Paul Krugman has what may well be the best column you will find about the politics of trade in the 2016 presidential elections. Anyone with interest in this issue should read the whole thing. A couple of excerpts:

The Sanders win defied all the polls, and nobody really knows why. But a widespread guess is that his attacks on trade agreements resonated with a broader audience than his attacks on Wall Street; and this message was especially powerful in Michigan, the former auto superpower. And while I hate attempts to claim symmetry between the parties — Trump is trying to become America’s Mussolini, Sanders at worst America’s Michael Foot — Trump has been tilling some of the same ground. So here’s the question: is the backlash against globalization finally getting real political traction?

If so, we can expect tweaks in messaging on the part of presidential, and perhaps down-ballot, candidates to amp up their protectionist cred. Krugman cautions, however:

You do want to be careful about announcing a political moment, given how many such proclamations turn out to be ludicrous. Remember the libertarian moment? The reformocon moment? Still, a protectionist backlash, like an immigration backlash, is one of those things where the puzzle has been how long it was in coming. And maybe the time is now.

Krugman critiques the overstated arguments of protectionists and globalists alike, and notes the limited ability of the candidates to do what they say about managing global trade. He concludes, however, by expressing his strong belief that “the case for more trade agreements — including TPP, which hasn’t happened yet — is very, very weak. And if a progressive makes it to the White House, she should devote no political capital whatsoever to such things.”
A sobering thought for voters — and for the leading candidates as they compete to win the support of American workers, a great many of whom have become deeply distrustful of U.S. trade policy.

In all the talk about Trump battling the Republican Establishment, a major source of confusion is the failure to understand that there are actually two Republican Establishments that hate Donald Trump but can’t quite agree on a strategy to stop him. I wrote about this topic at New York earlier this week:

The day after Super Tuesday, Mitt Romney (as the immediate past nominee of a nongoverning party, he would have once been called the “titular head” of the GOP) laid out the Republican Establishment’s game plan for stopping Donald Trump.

If the other candidates can find some common ground, I believe we can nominate a person who can win the general election and who will represent the values and policies of conservatism. Given the current delegate selection process, that means that I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and for John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state.

Everybody outside TrumpWorld was onboard, right? Wrong. Especially following the March 5 caucuses and primaries, when he solidified his second-place position in delegates, Ted Cruz and his backers made it clear they believe the most efficient method of stopping Trump is for Republicans to unite behind his own candidacy. It’s Marco Rubio’s “anti-Trump consolidation” theory adopted by another candidate now that Rubio is struggling to survive. And thus with most of the Republican Establishment digging under the sofa cushions for funds to help Rubio beat Trump in Florida, Team Cruz was up in the air in the Sunshine State running anti-Rubio ads.
Was this a rogue action by a candidate not exactly known in the Senate as a team player? Perhaps. But more fundamentally, the strategic rift in the anti-Trump coalition is the product of two very different Republican Establishments: that of self-conscious movement conservatives, who find a Cruz nomination either congenial or acceptable, and the non-movement-party Establishment, which is as hostile to Cruz as it is to Trump.
The conservative-movement Establishment can be found in organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and opinion vehicles like National Review magazine. Their basic mark of distinction is that they view the GOP as a vehicle for the promotion and implementation of conservative ideology and policy position rather than as an end in itself. They are virulently anti-Trump (as evidenced by National Review’s recent special issue attacking the mogul) for all the reasons most Republicans (and for that matter, Democrats) evince, but with the additional and decisive consideration that Trump has violated conservative orthodoxy on a host of issues from trade policy to “entitlement reform” to the Middle East. Members of this Establishment do not uniformly support Ted Cruz; some are fine with the equally conservative (if far less disruptive) Marco Rubio, and others have electability concerns about the Texan even if they like his issue positions and his combative attitude toward the Republican congressional leadership. But suffice it to say they are not horrified by the idea of a Cruz presidency, and many have concluded his nomination is an easier bet than some panicky Anybody But Trump movement that at best will produce the unpredictable nightmare of a contested convention even as Democrats (more than likely) unite behind their nominee. RedState’s Leon Wolf neatly expressed their point of view yesterday:

Maybe you preferred someone who is a better communicator than Cruz or who stood a better chance of beating Hillary in the general. Sorry, but for whatever reason, your fellow voters have ruled each of those candidates out, and Rubio’s collapse this weekend pretty much put that nail in the coffin. It’s now a choice between guaranteed loser Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who might actually win.

