Month: March 2016

Lulz:

Three Rubio-friendly conservative writers — Jen Rubin of the Washington Post, Dan McLaughlin of Red State, and Guy Benson of Townhall.com — contend it’s time for Rubio to quit the race and endorse Ted Cruz.

I never could figure out why the right would pick a guy who was everything they hated about Obama. He was an ethnic minority who had some state legislative experience and was serving in his first term in the U.S. Senate. Four years ago, it was bizarre that the Republicans reacted to the passage of Obamacare by nominating Mitt Romney, who basically invented Obamacare. People seriously expected the Republicans to follow that up by nominating a Latino who led the fight to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate?

The guy is good-looking, I’ll give him that. And he’s capable with the right preparation of giving a good speech. But he’s not charismatic. He doesn’t have the special attraction of a Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama.

He was clearly out of his league on the big debate stage even before Chris Christie exposed him as a crib note candidate.

I don’t know. I never took him seriously.

He’s a classic case of a person who looks good on paper.

Ultimately, it’s up to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa to decide whether or not to hold a confirmation hearing for President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court. I’m sure Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has strong opinions about the subject, but it’s really Grassley’s responsibility. </p

Despite this, Grassley just announced that he’s making a phony kind of concession to the Democrats:

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said the Senate Judiciary Committee will have a “full-blown debate” Thursday on whether to hold a hearing on a Supreme Court nomination.

“If you want to hear a full-blown debate on this issue, I think we’ll probably have one before our committee tomorrow while we’re also considering three of four judges and a piece of legislation as well,” he said.

The Judiciary Committee will be considering other routine business tomorrow, including nominations to the U.S. Court of International Trade and the District Court of Hawaii. And they’ll probably have a “full-blown debate” on the SCOTUS nominee. But the committee has 20 members, eleven of whom are Republicans. Even if Ted Cruz doesn’t show up, there’s still a 10-9 advantage for the GOP. So, unless a Republican defects, the refusal to hold a hearing will stand.

And I’m assuming a vote on the matter, but that actually seems unlikely. I expect this to be more in the nature of an argument than a vote.

Chris Bowers put together a useful document that helps guide us through the delegate process on the Democratic side. He looks only at the pledged (or earned) delegate count, excluding superdelegates. He then makes an estimate based on his best guess of who will win each primary or caucus and extrapolates from that how long it will take Clinton to win an outright majority of the pledged delegates. His guesses are based on polls where available, but also just on the exit polls of the states that have already held contests and how they map onto the demographics of future states. There’s also the caucus vs. primary, open vs. closed considerations.

His surprising finding is that Clinton won’t officially have the majority of pledged delegates until she wins California on June 7th. There are a bunch of other contests on June 7th (the Dakotas and Montana, New Jersey and New Mexico) that could also provide the majority-making delegate.

His final estimate is that Clinton will finish the process after the Washington DC primary on June 14th with 2283.9 pledged delegates to Sanders’s 1767.1. The threshold number to win the majority of earned delegates is 2,026 delegates. The threshold to win the nomination is 2,382 delegates of all types..

Now, we saw two important things demonstrated last night. The first was that the polls aren’t reliable and just because Sanders is currently not favored to win a state doesn’t mean that he won’t. The second was that narrow victories are not worth much in terms of netting delegates against your opponent, but blowout wins can be very valuable. According to Nate Silver, Bernie Sanders won the delegate fight in Michigan 69-61 but lost it in Mississippi 4-32.

Going back to Bowers’s estimates, Clinton is on track to win the pledged delegate fight with a 258 delegate cushion. To put things in perspective, it would take 32 Michigans or nine Mississippi-style blowouts for Sanders to net 258 delegates over Clinton.

Of course, we can’t ignore the superdelegates. As of this morning, the New York Times estimates that Hillary Clinton has a 461-25 advantage with the superdelegates (along with a 759-546 earned delegate lead).

I hope this information demonstrates a few things:

1. Clinton is not on track to win the nomination outright without the help of superdelegates. On current trends, she’s going to come up about 100 votes short (2,284 out of the 2,382 needed).
2. She’s unlikely to lose her pledged delegate advantage at any point, so a mass defection of superdelegates simply isn’t going to happen barring some scandal or health scare.
3. Sanders cannot put much of a dent in her lead by winning narrow victories even in big important states like Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.
4. Yet, Sanders should remain mathematically alive all the way to the convention.
5. Based on Chris Bowers’s projections, Sanders is on track to win almost 1,800 of the 4,762 delegates to the convention. This would be 38% of the total delegates.

