
Trump and Cruz are betting that their dual dominance in the delegate hunt will permanently box out the Ohio governor, who has no mathematical path to the nomination and is openly pursuing a floor fight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
And their aides say Kasich won’t even make it to the floor.
“There is virtually zero chance he can even be nominated,” Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan Republican national committeeman who’s advising Cruz on his convention strategy, told POLITICO. “It’s a two-man race.”
Their confidence is rooted in the fact that Trump and Cruz are nearly certain to control the lion’s share of the 2,472 delegates participating in the July convention. Together, they’ve earned more than 1,000 delegate slots to Kasich’s 136. And those delegates will ultimately approve the rules that govern a contested convention.

One possible means for excluding Kasich is the famous 2012 rule, enacted to thwart a discordant Ron Paul faction in Tampa, that a candidate must have a majority of eight delegations in hand before her or his name can even be placed in nomination. That would take care not only of Kasich (barring some late-primary pyrotechnics) but any dark horse as well. But the more abiding reality is that a convention makes its own rules, and so long as Trump and Cruz control a majority and continue to work together to force a “two-man race,” they can do so.
That’s probably true even if there are a significant number of “false flag” delegates who don’t really support the candidate to whom they are bound on the first ballot. They are free to vote as they wish on procedural matters such as the rules. But it’s hard to imagine there will be enough of them to overcome the combined forces of loyal Trump and Cruz delegates. And for that matter, if you had to figure who will be most successful in “stealing” delegates prior to Cleveland, it will probably be Cruz with his well-organized campaign, not the inchoate forces of the anti-Cruz/anti-Trump Establishment.

So Establishment fantasies of nominating Kasich or Paul Ryan or anyone else other than Trump or Cruz may be as unlikely now as this whole cycle might have seemed a year ago.

A few months ago James Vega posted a strategy memo at TDS addressing the GOP’s “standarized strategy for manufacturing bogus Democratic ‘scandals'” most recently used to gin up outrage about former Secretary of State Clinton’s alleged email improprieties. The memo held the New York Times and other MSM outlets to account for allowing themselves to be manipulated by a “profound fear of reporting anything that contradicts the notion that both political parties are basically equivalent” and suggested strategies for Democrats to respond effectively. As Vega put it,

…Once the GOP grasped the fact that the mainstream media would not honestly report the fact that they were engaging in an asymmetric extremist warfare against the Democrats, Republicans realized that they could use the traditional journalistic standards for reporting information given “off the record” or “on deep background” to easily manipulate the press without fear of exposure or censure.

Vega cites proposals by Norm Ornstein, which gems can use to help prevent media from being so easily-manipulated in the future, including:

• Sources that provide information that turns out to be false and defamatory should lose any “off the record” protection whatsoever and have their identities exposed.
• Reporters should not be allowed to publish information provided by a source that refuses to allow the writer to honestly describe relevant information about the sources’ partisan ties and affiliations.
• Reporters or editors who fail at this fundamental public responsibility should face dismissal, suspension or other consequences from their publishers severe enough to dissuade them from continuing to abuse the public trust.

Vega concludes that “If editors and reporters in the mainstream media aspire to be objective, they can start by refusing to allow themselves to be manipulated by the GOP.” In effect argues Vega, “Failing to do this is represents the endorsement and support of pro-Republican partisan dishonesty in their reporting that is different from the partisan propaganda of Fox News and talk radio commentators only in degree and not essential character.”
Since Vega’s memo and mounting criticism against biased reporting that elevates bogus “scandals,” it appears that some major media outlets are doing some constructive soul-searching. In her Public Editor’s Journal article, “Tightening the Screws on Anonymous Sources” in The New York Times, Margaret Sullivan explains that “Times editors are cracking down on the use of anonymous sources…Although the policy does not ban anonymity, it is intended to significantly reduce…an overreliance on unnamed sources.” Further, adds Sullivan,

It requires one of three top editors to review and sign off on articles that depend primarily on information from unnamed sources – particularly those that “hinge on a central fact” from such a source…
The policy also requires any other use of anonymous sources to be approved by a desk head – for example, the ranking culture, metro or international editor – or that person’s immediate deputy. It also “underscores what has been our policy”: that an editor must know the identity of an unnamed source.
The new policy also aims to significantly “ratchet down the use of anonymous quotation,” Mr. Purdy said. It would make such quotation relatively rare. Too often, he said, such direct quotations allow sources to express “their impression, their spin, their agenda” without accountability. And, he said, they don’t allow readers to evaluate motive because they don’t know where the information is coming from.