From the movement-conservative perspective, it’s not Cruz who’s going rogue but instead elements of the party Establishment (including the members of Congress who conspicuously hate Ted Cruz) that cannot accept that it has lost control of the GOP this year and is insisting on a contested convention as a way to reassert its control behind closed doors in Cleveland. Party Establishmentarians are often conservative ideologically, too, but are dedicated to pragmatic strategies and tactics at sharp odds with Cruz’s philosophy of systematic partisan confrontation and maximalist rhetoric. And they are highly allergic to risky general-election candidates.
But there’s a fresh crisis in the party Establishment after the March 8 contests in four states, wherein Trump won Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii, Cruz won Idaho, and Marco Rubio won — maybe, it hasn’t been totally resolved yet — one delegate in Hawaii and absolutely nothing else. And new polls of Florida are beginning to come in that don’t look promising for Rubio. Even as party Establishment and even some conservative-movement Establishment folk pound Trump with negative ads, there are signs of panic. Most shocking, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, normally the most reliable of party Establishment mouthpieces and a big-time neoconservative booster of Rubio’s foreign-policy positions, publicly called on the Floridian to drop out of the race and endorse Cruz in order to stop Trump.
We’ll soon see if the divisions between the two Republican Establishments will quickly be resolved by the surrender of party types like Rubin. Some may instead try to reanimate Rubin or switch horses to Kasich, who has a better chance than Rubio to win his own home state next week. Still others may make their peace with Trump, or resolve to spend the rest of the cycle focused on down-ballot races.

In any event, time’s running out for the anti-Trump coalition.

At The Plum Line Greg Sargent quotes from an interview he conducted with pollster and Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg, focusing on white working-class voters and Hillary Clinton’s prospects: “Michigan will end up making her a stronger candidate, both in the primary and the general election,” Greenberg told me this morning. “It will lead her to be focused more on change and the economy…This will enable her to unite the party, and compete for working class voters in the general against Trump,” Greenberg concluded. “She’s going to win. She’ll be stronger when she wins in the right way.”
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein of Brookings write, “”The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier–ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” That passage, which framed a core part of the argument of our 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, was vilified by conservative commentators, called a rant and a parody…Fast forward to 2016. Incredibly, Republican destructiveness is even worse than it was four years ago–and the party is paying for it with a surge of anti-establishment populism that is tearing apart its coalitional base…The Trump disaster, especially if it leads to a Democratic sweep of the 2016 elections, may provide the basis for a major rethinking and realignment of a deeply dysfunctional Republican Party.”
Naturally the media is full of let’s-you-and-her-fight yada yada about how tense and angry was last night’s Democratic presidential debate. For a more level-headed take, however, read “Anti-Trumpism Won the Democratic Debate: Both Sanders and Clinton went all-in on pro-immigrant policy, making a good long-term bet for Democrats.” by Pat Garofalo at U.S. News.
Lots of agonized hand-wringing from pollsters and poll analysts about the utter failure of polls in Michigan. Carl Bialik does a painful post-mortem in his FiveThirtyEight post “Why The Polls Missed Bernie Sanders’s Michigan Upset.”
Sorry GOP establishment whiners. Trump is not winning your decaying party’s presidential nomination because Dems are crossing over in the primaries.
For a more in-depth look at underlying issues presaging the collapse of the GOP, read “Why Donald Trump Is Winning and Why His Nomination Could Shatter the Republican Party” by Alan I. Abramowitz, Ronald Rapoport, and Walter Stone at the Crystal Ball. Among the authors’ observations, reporting on their national survey of 1,000 registered Republican and independent voters: “…We examined the relationship between Trump support and a variety of factors that have been identified as possibly explaining reactions to Trump’s candidacy: authoritarianism, nativism, and economic liberalism. The results…show that there were strong relationships between all three of these predictors and where respondents ranked Trump among 11 possible Republican candidates…In addition to authoritarianism and nativism, economic attitudes also predicted support for Trump. In contrast to most other Republican presidential candidates and, indeed, most other prominent Republican officeholders, Trump has sometimes veered from conservative orthodoxy on economic issues…If we combine authoritarianism with nativism and economic liberalism we get an even stronger prediction of Trump support…a Trump candidacy would almost certainly produce serious divisions among GOP leaders and voters, potentially leading to the election of a Democratic president and major Republican losses in down-ballot contests, including key U.S. Senate races.”
Need a lift from the political doldrums? Try David Nir’s Kos post, “In a miraculous set of victories, Kentucky Democrats keep their state House out of Republican hands.”
One of the stronger arguments for Democrats nominating Hillary Clinton is that her presidency would serve as a source of inspiration for more women to get into politics. It seems obvious, which may be why there has been surprisingly little discussion about it. I say stronger because the gross underrepresentation of women in federal, state and local elective offices is highly consequential. How can we have legislatures that do a good job of serving American families and children when women are largely locked out of the decision-making process? Of course all of the caveats apply, e.g. – women can be reactionary leaders too (Palin, Bachman etc.) and, yes, a progressive male is going to be more family-friendly than a right-wing female. But overall, we can’t expect balanced decision-making in our democratic institutions when women are only 20 percent of the U.S. Senate, 19.3 percent of the House of Reps, 12 percent of Governors, 24.5 percent of state legislators, and 19 percent of the mayors of America’s 100 largest cities? (sources also at: Center for American Women in Politics) Getting more women into elective office across the U.S. should be a much higher priority for voters. A Clinton presidency can only help that and the argument is made stronger by her impressive experience. When girls and young women see a woman leader in the white house, more of them will see themselves as potential leaders. America needs that.
You can make a case that the real “Super Tuesday” is March 15, when FL, OH, IL, NC and MO pick their delegates. That’s not as many states as the 13 on March 1, but it does include 4 of the 11 most populated states. Plus MO ranks 17th in population. That’s a big bundle of delegates, and it includes several major swing states. Further, writes Leada Gore at Al.com: “The day is particularly important as it marks one of the first times a winning candidate can take all of a state’s delegates. Past primaries awarded proportionately, with the highest vote getter getting the most delegates. The March 15 primaries include some winner-take-all states – Florida, Missouri and Ohio,” with FL as the largest of the 50 states to award all of its delegates to one candidate.