After his upset win in Michigan last night, it’s certainly realistic to believe that Sanders can do substantially better than 38%, but it’s simply not realistic to believe that he can win. Still, if roughly 40% of the delegates in Philadelphia are pledged to Sanders, that’s going to be impressive and they’ll have tremendous influence over the platform and the rule-writing committees. It may be four years before you see how these delegates have had influence over how the party conducts its presidential nominating process, but they will have their influence.

The platform of the party has a more nebulous influence, as it isn’t binding on the president or the lawmakers. But, if you’re trying to change the culture of a major political party, having a big say in what’s in their platform is not unimportant.

For these reasons, it’s worth the effort for the Sanders folks to keep up the fight for delegates. He can release them to vote for Clinton on the first ballot if he wants, but they’ll still be there to vote on everything else a convention considers.

You can argue that the party needs to unify, but I think Obama ultimately benefitted in two main ways from the fact that Clinton wouldn’t drop out in 2008. First, it forced him to hone all his campaigning and debating skills, and vetted him thoroughly so that a lot of his vulnerabilities were old news by the time the general election came around. Second, and probably more importantly, it forced Obama to organize in all fifty states, including Indiana and North Carolina which he went on to narrowly win in his contest against John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Sanders might want to lower the heat a bit to make it easier to unify the party later, but he’s still got plenty to fight for and so do his supporters.

It’s impossible not to get a little excited about what Bernie Sanders just pulled off in Michigan. I am so schizophrenic about this race. I always root for Sanders to win every contest even though I’m not at all convinced he’s the right candidate for the job. What it reminds me of is one of those situations in sports where you know you need the team you don’t like to win so your team can make the playoffs, but you just can’t bring yourself to root for (in my case) the Boston Red Sox or the Dallas Cowboys.

This is why I can’t endorse a candidate.

It’s also why I’m trying my hat at just doing analysis with no advocacy.

The Sanders win in Michigan has changed the race. There can be no doubt about that. But before Sanders supporters get too excited, I have to douse them with some cold reality.

Sanders got crushed in Mississippi so badly tonight that he barely made the 15% minimum threshold to get some delegates there. And this was a two-person race. It was just a brutal drubbing. Clinton is also controlling almost all the superdelegates out of Michigan. It’s likely that she’ll emerge from tonight with the most delegates from both states, and also with a significant net gain in her delegate lead. Sanders cannot afford to have victories like this.

However, if he can translate his win in Michigan into wins in other upper Midwest states like Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin, he’s going to start eating into Clinton’s earned delegate lead.

It’s almost impossible for him to catch her in the overall delegate race, but this is mainly due to her dominance with superdelegates.

She shouldn’t be worried at all, really, but this is a setback for her. And it’s exposed a weakness that most people thought would be a strength. She’s not getting it done with the very same white working class Democratic voters who formed her base of support eight years ago.

Trump’s arguing that he can steal these voters in November and carry blue states. McCain thought the same thing, but he’s a different kind of politician than Trump.

In any case, my hat’s off to Sanders and his organizers. Very, very impressive work tonight. No one will be asking him to drop out now and he’s going full speed ahead with a head full of steam.

Show your solidarity and go help Pam out.

Conservatives like to talk about “the liberal media” and they frequently disparage the Washington Post as a liberal paper. I’ve never agreed with them, and I have an example that helps explain why. Between 10:20 PM EST March 6th and 3:54 PM EST March 7th, the Post managed to publish sixteen stories that cast Bernie Sanders in a negative light. Another way of looking at this is that the Post savaged Bernie Sanders sixteen times in a sixteen hour span.

That’s how the Post started their week, and it’s hard for me to avoid the impression that this was at the direction of the management under the guidance of senior editors.

Maybe you don’t like Bernie Sanders. Maybe you don’t want him to be the nominee. But it’s not about anything particular to him. How do you feel about any candidate getting that kind of finger-on-the-scale negative coverage? What if it was a liberal candidate that you did like and did want to see win the nomination? How would you feel then?

My point here is that the media, particularly the media that covers national politics, does a pretty good job of playing whack-a-mole with anyone who moves a centimeter outside the Overton Window. And that can hurt radical conservatives, but it hurts liberals, too, if they challenge the status quo.

Sometimes this provides a valuable service and helps people stay grounded and sane, but it’s definitely not liberal bias. It’s enforcement of a narrow band of acceptable politics.

For this kind of behavior to be beneficial the elite establishment they’re protecting has to be worthy of protection. If you think Fred Hiatt, Marty Baron and the collective Beltway wisdom have been right about the big issues since they took over at the Washington Post, then maybe you don’t have a problem with how they throw their weight around.

I think they’re protecting people who haven’t earned the trust they’re putting in them.