Sullivan warns that “the devil, of course, is in the enforcement.” She notes that recent experiments using the new policies have been encouraging. More rigorous standards for using anonymous sources is a welcome change in America’s most prominent newspaper, and it’s likely that the better newspapers, and perhaps some electronic media outlets, will follow suit.
But no one should be deluded that such well-intentioned policy changes will automatically prove to be permanent. It will require constant vigilance and monitoring both inside — and outside — major media outlets against equal constant pressure from partisan scandal-mongers.
For now, however, give the Times credit for addressing the issue in a credible way. May their example be contagious.

The following article by Democratic strategist Roberrt Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The rise of Donald Trump — and the events of the last week — have promoted serious discussion of the question of whether fascism can in fact triumph in the United States of America.
I do not raise that question simply as a means of slurring an opposition political candidate, or movement. I raise it as a technical, analytic question that deserves a serious answer.
In 1935, during the rise of fascism in Europe, the novelist Sinclair Lewis published a semi-satirical novel entitled It Can’t Happen Here. In the novel, a United States senator named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip is elected to the presidency, demanding that America return to patriotism and traditional values, and promising dramatic economic and social reforms. He argued that America needed a strong man to make the country great again.
After he is elected, Windrip imposes a semi-plutocratic totalitarian form of leadership supported by a paramilitary reminiscent of Europe’s brown shirts.
Now, 80 years later, the question of whether it could happen here once again confronts America.
Donald Trump, like the fascist leaders of Europe in the 1930s and their counterparts in South America in the 1970s and ’80s, argues that he — a strong leader — can “Make America Great Again.” Like earlier fascists, he addresses legitimate economic discontent by targeting international enemies, and internal threats that must be expunged from the body politic. In Trump’s case, the “internal enemy” is comprised of “illegal” immigrants who are “rapists and criminals” and who, he argues, take American jobs. But they also include Muslims — of any stripe. And, he doesn’t mind whipping up latent white racism wherever he can find it.
Like other fascist movements, Trump says out loud — and legitimates — the kind of hateful, violent language that was previously whispered only in the privacy of people’s living rooms.
And like previous generations of fascists, Trump frames his rhetoric in populist terms, while actually promoting policy solutions that would instead benefit plutocrats like himself.
And it’s worth noting, that while he doesn’t always use exactly the same rhetoric, Senator Ted Cruz shares many of Trump’s values.
It’s not hard to see why Trump has been successful in Republican primary politics.
Much of the elite media and Washington political class was blindsided by his appeal. But this is because many of them missed the central underlying fact of American politics: normal people haven’t had a raise in thirty years.
In the years 1986 to 2016, the real per capita gross domestic product — the best measure of the economic property of a society — increased 48 percent.
But virtually every dime of that increase went to the top 1 percent — and often the top .01 percent — of the population. Median household incomes barely budged. Measured in 2013 dollars, median household income was $50,488 in 1986. In 2013 it was $51,930.
There has been some fluctuation over the period. After dropping to $48,884 in 1993 — the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency — it increased to $56,080 in 1999. A year and a half later Clinton turned over the Oval office to George W. Bush.
Of course the economic record of Bush ended in utter catastrophe with the Great Recession. Since then, President Obama has built the economy back with a record 72 months of successive private sector job growth. But median household income still isn’t moving because the Republicans in Congress and the rules of the economic game still allow the corporate establishment to hang onto most of the fruits of that growth.
The iconic political result is the middle class Iowa focus group participant who said: “I haven’t had a raise in 30 years — and all of the growth has gone to those guys at the top, and all of the poor people at the bottom.”
Democrats Clinton and Sanders have answered by pointing to the 1 percent, the corporate CEOs and the wealthy — a political message which has the advantage of being true.
Trump and the Republicans have taken the opposite tack — whipping up antagonism to “immigrants,” “lazy people who don’t get a job,” and — frankly — anyone who is “not like you.” This of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth.
We know empirically the effect that increasing income inequality has on political polarization.
Several years ago, political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal published a study showing a direct relationship between economic inequality and polarization in American politics.
They measured political polarization in congressional votes over the last century, and found a direct correlation with the percentage of income received by the top 1 percent of the electorate.
They also compared the Gini Index of income inequality with congressional vote polarization of the last half-century and found a comparable relationship.
Economic stagnation is the breeding ground for fear, racial hatred and extremist rhetoric. That is particularly true if other forms of social change simultaneously cause people to fear for their personal meaning and place in the world. An increasingly diverse America, the redefinition in relationships between men and women, gay and straight, is frightening to some Americans.
Racism is not the same thing as racial prejudice. Racism develops where a group of people’s meaning and status in life are tied to their self-definition, as “not Black,” or “not Brown.”. If personal meaning doesn’t come from excelling in your work life, or economic success, it’s a lot easier for people to be convinced that they need to define themselves through race and nationality.
It is no accident that fascism arose in Europe out of the economic depression of the 1930s, and in South America in a period of economic stagnation.
And Trump’s ability to dominate the Republican political dialogue is also the direct result of the behavior of Republican elites — ever since the resurgence of the “Conservative Movement” in the 1980s and especially since the Gingrich “revolution” and the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency.
The GOP has been divided for decades into its social conservative/populist wing, and the business wing. In fact the business wing always called the shots — and used the mass wing of the party as cannon fodder to win elections so they could cut taxes for the wealthy, reduce government “regulation”, and cut trade deals that benefit huge corporations.