Hillary Clinton won the most delegates for the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, adding 84, compared with a net gain of 67 for Sanders. Clinton now has 1,234 of the 2,383 delegates needed to win the nomination, while Sanders has 567 delegates.
Clinton won an 83-17 percent blowout in Mississippi, but Sanders won an upset victory in delegate-rich Michigan, where “every poll leading up to Tuesday’s election showed Clinton with a double-digit lead and a vast institutional edge with African-American voters,” report Todd Spangler and Kathleen Gray of the Detroit Free Press.
CNN’s exit polls provided one clear indication of why Sanders won — an amazing 81%-18% edge among 18-24 year-old voters.
“Sanders also did well among black voters under the age of 45 in Michigan, splitting their support with Clinton — however Clinton performed well with older black voters, winning roughly 8 in 10,” note Tom LoBianco and Jennifer Agiesta of CNNPolitics.
Exit polls reveal that In Michigan, nearly 7 of 10 Democratic voters were white, while about 2 in 10 were African American. In Mississippi, however, only one-third of voters were white and more than 6 in 10 were black voters. It’s unclear, however, whether the African American voter turnout percentage was higher or lower than in previous years in MI.
While Clinton attacked Sanders for failing to vote on one occasion for funding of the auto bailout in the wake of the Bush economic meltdown, Sanders may have benefitted more from well-crafted economic messaging. He argued, for example that she had supported trade deals which exported Michigan jobs. Further, “CNN exit polls showed that Sanders outperformed Clinton among voters who are “very worried” about the U.S. economy, 56% to 40%. Among voters who believe international trade takes away American jobs, Sanders also led Clinton, 56% to 43% — a sign that Sanders’ populist economic message resonated in Michigan,” according to MJ Lee, Jeff Zeleny, Dana Bash and Dan Merica at CNN Politics.
At WaPo’s The Daily 202, James Hohman explains,

A message of economic populism, particularly protectionism, is much more potent in the Rust Belt than we understood.
Most Michiganders feel like they are victims of trade deals, going back to NAFTA under Bill Clinton, and they’re deeply suspicious of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Outsourcing has helped hollow out the state’s once mighty manufacturing core…Trump and Sanders both successfully tapped into this.
Six in 10 Michigan Democratic primary voters said international trade takes away U.S. jobs, and Sanders won these voters by roughly 20 points, according to preliminary exit poll data reported by CNN. Only 3 in 10 thought trade creates jobs; Clinton won that group…One-third of voters said Clinton is too pro-business. Sanders won more than four in five of them.

