Tuesday Open Thread [4.5.16]

WISCONSIN—Emerson–Cruz 40, Trump 35, Kasich 21
WISCONSIN—Emerson–Sanders 51, Clinton 43
WISCONSIN—ARG–Trump 42, Cruz 32, Kasich 23
WISCONSIN—ARG–Clinton 49, Sanders 48
CALIFORNIA—SurveyUSA –Trump 40, Cruz 32, Kasich 17
CALIFORNIA—SurveyUSA–Clinton 53, Sanders 39
NATIONAL—Morning Consult–Clinton 47, Sanders 39
NATIONAL—NBC News|SurveyMonkey –Trump 45, Cruz 28, Kasich 18
NATIONAL—Morning Consult–Trump 45, Cruz 27, Kasich 14

Could there be more divergent polling on Wisconsin? One poll with Clinton up by 1, and another with Sanders up by 8. I guess we can’t be surprised with any result tonight.

There is a pretty interesting New York Times article detailing the story of the Sanders campaign, which is good because that means they are in touch with reality and deal with facts and math.

The morning after he lost the Nevada caucuses in February, Bernie Sanders held a painful conference call with his top advisers. Mr. Sanders expressed deep frustration that he had not built a stronger political operation in the state, and then turned to the worrisome situation at hand.

His strategy for capturing the Democratic presidential nomination was based on sweeping all three early-voting states, and he had fallen short, winning only New Hampshire — to the consternation of his wife, Jane, who questioned whether he should have campaigned more in 2015.

Without that sweep, his aides thought at the time, Mr. Sanders had little hope of overcoming his vast problems with black voters in the Southern primaries. And he had no convincing evidence to challenge Hillary Clinton’s electability.

“If Clinton had lost Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, it would have been a devastating series of defeats that would have called into question her entire campaign,” said Tad Devine, one of several Sanders advisers who described the Feb. 21 conference call. “We had to shift our strategy. But no matter what, the nomination became tougher to win.”

Mr. Sanders is now campaigning more effectively than many expected, exposing Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate, and is positioning himself to win contests like the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday. But allies and advisers of Mr. Sanders say they missed opportunities to run an aggressive political operation in 2015 that would have presented more of a challenge to Mrs. Clinton. She has now firmly built a big lead in delegates needed to clinch the nomination — a margin that would be smaller if Mr. Sanders had run differently last year, according to interviews with more than 15 people who are on his team or close to him.

The article reads as a post mortem, a “woulda-coulda-shoulda” “hindsight is 20/20” kinda piece. First Read: “It’s hard to sustain a revolution when the revolutionaries are admitting that the war is over and that they lost. And that’s the impression you get after reading the story. Will this affect Sanders’ voter mobilization, his grassroots donor base, and his attacks on Clinton on the campaign trail?”

Yesterday, the “Supreme Court ruled against a challenge to a decades long practice used in drawing political maps, saying states may continue to divide legislative seats according to total population rather than limiting representation to citizens or voters,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The decision is a blow to conservative activists who argued the Constitution forbids counting immigrants or prisoners who lack the right to vote… A contrary ruling would have upended the practice in nearly every state, which since the one-person, one-vote principle was established in the 1960s, have divided legislative districts according to total population.”

Rick Hasen: “Justice Ginsburg wrote the opinion for the Court, and it is clear (as I had been saying) that Justice Scalia’s death did not affect the outcome of this case.” And the reason for that is that it was an unanimous 8-0 decision, which surprises me. Maybe there are some laws and principles that are so fundamental that not even conservative activist judges will not touch them.

First Read: “Now if Cruz wins all of the [Wisconsin’s] 42 delegates, which is possible if he runs the table, the percentage of remaining delegates that Trump will need to win to hit the magic number will increase to about 59%. If Cruz triumphs in Wisconsin, but Trump wins a handful of congressional districts, Trump’s percentage will be 57%. And if Trump somehow wins all of the state’s delegates, it will go down to 54%. So in a race where EVERY delegate matters, tonight’s margin — and the corresponding delegate haul — is what’s important.”