But, however you feel, this ain’t liberal bias.

We’re already seeing people try to report on what a contested convention in Cleveland would look like. It’s a tricky task. Getting it close to right involves understanding several different pieces.

Greg Sargent is dealing with two of them. First, there’s an effort to figure out the advance game. What’s the most effective way to keep Donald Trump from winning an outright majority of the delegates. Without this, there will be no contested convention to talk about. Is it better to stop Trump by having three opponents splitting delegates, or two, or maybe a head-to-head matchup would work best?

The second piece is to look at how different delegate splits would play or look at the convention. Obviously, it would be less painful and divisive to deny Trump the nomination if he isn’t even close to having a majority, or if the second place finisher is only a couple of dozen delegates behind him. If he’s got a large plurality lead, Trump and his supporters will have a strong moral argument, supposedly, that he’s the only fair choice of the electorate. But the three-way split strategy to stop Trump will make it more likely that Trump has a significant lead over all of his opponents.

This is useful stuff to think about, but there’s a lot more to consider.

The most important thing to understand is how the mechanics of the convention would work. Which candidates will be eligible for consideration, and when in the process will they become eligible? Which individuals, groups, committees, will have the power to interpret or change the rules? Which rules may need to be interpreted or changed in which scenarios? Who is positioned already to control this process and what candidate do they support, if any? Which candidate will do the best job prior to the convention of influencing who the delegates will actually be so that they can bank their support on a second ballot? How will the anti-Trump candidates coordinate, assuming they can act collectively at all?

For anyone seeking to educate the public about what to expect, that’s a daunting amount of information to wrestle with before you can offer a really informed opinion.

And there’s another problem.

We haven’t seen a truly contested election in a long time. There have been test votes to change the rules, but those have failed. No one can remember a situation where actual multiple-ballot wheeling and dealing took place. And, back when those kinds of deals actually occurred, the candidates were more clearly representative of factions than they are today.

It’s true that Cruz is a Southerner, but so is Rubio, and neither of them really represent a regional faction because there are no regional issues like Jim Crow or slavery at stake. None of the candidates clearly represents the Eastern financial establishment. Trump comes closest by biography, but he also has the most dedicated opposition from that quarter. Cruz is loathed by the Washington Establishment, but he’s the candidate with a spouse who works for Goldman Sachs. Rubio has been the golden boy of the financial elites since Bush and Christie and Walker dropped out, but not for any clear reason beyond his reasonableness on immigration. And Kasich probably comes closest to a Rockefeller or Eisenhower Republican. He did, after all, work for Lehman Brothers.

This is a lot different from a having one candidate from the labor faction, and another from the farmer faction, and another that’s anti-lynching, and another that’s for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” We can’t look at any urban political boss or Daley machine. There’s no George Meany champion. There’s not even an obvious conservative/moderate split, at least not in any straightforward way. It’s actually Trump who has the closest thing to an army of dedicated soldiers, but they’re united around something nebulous and visceral rather than any kind of issue that can be horse-traded away.

A short way of putting this is that the delegates won’t form blocks of voters with distinct interests. You can’t tell the teachers that you’ll give them some legislation if they abandon Trump. There will be no rump of delegates who can be bought off by making their guy the head of the EPA or the Energy Department. Can you imagine Donald Trump as a cabinet official or vice-presidential candidate anyway?

What I think this all means is that perceived electability will be the biggest consideration. That’s what John Kasich is banking on, and he’d probably have the poll numbers to back up his case for himself.

But Kasich would have to jump through more hoops than just having the best argument that he can win the general election. He’ll almost definitely need to have Rule 40(b) changed so that he can stand for the nomination despite not having won the majority of the delegates in eight states. And he’ll have to get Cruz and Rubio to back him, which will require that he agree, most likely, to put one of them on the ticket and the other in a position of considerable power.

An outsider like Mitt Romney would face the same challenges and would probably have to wait for multiple ballots to demonstrate that none of the top four can form a majority.

Trump, on the other hand, would have a comparatively easy task. He might be controversial and seemingly unelectable, but nominating him would honor the choice of a plurality of the Republican electorate and short circuit a circus at the convention. It would require no heavy-handed rules changes or the forming of unlikely coalitions. And, perhaps most importantly, it wouldn’t create a situation where Trump might cry foul, walk away from the nominee, and do his best to assure the election of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

For these reasons, I see a successful challenge to Trump as unlikely to succeed at the convention, assuming he enters with the most delegates. But it would, at least, put a lot of Republicans on the record that they weren’t willing to swallow his racism and xenophobia and misogyny and boorishness.

That might be the best anyone can hope for.