Another dramatic difference between Clinton and Sanders voters: Those who said their “most important priority” is that a candidate is honest and trustworthy voted for Sanders over Clinton by a gaping margin of 80% to 19%.
Another possible clue, Sanders was, ironically, the big Democratic spender in Michigan, pouring $3.5 million into ads, while Clinton spent only $2.6 million. There were also complaints that Clinton didn’t campaign as hard in MI, as she did in NV and SC.
Clinton edged Sanders in Michigan’s emblematically white working-class Macomb County by a margin of 48.8 percent to 47.41, according to the Detroit Free Press. Trump received 60,492 votes in Macomb, compared to Clinton’s 47,597 and 46,242 for Sanders. Given Sanders’s strong turnout among younger voters, it would be interesting to know if they also made him competitive with white working-class voters.
Republican presidential candidates received 124,896 votes in Macomb, compared to 97,528 for Democratic candidates.

At Maddowblog Steve Benen’s “Sanders makes the case for a single-issue candidacy” sheds light, not only on the unique strategy of a major presidential candidate, but also on what many believe to be the greatest threat to American democracy. As Benen explains, following the last democratic debate:

…Last night, I believe for the first time, Sanders acknowledged that one of Clinton’s criticisms of his candidacy is probably correct.
“Let us be clear, one of the major issues Secretary Clinton says I’m a one-issue person, well, I guess so. My one issue is trying to rebuild a disappearing middle class. That’s my one issue.”

“Sanders is still ‘talking about dozens of issues,'” says Benen, “but as of last night, he’s effectively making the case that the issues that are most important to him – economic inequality, an unfair tax system, trade, Wall Street accountability, etc. – fall under the umbrella of a broader issue: rebuilding the middle class.
Benen notes that “Clinton’s principal criticism of Sanders is that his areas of interest are far too narrow…Clinton wants voters to see Sanders as a well-intentioned protest candidate. The White House is about breadth and complexity, the argument goes, and even if you agree with Sanders, it’s hard to deny his principal focus on the one issue that drives and motivates him…A president, Clinton wants Democratic voters to believe, doesn’t have the luxury of being “a one-issue person.” A president’s responsibilities are simply too broad to see every issue through narrowly focused lens.”
But Sanders no longer bothers to deny it; he puts it in broader perspective to refine his image as the candidate who stands most clearly as a genuine champion of economic justice for everyone who is struggling to have a decent middle class life. “Sanders,” says Benen, “is willing to gamble that progressive voters will back him anyway. It’s a risk that will likely make or break his candidacy in the coming weeks.”
Benen adds “Democrats have been focused on the interests of the middle class for generations, and when Sanders made his “one-issue” declaration, the audience applauded.” it’s a pretty clever way to turn one of Clinton’s attack memes into a net positive. Certainly it helps that he backs it up with his policy regarding contributions to his campaign.
Clinton has evolved into a sharp debater, and Benen notes that “during last night’s debate, Clinton let Sanders’ acknowledgement go without comment – she did not repeat the “single-issue candidate” criticism.”
Sanders undoubtedly believes many voters will agree with him. But he also holds the conviction that, win or lose, America will not be able to create a better society until the central issue of economic justice is addressed with meaningful reforms.
Calling Sanders a “one-issue candidate” was always a gross oversimplification. As a congressman and U.S. Senator for 25 years, his career has included stands on every major issue, from the invasion of Iraq, to reproductive rights, gun control and environmental reforms, to name just a few, and he has provided thoughtful and often controversial policy positions on all such issues during his tenure.
Sanders can hold his own on any important issue. He could easily choose to become another political leader who spends his time opining about everything. But he believes that greater good — and a stronger image — can come from mining public concern about corporate abuses of working people and our political system.
It’s an interesting strategy, more pro-active than just responding to issues du jour defined by the media. Elevating this concern to a central focus may be a gamble. But most informed voters now have a pretty clear understanding of what he stands for, and it has served him well so far.