Jeff Stein:

Despite the claims of some Sanders fans, the Democratic race really isn’t wide open. Clinton is up by more than 220 pledged delegates. Sanders’s supporters have taken to pointing out that since only about half of the pledged delegates have been decided, there’s still enough states remaining for Sanders to still close the gap. (Clinton also leads among superdelegates.)

And that’s true. The problem is that of the states remaining, very few are expected to break heavily for Sanders.

“There’s a bunch of states after [Wisconsin] that I think will go for Clinton,” says Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist. “My view is people are giving too much importance to Wisconsin: It seems to line up well for Bernie, but I don’t think it’s going to have any influence on what happens later.”

To get a sense of just how difficult it would be for Sanders to close the delegate gap, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver came up with a “Bernie miracle” model that lays out a path for him to win the 988 delegates he needs.

Silver found that Sanders would need to win Wisconsin by 16 points to run even with Clinton nationally. He’d also need to win Clinton’s home state of New York by at least 4 points, though most polls have found Sanders trailing there.

“I think she would need to lose by 15 points or more in Wisconsin to really worry about the narrative of the popular choice not breaking for her,” says Wagner, the University of Wisconsin political scientist.

Ed Kilgore says Cruz and Sanders have a lot to lose tonight in Wisconsin:

Because of the national Democratic principle of proportional representation, Sanders is unlikely to shave much from Clinton’s pledged-delegate lead even with a relatively comfortable win in Wisconsin. What a victory would mainly do for him is keep his winning streak going — a Wisconsin victory would give him six wins in the last seven contests dating back to March 22. So his campaign and allied interest groups and media would have two weeks to hype this momentum going into New York, a virtual must-win. Inversely, a Clinton win in Wisconsin, though it would have little impact on the delegate count, would be very damaging psychologically to Team Sanders, much as the occasional late win for Obama in 2008 messed up HRC’s late momentum.

On the Republican side, Wisconsin is not what you’d call Trump Country, with a relatively well-educated and fairly religious primary electorate. An analysis by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn showed the Wisconsin primary electorate as most resembling Iowa’s, Kansas’s, and Utah’s — all states where Trump has lost to Cruz. The state’s GOP has also become a conservative-movement stalwart during the partisan wars of the last few years, led by Governor Scott Walker, who endorsed Cruz (as did most of the state’s conservative writers and gabbers). […]

Like a Clinton win, a Trump upset would have tremendous psychological value, especially heading into the northeastern primaries where he’s expected to do well unless his “momentum” is gone. Doing better than expected in the Badger State would once again prove Trump obituaries are premature.

Jonathan Chait says that, despite protestations to the contrary, Speaker Paul Ryan is running for President: “If Paul Ryan does not want the Republican nomination, he will make what we call a ‘Shermanesque statement.’ Despite numerous opportunities, he has failed to do so. The most plausible explanation for this is that Ryan does, in fact, covet the nomination.”

“Sometimes politicians have reasons to stoke presidential speculation without having an intention to run. Maybe they’re gauging potential interest, or maybe they’re looking to attract media attention to elevate their profile. Ryan has no such motivation. If he wanted to rule out getting the nomination at the convention, he could simply state he wouldn’t accept it. He hasn’t.”

Mike Allen: “On the eve of the Wisconsin primaries, top Republicans are becoming increasingly vocal about their long-held belief that Speaker Paul Ryan will wind up as the nominee, perhaps on the fourth ballot at a chaotic Cleveland convention. One of the nation’s best-wired Republicans, with an enviable prediction record for this cycle, sees a 60% chance of a convention deadlock, and a 90% chance that delegates turn to Ryan – ergo, a 54% chance that Ryan, who’ll start the third week of July as chairman of the Republican National Convention, will end it as the nominee.”