Probably, the only thing that can stop Trump is Trump. If he makes himself toxic enough, the delegates in Cleveland will find a way to send him packing. What they won’t be able to do is send him packing and keep him on the team.

The next time someone tells you that both sides do it…

Curious because, with one exception, it’s not intuitively obvious.

From 2000 through 2012, there have been twelve Presidential and four Vice-Presidential nationally televised debates.  What  interested me was the viewership of each of those debates and how they compared with each other.

The viewership of the VP debates conforms to what would be expected.  Although the numbers are somewhat surprising or alarming depending on one’s perspective.  Can you peg the year and the candidates:

69.9 million – 2008 – Biden v. Palin

51.4 million – 2012 – Biden v. Ryan
43.5 million – 2004 – Cheney v. Edwards
28.5 million – 2000 – Cheney v. Lieberman

Same task for the first of the three Presidential debates in each of the four elections:

67.2 million – 2012 – Obama v. Romney
62.4 million – 2004 – Bush v. Kerry
52.4 million – 2008 – Obama v. McCain
46.6 million – 2000 – Bush v. Gore

In which year(s) did viewership decline between the first and second debate AND the second and third debate?

In which year(s) did viewership increase between the second and third debate. 2012

Bonus question: Which year had the highest total rating for the three debates? 2012
UPDATE – additional information

In chronological order – including all three POTUS and VP debates:

2000: first 46.5, second 37.5, third 37.7; VP 28.5

2004: first 62.4, second 46.7, third 51.1; VP 43.5

2008: first 52.4, second 63.2, third 56.5; VP 69.9

2012: first 67.2, second 65.6, third 59.2; VP 51.4

What I would have expected is that viewership would be highest when it’s an open seat race because that’s when the public knows the least about two candidates and it’s the first opportunity to contrast and compare their styles, demeanor, knowledge, etc. That would have meant higher in 2000 and 2008. But it was more or less the opposite. Why was my assumption wrong?

While my assumption sounds logical, it was undoubtedly influenced by the stupid “undecided” voters networks collect to view the debates and then tell what they heard and how or if the debate led to a decision on who to vote for. Generally, these interviewees (DEMs, GOPs, and INDs,) have struck me as poorly informed, wishy-washy, and came up with odd reasons/reasoning if the debate gave them a reason to move to “decided.” Thus, I assumed that information gathering about the candidates and their policy position was why a large number of people watched the debates. The numbers indicate that that is wrong.

It must be “decideds” that tune in to watch their “guy” or their team “win.” And “decideds” care enough to have previously obtained whatever information they use to make their decision. The low numbers in 2000 indicate that fewer people cared enough to have made a decision and therefore, fewer had a “guy” they wanted to cheer on. And voter turnout in 2000 was low.

The comparatively low number for the first debate in 2008 has been explained as a function of holding it on a Friday night. People have better things to do on Friday nights than watch a debate. True or not, future candidates would be wise to reject a Friday night debate schedule. If Friday is bad, is Saturday equally bad or worse? (No chance, IMO, that HRC, DWS/DNC didn’t exploit that in choosing the dates for the second and third DEM candidates debate.)

With significantly higher viewership of the individual 2012 debates compared to that of 2008, why was voter turnout down? A correlation between debate viewership and voter turnout exists but it’s not perfect. And it’s possible that the blockbuster viewership of the 2008 VP debate had a significant effect on voter turnout. The Palin trainwreck got more people, particularly younger people, to vote.

There are undoubtedly other interpretations for these numbers and would appreciate hearing what others here have to say. Including information from debates prior to 2000 may shed further light on interpretations. One that I did pull up was 1960: first 66.4, second 61.9 and third 63.7. We the people were either much different back then than we are today or a higher percentage of the electorate tuned in because it was a novelty.

We had another Democratic debate last night, and we have another one coming up on Wednesday, and the GOP has another one coming this Thursday. The GOP has had over a dozen debates while the Democrats are not that far behind. My question is do we really need any more debates?? Moderators ask the same questions over and over again, and candidates give the same canned answers over and over again. Does anyone really think anything new is going to come out of these debates?? The GOP is making fools of themselves, talking about everything except the issues, and while Democrats are talking issues, it’s the same issues that they’ve talked about earlier.
It’s time to put an end to the debates until the parties have picked their nominees. Any debate that takes place between now and then are going to be completely useless. The only people who think debates are still useful, are the policy wonks and political junkies who live for this sort of thing. Only 5.5 million people listened to last Democratic debate, and the only reason more people watched the GOP debate was to see Larry, Moe and Curly take shots at each other. Please, enough of these useless, boring, stupid debates. Overkill to the max!!