Among Eric Bradner’s “5 takeaways from the Democratic debate“: “The debate was a strong sign that both candidates still see room to gain or lose ground among liberal voters. They spent so much time jockeying to get to each other’s left that there was virtually no talk of Republicans at all…Clinton and Sanders defended government spending and intervention, teachers’ unions, gun control, clean energy programs and efforts to fight climate change.”
For the time-challenged: “CNN’s Flint Democratic Debate in 90 Seconds.”
NYT’s Trip Gabriel explains why “Michigan Primary Puts Donald Trump’s Rust Belt Strategy to a Test.” Gabriel writes, “Mr. Trump’s signature issues of opposition to free trade and a crackdown on illegal immigration, which Republican leaders once dismissed as outside the mainstream, have brought him a populist following, including independents and some Democrats…Stanley B. Greenberg, whose research in Macomb County in the 1980s popularized the term “Reagan Democrat,” said Mr. Trump might put the Rust Belt into play. “There’s no doubt there’s new voters coming into the Republican primary process,” he said.”
In “The GOP Establishment Now Faces Its Nightmare Scenario: Trump Versus Cruz,” The Nation’s John Nichols puts the Republican predicament in perspective — a choice between their two most deeply-flawed candidates, the most obnoxious lout ever to achieve front-runner status vs. a theocratic extremist who has zero understanding of or regard for mainstream social values.
An interesting AP-GFK poll on what may soon become a major infrastructure issue, nationwide — the safety of tap water.
Another sleeper issue, and one that could resonate with high-turnout senior voters: At Slate.com Helaine Olen explains why “The Retirement Crisis Is Getting Truly Scary: It’s time for the presidential candidates to give it the urgency it deserves.”
Getting down to recent cases, “It’s already looking like a different Supreme Court,” writes Robert Barnes at the Washington Post. Make that profoundly different. As Barnes reports in one example, “Dow Chemical, for instance, announced that it would settle a nearly $1 billion antitrust judgment instead of pursuing its plans to take the fight to the high court….”Growing political uncertainties due to recent events with the Supreme Court and increased likelihood for unfavorable outcomes for business involved in class-action suits have changed Dow’s risk assessment of the situation,” the company said.”
At The American Prospect, Paul Waldman addresses a question of overarching importance: “Could Donald Trump Deliver Congress to the Democrats?” Says Waldman: “…What had looked like seats where Republicans had a clear advantage could be up for grabs, particularly if Democrats come out in force, moved to the polls by the ghastly prospect of Donald Trump becoming president. Combine that with a potentially dispirited Republican electorate, and Democrats could win more seats than anyone predicted. “We can’t have a nominee be an albatross around the down-ballot races,” Senator John Cornyn recently told CNN. “That’s a concern of mine.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr. observes in his WaPo column that “The 2016 Republican primary campaign is now on track to be the crudest, most vulgar and most thoroughly disgusting in our nation’s history…the whole Republican race is now a moral and electoral wreck, a state of affairs that one conservative after another mourned during and after Thursday’s encounter…For decades, conservatives have done a great business assailing liberals for promoting cultural decay. Sorry, guys, but in this campaign, you have kicked away the franchise.”

If you were a candidate running for any elective office, you should be delighted to have the support of Markos Moulitsas, Founder/Publisher of Daily Kos and likely the most influential progressive journalist on the blogosphere.
That’s essentially what Hillary Clinton got on Friday, when Moulitsas wrote a blogpost, “March 15, and Daily Kos transition to General Election footing,” urging Kos writers, commenters and readers to support her candidacy if she is the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination by March 15. He would also support Sen. Bernie Sanders, if he is still competitive by mid-March. As Kos writes,

…if Sanders eats into Clinton’s big delegate lead by March 15, then we carry on. But if he doesn’t, then on March 15 this site officially transitions to General Election footing. That means, we will focus our attention not just on Donald Trump or his rivals, but also on the Senate, the House, and state-level races. If you want the most liberal government possible, we aren’t going to get that this cycle in the White House, but we can keep building the bench down the ballot so that come 2024, we have lots of great liberals to choose from…But it does us no good to keep fighting over something that is already determined. People have voted, and the numbers are the numbers. It’s time to move on and focus on what binds us together.

In his post, Kos also blasts the super delegates system, the primary/caucuses process and calendar, which favors less diverse states Iowa and New Hampshire, and he calls for the resignation of DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Kos regards the future of the U.S. Supreme Court as the most pivotal reason why Dems must begin to unify this month:

Do you know what else we all agree on? The Supreme Court… Even assuming the worst crazy shit people say about Clinton, fact is the next president will get to determine the Supreme Court’s direction for at least a generation, if not longer than that. It will be a new liberal Supreme Court that will overturn Citizens United, that will protect voting rights, that will protect labor unions, that will end partisan gerrymandering, that will undo the myriad roadblocks to citizens participation in our democracy–the very roadblocks that are keeping the Republican Party nationally relevant when they should be a rump regional party.
Clinton critics like to cite the presidency of Bill as evidence of her various horrible traits, yet it was Bill who gave us Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and I dare any of you to find reasons to criticize either of those two judicial heroes. If Hillary is like Bill (and she’s not, but let’s assume), why wouldn’t her Supreme Court justices follow suit?