Read more…

NYT’s Trip Gabriel explains why “Ohio Looms Large in Both Races on Tuesday,” and notes, “Ohio has emerged as a critical contest, the one large state voting this week where Mr. Trump appears vulnerable. A victory here by Gov. John Kasich would complicate Mr. Trump’s attempt to gather a majority of delegates needed for the nomination…On the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont hoped for a repeat of his stunning upset over Hillary Clinton last week in Michigan, as he hopscotched the Midwest to push his central message that American workers have suffered too much under trade deals.”
In the wake of the Clinton-Sanders debates, Jared Bernstein has a NYT Op-Ed explaining why “The Era of Free Trade Might Be Over. That’s a Good Thing.”
Alan I. Abramowitz offers “A Simple Model for Predicting Hillary Clinton’s Vote in the March 15 Democratic Primaries” at Crsytal Ball. Abramowitz notes, “A simple model based on two predictors — the racial composition of the Democratic primary electorate and a dummy variable for region — explain over 90% of the variance in Hillary Clinton’s vote share in this year’s Democratic primaries through March 8.” Abramowitz evaluates outcomes based on this model.
From Daily Kos Elections “Morning Digest: Can Team Blue retake the House in 2016? Only if they completely run the table“: “We rate just 52 seats as potentially competitive as of today, and the Democrats hold 16 of them. In other words, if Democrats hold all their vulnerable seats, they’ll need to sweep 29 of the 36 GOP-held districts we have on the big board to retake the House. Needless to say, this is an extremely tough task…However, a Donald Trump nomination could scramble the general election outlook in unexpected ways–just as he’s upended the Republican primary–so we could see more revisions to our ratings than we would in a typical election year.”
James Hohman’s Daily 202 notes “Obama could announce his Supreme Court pick as early as this week” and “sources tell The Post that the president has narrowed his choice down to three finalists,” including Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Sri Srinivasan, a judge on the same court; and Paul Watford, a judge on the federal Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
At The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza ponders “The Great Divide: Clinton, Sanders, and the future of the Democratic Party.” Lizza quotes Simon Rosenberg, president anad founder of New Democratic network, who adds “Sanders is speaking to a rising generation who want both a better and more responsible capitalism and a better and more ethical politics…Unrigging the system will be a central focus of Democratic politics for years to come–as it should be.”
Michael J. Mishak’s TNR post, “Have Republicans Already Lost Florida?” takes a clear-eyed look at GOP prospects in the November election the Sunshine state: “Once dominated by conservative Cubans in South Florida, the Latino electorate is growing more diverse and more Democratic–driven in large part by a booming Puerto Rican diaspora in the central part of the state. Nearly 400,000 Puerto Ricans have settled in the Orlando area, with thousands coming from the island each month. Still others are relocating from the Northeastern U.S., and they now make up 27 percent of Florida’s Hispanic vote. (Hispanics of other ancestry, such as Mexico and South America, now make up 42 percent, while just 31 percent are Cuban American.) Puerto Ricans in Central Florida played a key role in helping put Barack Obama over the top in 2012, though they also have a strong independent streak…Among these folks, the Trump message comes across like a warning siren.”
Eric Bradner of CNN Politics provides “Your guide to Super Tuesday 3,” and notes, “Clinton is all but assured of finishing her sweep of the South by picking up wins in Florida and North Carolina…The real battleground will be the Midwest. Sanders will try to replicate his stunning victory in Michigan last week by winning similar big, manufacturing-heavy, states: Illinois, Missouri and Ohio.”
Daily Beast columnist Olivia Nuzzi raises an issue Trump’s fellow Republican candidates would rather forget in her post, “Weak GOP Rivals Fail to Condemn Donald Trump’s Thugs.”