“Ryan, who’s more calculating and ambitious than he lets on, is running the same playbook he did to become Speaker: saying he doesn’t want it, that it won’t happen. In both cases, the maximum leverage is to NOT WANT IT – and to be begged to do it. He and his staff are trying to be as Shermanesque as it gets.”

Is this Shermanesque enough?: “I think you need to run for president in order to be president. I’m not running for president, so, period. End of story.” — Speaker Paul Ryan, quoted by the Times of Israel.

“Republicans, already girding for their most tumultuous convention in decades, now have another fight brewing: a divisive battle over gay marriage on the party’s official national platform,” Politico reports.

“It’s an issue that drives intense passion, and one that splits the mainstream and evangelical wings of the GOP. With the convention less than four months away, both sides are mobilizing in anticipation of a bitter clash over whether the party should embrace a more moderate approach to gay nuptials in keeping with a public that is more open to it — or maintain the hard line the party’s base demands.”

With less than 9 months to go in President Obama’s second term, Nobel laureate/NYT columnist Paul Krugman takes a look at his presidency and offers a well-documented set of conclusions about the Administration’s accomplishments regarding the economy, financial reform and health care that will set Republican teeth to grinding, especialy Krugman’s summation that: “All in all, it’s quite a record. Assuming Democrats hold the presidency, Mr. Obama will emerge as a hugely consequential president — more than Reagan.”

“As long as you come here legally and get a proper job . . . we need immigrants. Who’s going to vacuum our living rooms and clean up after us? Americans don’t like to do that.” — Ivana Trump, quoted by the New York Post.

Jonathan Chait

Arguments by purists have an emotional appeal to political activists that pragmatic arguments lack — they promise freedom from the vise grip of trade-offs between one’s ideological goals and the fickle loyalties of swing voters. Purist arguments are usually wrong. But not always. In 1980, Republicans disregarded the pragmatic choice — centrist candidate George H.W. Bush — to nominate conservative darling Reagan, whose presidency yanked the terms of public debate rightward for more than a generation. So Sanders’s version of a purist argument deserves not to be dismissed in generalized terms but taken seriously in its specifics. And Democrats in New York, or at least the ones who find ­Sanders’s ideas attractive, are currently wrestling with exactly this question: Just how much purity can we afford?

A Sanders nomination would have certain clear benefits. His public image is more hazily defined, which could be advantageous in comparison with that of Clinton, who is well known to, and disliked by, the public as a whole. A much smaller percentage of Americans have already decided not to like him (specifically: 40 percent to her 55 percent). The cranky white-haired Vermonter has some personal qualities that recommend him even to voters who don’t subscribe to his worldview: He’s forthright about his beliefs and untainted by the routine low-grade corruption that has sucked in much of the political class (including both Clintons, who’ve wrung every cent out of the speaking circuit). Voters sometimes admire principled politicians even if they don’t share all the principles in question. And just as Reagan introduced a new, anti-government language into mainstream discourse, Sanders’s economic program, if he were elected, might reframe the terms of the domestic debate.

But a Sanders nomination comes with potentially enormous risks. As a candidate, he is laden with positions likely to alienate or even terrify a majority of the electorate. Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist,” would increase taxes on the middle class. (A recent poll found that just 7 percent of Americans share his belief that the middle class pays too little.) Sanders’s health-care plan would move 200 million people off private health insurance onto a new public plan — a frightening prospect given that disruptions on a far tinier scale have alienated the public from health-care reform in the past. Oh, and according to a 2011 poll, Americans disapprove of socialism by about two-to-one.

Clinton has largely abstained from exploiting these liabilities, since many of the voters she needs agree with Sanders. A Republican would show no such restraint, and Sanders could quickly become less popular than Clinton. There is a longer record of Americans’ seeing fit to vote for a candidate whose character they vaguely distrust — Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson — rather than for a candidate who seems to pose a danger to their pocketbook. (Reagan had to renounce his initial opposition to Medicare to get elected.)