Moulitsas then lays down the guidelines for future postings on Daily Kos. “I will no longer tolerate malicious attacks on our presumptive presidential nominee or our presidential efforts…” He includes some pretty specific bullet points, including, but not limited to:

• No attacks on Hillary Clinton using right-wing tropes of sources. She’s had 30 years of bullshit flung at her from the Right, there’s no need to have Daily Kos give them an assist.
• Constructive criticism from the Left is allowed. There’s a difference between constructive and destructive criticism. Do I need to spell it out? It’s the difference between “We need to put pressure on her to do the right thing on TPP” versus “she’s a sell-out corporatist whore oligarch.” In general, if you’re resorting to cheap sloganeering like “oligarch” or “warmonger” or “neocon”, you might want to reframe your argument in a more substantive, issue-focused and constructive matter. Again, I’m not interested in furthering the Right’s hate-fueled media machine. If that’s what you want, might I suggest Free Republic?
• Saying you won’t vote, or will vote for Trump, or will vote for Jill Stein (or another Third Party) is not allowed. If that’s how you feel, but have other places in which you can be constructive on the site, then keep your presidential feelings to yourself. Those of us who care about our country and it’s future are focused on victory. If you aren’t, then it’s a big internet, I suggest you find more hospitable grounds for your huffing, puffing, and stomping of feet.

There will probably be some negative fallout about Kos’s post in lefty purist circles. Others may argue that it’s a little premature. But to paraphrase Spike Lee, “If you don’t like my movie, make your own movie.” Kos has built a hell of an internet community with his hard work, dedication and creativity, and he gets to make the rules on his website.
The impressive turnout of Republicans in the primaries and caucuses does suggest that Kos is right that Democrats should begin unifying sooner than later. Whatever edge Dems had in voter turnout mechanics has clearly evaporated. GOP GOTV operations are now state-of-the-art, and they are going to have all of the money they need.
In his HuffPo report on Kos’s statement, Daniel Marans quotes the head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee:

“Hillary Clinton was made a better candidate thanks to Bernie Sanders engaging her in a race to the top on popular economic populism issues like debt-free college, expanding Social Security, and jailing Wall Street bankers who break the law,” said Adam Green, PCCC’s co-founder, in a statement. “Had she run away from Elizabeth Warren-style ideas instead of working to ride an economic populist tide, many Super Tuesday results likely would have been different.”
“The primary continues — but no matter who wins, the Democratic Party has begun to be fundamentally remolded in Elizabeth Warren’s image,” Green added in the statement. “Armed with popular economic populist themes, Democrats are better positioned to win in November.”

The worst mistake would be for Democrats to become complaisant or overconfident as a result of the GOP’s recent meltdown. Numerous polls show that American voters are evenly polarized on many issues, and it’s not hard to imagine a number of events occurring which could make the 2016 general election razor-close. Internecine bickering is no longer an option for Democrats who seek a progressive victory in November. Save that for after the election. As Moultsas explains,

After Clinton is elected, we’ll all have plenty of reasons to be upset at her and criticize her actions. That’s what would happen even if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren got elected, because no one can ever live up to any good liberal’s hopes and expectations. Politics is messy and requires compromises and decisions that will never match our ideal. But hey, we’ll push Clinton hard when it requires, and we’ll keep working for a more inclusive and democratic Democratic Party.

“But now,” concludes Kos, “we’ve got to start focusing on the immediate task at hand, making sure we keep the White House, win back the Senate and maybe even the House, and lock down the Supreme Court for a liberal generation. Sound good?”