As we all continue to mull the greater meaning of Donald J. Trump, it’s generally assumed he’s built a cult of personality for himself, and not any sustainable movement or point of view beyond a crude authoritarianism. But at least one left-of-center writer thinks otherwise. I discussed the topic at some length at New York, beginning with an observation about Thursday night’s subdued Republican candidate debate:

With the volume turned down, the emptiness and incoherence of Donald Trump’s approach to public-policy issues becomes especially clear. He’ll make good deals and will be lethally inclined toward America’s enemies (including, for the moment, global Islam, it seems). Even on the one topic where he seemed to have a new thought — supporting the deployment of ground troops to fight ISIS — no reason was given for the change in position, other than a sort of gut feeling it would be necessary to “destroy ISIS.”
Everyone understands that Trump is exploiting a rich and very real vein of public sentiment, centered in but not limited to white working-class folk who may have voted Republican in the past but never shared the economic and foreign-policy views of the business and movement-conservative elites who run the GOP. Some optimistically view this Trump constituency as an addition to the Republican coalition; I think it’s mostly elements of the existing coalition that are threatening to leave unless the party changes. Either way, does this all go away if Trump loses or gets bored and goes back to different modes of brand promotion?
You might think so, but a certain erudite if occasionally cranky polymath and thinker, New America’s Michael Lind, believes there’s something we can call Trumpism, and it’s the future of conservative politics. Here’s how Lind boils it down in a piece on Trump as “the perfect populist” at Politico:

It remains to be seen whether Trump can win the Republican nomination, much less the White House. But whatever becomes of his candidacy, it seems likely that his campaign will prove to be just one of many episodes in the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national populist movements, such as the National Front in France and the United Kingdom Independence Party in Britain. Unlike Goldwater, who spearheaded an already-existing alliance consisting of National Review, Modern Age, and Young Americans for Freedom, Trump has followers but no supportive structure of policy experts and journalists. But it seems likely that some Republican experts and editors, seeking to appeal to his voters in the future, will promote a Trump-like national populist synthesis of middle-class social insurance plus immigration restriction and foreign policy realpolitik,through conventional policy papers and op-eds rather than blustering speeches and tweets.

Now, that’s a fascinating prospect, isn’t it? The entire conservative policy and messaging edifice, the product of hundreds of billions of dollars of investments and many years of development, employing God knows how many thinkers, researchers, gabbers, and writers, replaced by an infrastructure devoted to making Trumpism not just a brand or an epithet but a whole way of thinking about public life.
Where this would all come from is a mystery. The Trump campaign itself is a strange assortment of personal retainers, hired guns, and the occasional public figure reeking of brimstone after climbing aboard Trump’s bandwagon out of what appears to be sheer opportunism. When you look at a guy like Sam Clovis — the intellectually well-regarded Iowa “constitutional conservative” who abandoned Rick Perry’s sinking ship last summer and signed on with Trump as “senior policy adviser” — you see someone who’s probably winging it as much as the Donald himself. So the question abides: Does Trump represent anything larger than himself (not that he could imagine it!)? Is he the harbinger of some “national populist” movement that will kick conventional conservatism to the curb, or just (like many right-wing demagogues before him) the vehicle for the occasional rage that seizes people furious with change?
It’s hard to say…. If Trump is somehow elected president, the challenges of actual power may domesticate him and make him a real Republican. Without question, the prestige of the presidency and its vast patronage inside and outside government would stimulate the kind of interest in developing Trumpism that Michael Lind expects. If he wins the Republican nomination but then loses the general election, it’s far more likely the right will turn the whole Trump phenomenon into an object lesson about the consequences of irresponsibility and ideological laxity.
And if Trump can’t even make it to Cleveland and seize the nomination with all of the things working in his favor at present, he’ll become just another loser, and no more likely to become the founding father of a new ideology than Rick Santorum. So don’t hold your breath waiting for the development of Trumpism until and unless Trump takes the oath of office as president. But then we’d have more things to worry about than the future shape of center-right thinking, wouldn’t we?

Democrats need to work hard to make sure it does not come to that.