The 11th Republican candidates’ debate of the cycle was another gift to Democrats for its gutter tone and substantive emptiness. It was also remarkable from a strategic point of view since it showed a new anti-Trump cabal in action, and then at the end displayed its members promising to support Trump as the nominee. I wrote about the event’s significance at New York:

Rarely has a presidential candidates’ debate so closely reflected the overall state of the race as the 11th Republican gabfest held in Detroit tonight. After Super Tuesday, Marco Rubio called for emergency collective action by the remaining contenders to stop the “con man” Trump without adjudicating for the present which of them would win the prize. Mitt Romney confirmed the cabal and its everyone-take-their-best-shot strategy in a big speech today. It’s beginning to sink in that this strategy almost certainly depends on a “contested convention,” the first for Republicans in forty years.
The candidate most blessed by this development was John Kasich, who almost overnight has gone from being an annoying impediment to the consolidation of anti-Trump and anti-Cruz votes behind Marco Rubio to a valued collaborator who might knock off the Donald in winner-take-all Ohio. And tonight, as Rubio and Cruz (and the Fox moderators) focused the most extended fire of the entire campaign on Trump, Kasich was left alone to devote his entire debate performance to the recitation of his record and message to Michiganders — a state where he needs to do reasonably well on Tuesday as a springboard to Ohio on March 15.
As a starting point for the anti-Trump collective-action cabal, tonight’s debate was probably about as good as it gets. For long, long minutes Rubio beat up on the Donald as a con man and Cruz savaged him as a crypto-Democrat, the two lines of attack regularly reinforced by the moderators and converging in the impression that Trump’s a terrible gamble, even for the people who are most attracted to him. From long experience during this campaign, it would be foolish to assume the debate damaged Trump’s standing significantly. But if it didn’t, perhaps the man is indeed bulletproof. He did seem uncharacteristically flustered at times.
It’s unlikely Rubio — who for the second debate in a row got into long insult-laden cross-talk exchanges with Trump — or Cruz helped themselves that much. But again, in the collective-action scenario, they’re like crime bosses who’ve agreed to rub out a common opponent while recognizing that they will have their own reckoning down the line. Meanwhile, Kasich was either smart or lucky enough to ignore the carnage and speak for himself, though if he loses Ohio, he will be dumped from the convention cabal unceremoniously for failure to bring delegates to the table.
One very important moment occurred at the very end of the debate, when the candidates were asked if they’d reaffirm the “loyalty pledge” they all took late last summer, promising to support the ultimate Republican nominee. It was framed initially as a specific challenge to Rubio, who has been promoting the #NeverTrump meme and treating the mogul’s potential nomination as an unendurable violation of Republican principles. Indeed, Trump has noticed that and has openly suggested he might not feel so inclined to observe the loyalty pledge and forswear an independent candidacy if the other candidates drop their own pledges. But all the candidates backed away from loyalty-pledge brinkmanship tonight and promised the ultimate collective action to prevent the horror of another Democratic president. For Rubio, “never” apparently doesn’t mean what it says.
Trump may have missed a strategic opportunity to make his own renewal of the loyalty-pledge contingent on not having the nomination “stolen” from him by some Establishment skullduggery in Cleveland. But as the front-runner — for now — he may have figured he could afford to be magnanimous.

He’s a “con man,” conventional Republicans are saying of Trump.. But they are also making it clear he is their con man.

In the current issue of the New Yorker, John Cassidy interviews TDS Founding Editor Ruy Teixeira on the topic “Could Donald Trump Win the General Election?” From Cassidy’s report on the interview:

Teixeira, who is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, co-authored a paper titled “The Path to 270 in 2016,” which argued that demographics continue to favor the Democrats in assembling a majority in the Electoral College.
In conversation, Teixeira began by reviewing some figures that he and his colleagues have put together. Between 1976 and 2012, the percentage of white voters in the U.S. electorate declined from eighty-nine per cent to seventy-four per cent. In 2016, that number is likely to fall another two per cent, Teixeira said. That means the minority vote will rise from twenty-six per cent to twenty-eight per cent. About half of that increase reflects the growing Hispanic population; the other half is accounted for by rising numbers of Asians and peoples of other ethnicities.

Cassidy asks Teixeira if Trump could win, as some observers have ventured, by turning out enough discontented white working class voters in the rust belt. Teixeira responded that “It is not crazy. But I think it would be very hard to pull off.” Cassidy adds,

Teixeira went on to explain that he was skeptical in part because, on a national basis, Trump’s support among white voters isn’t quite as strong as it sometimes appears to be. While he is attracting a lot of people to his rallies and to the Republican voting booths, it is a mistake to believe that these people are wholly representative of that segment of the electorate. “We are talking about the most alienated white non-college voters, and some college-educated voters,” Teixeira said. “The most totally pissed-off ones.” Among white Americans as a whole, including those who vote Republican, Teixeira reminded me, there are many people with moderate or liberal views. And in order to win the election, Texeira went on, Trump would need to rack up huge majorities of the white vote in some parts of the country where that vote has traditionally been relatively liberal, compared to the white vote in the South.
…Teixeira cited some more figures for individual states, distinguishing between white working-class voters who didn’t go to college–Trump’s base–and white college-educated voters. In Ohio in 2012, Mitt Romney won the white working-class vote by a sixteen-per-cent margin: fifty-seven per cent to forty-one per cent. According to Teixeira’s projections, Trump, to carry Ohio in November, would need to increase this margin to twenty-two or twenty-three points. “That’s a big ask,” Teixeira said. And Trump would also need to retain, or even increase, Romney’s ten-point margin among college-educated white Republicans, even though at least some members of this group may be sufficiently put off by Trump’s extremism to stay at home, or even to switch to the Democrats.

Teixeira cites the 2012 white working-class votes in Wisconsin and Minnesota, which were evenly-split, as illustrative of the challenge facing the GOP nominee in those states in 2016. In addition, writes Cassidy, “The biggest weakness in the argument that Trump can win, Teixeira said, is that it rests on the notion that he can raise turnout among such voters, particularly working-class ones, without provoking a similarly high turnout among anti-Trump voters, particularly people of color.”
“I find it just so implausible that we could have this massive white nativist mobilization without also provoking a big mobilization among minority voters,” Teixeira said. “It is kind of magical thinking that you could do one thing and not have the other.”
Cassidy cautions, however, that “On the other side of the ledger, Trump has been trampling on established political wisdom since he launched his campaign. So far, it has worked for him.” But Teixeira responds that, even so, a Trump sweep of the needed states would also require a significant dip in African American and Latino turnout — not a wise bet in 2016.
For a more detailed look at Ruy Teixeira’s cutting edge research on the demographic dynamics and political attitudes underlying the 2016 elections, see his recent publication with co-authors John Halpin and Rob Griffin, “The Path to 270 in 2016” and “America’s Electoral Future: How Changing Demographics Could Impact Presidential Elections from 2016 to 2032,” written with William H. Frey and Robert Griffin.

Suzy Khimm, a former senior editor of The New Republic, addresses a question of consequence at The New York Times Opinion Pages, “Can the Sanders Movement Go Local?” It’s an important issue, whether or not Sanders wins the Democratic nomination and the presidency, as Khimm explains:

…The test of the “political revolution” Mr. Sanders has started won’t just be the strength of his primary challenge, but also whether his movement can survive without him and help get other candidates elected…Despite a revival of movement activism, the left has struggled over the last eight years to achieve broad electoral success outside the White House. Many of the voters who propelled Barack Obama to victory twice didn’t show up for midterm elections, helping Republicans recapture both houses of Congress by 2014 and win control of 31 governorships and nearly 70 percent of state legislative chambers.

Khimm adds “During the heyday of Occupy, many activists rejected electoral politics, unlike their Tea Party counterparts, who leapt into races at every level of government, and scored huge victories for conservatives.” She quotes Democratic consultatn Joe Trippi, who explains, “We’ve been doing this backwards. The mistake is thinking that we get behind a progressive candidate for president, and that will solve all our problems.” Further, notes Khimm,

One of the biggest problems facing the left is structural. Whether by choice or circumstance, insurgent Democrats haven’t relied on the party establishment to build their support, so the party apparatus is ill equipped to capitalize on that momentum, which is particularly problematic in midterm elections and on the state and local levels.
Insurgent candidates can build up huge email lists and an army of eager volunteers, but if they’re operating independently from the party establishment there’s no obvious way for them to pass that knowledge on to the next breakout candidate. “There’s no progressive repository to keep the movement intact for the next progressive candidate — or the progressive candidate in California or Texas or wherever,” Mr. Trippi said.

Conservatives, fueled by GOP donors like the Koch brothers, have out-organized Democrats at the state and local levels, then gerrymandered districts to lock Democrats out with extraordinary effectiveness. But the good news, says, Khimm, is that Sanders supporters are now beginning to run down-ballot in increasing numbers.
There is a concern that a Clinton victory might slow the trend. But Sen. Sanders is himself every inch a long-haul social change advocate, and he well-understands that a permanent grass roots movement, based on his policies, is imperative for securing meaningful reforms. The challenge is crafting the structures that can instill his message in his young followers, who can carry his torch of hope into the future and win state and local elections with ever-increasing effectiveness — regardless of who is president.