Tuesday Reads: Feel The Bern-Out

All I see is white people.

Good Morning!!

Today Michigan and Mississippi will hold primaries, and Bernie Sanders will fall farther behind Hillary Clinton in the delegate count for the Democratic nomination.

On the Republican side, in addition to the Michigan and Mississippi primaries, there will be a primary in Idaho and caucuses in Hawaii.

ABC News reports: Storylines to Watch in Tuesday’s 2016 Presidential Primaries and Republican Caucuses.

Republicans will vote Tuesday in the Idaho, Michigan and Mississippi primaries and the Hawaii Republican caucuses. Democrats in Michigan and Mississippi are also holding their primaries.

In total, 205 delegates are at stake for the two Democratic candidates. On the other side of the aisle, 150 are up for grabs for the four remaining Republican candidates.

Bernie has high hopes for Michigan, but at the end of the day he’s likely to be disappointed.

While campaigning in Michigan, Sanders has attacked Clinton with a heavy focus on trade, arguing that Clinton’s support of “disastrous trade deals” has led to job loss in the state.

“If the people of Michigan want to make a decision of which candidate stood against corporate America, stood against these disastrous trade agreements, that candidate is Bernie Sanders,” the Vermont senator said at a campaign rally in Traverse City, Michigan, last Friday.

“We think we’re going to surprise people here in Michigan,” Sanders said Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

However, a NBC/WSJ poll conducted in Michigan shows Hillary Clinton with a major lead of 57 percent among Democrats to Sanders’ 40 percent.

Read more storylines at the ABC News link above.

Sorry, Bernie. Black people in the northern states don’t vote differently from those in southern ones, despite your spin after Super Tuesday. Bernie on This Week:

“I think you’re going to see us doing — and I think the polls indicated it, much better within the African-American community outside of the Deep South,” Sanders said. “You’re going to see us much better in New York state where I think we have a shot to win, in California and in Michigan.”

Dream on. I said after Super Tuesday that we need to be kind to Sanders’ supporters, and that will be even more true tomorrow. They are going through a grieving process and many of them are young people who have never experienced this kind of loss before.

Last night, at the Fox News town hall, Hillary was gentle with Bernie, and we should follow her lead. It will be mostly over after today, but his supporters will still be telling themselves he can win Ohio and Pennsylvania. It’s not going to happen, but the Bernie fans will just have to find out for themselves.

Excuse me . . .

Yesterday John Cole had an interesting post at Balloon Juice: I’ve Kind of Made My Decision. The gist is that he likes Bernie, but has decided to vote for Hillary. It’s a good read, and I suggest to go check it out at the link, but I want to highlight this section (emphasis added):

I know this is going to piss people off, and I know some of you are going to scream ageism, but watching Bernie last night, he just seemed old and tired and wearing down. I was initially leaning Bernie at the beginning of this primary (because of course I was), and every time I look at him he just looks less energetic and a little more beat down. His response latency seems to be increasing as he collects his thoughts, and last night I saw him lashing out angrily about “your Wall Street friends,” and those are just not things that can happen in the general.

I’m not trying to be ageist- I don’t think people his age can’t or shouldn’t be President, it’s just that as I have watched this primary election go on, Clinton seems to be getting stronger and more confident and more ready for the election, while I feel the opposite is true about Sanders. In my mind’s eye, she looks younger to me than she did at the beginning of this primary. Clinton seems to really becoming a happy warrior, despite all the heaps of bullshit the Republicans have thrown at her.

Maybe you don’t see it that way. But I do. I look at Hillary these days and think there is no doubt she could serve eight years right now, while some days I wonder if Bernie is going to make it to November. The Vice President is a backup plan for when things go horribly wrong, not a plan. Again, I’m sorry if my elders think I am bashing them by stating this, but I’m really not trying to- Bernie has more energy on a bad day than I do on a great day, but he just is really starting to look worn down. The contrast for me last night was palpable.

I strongly agree with Cole on this. Bernie is wearing down. I think part of it is age, but I think it’s also his perpetual anger and defensiveness.

All right, I’ll wait for you to finish . . .

Hillary comes off as cool as a cucumber. She has dealt with so much shit over the years that she’s immune to it. As she is fond of saying, whenever she gets knocked down, she gets right back up stronger than ever. It’s clear that she loves the challenge of running as the first woman to become the nominee of any major party. And she is ready to be POTUS from day one.

Bernie, on the other hand, lets criticism and losses get under his skin. and when that happens, he lashed out and he makes unforced errors. He’s just not ready to be the nominee and definitely not ready to be POTUS.

MSNBC: ‘Ghetto’ gaffe highlights Bernie Sanders campaign’s struggle with race.

While discussing his own racial “blind spots” during Sunday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Flint, Michigan, Sen. Bernie Sanders offered that white people “don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor.” His comment drew swift condemnation on social media, since it appeared that the Vermont lawmaker was implying that only black people live in impoverished communities, reinforcing inaccurate and painful stereotypes that have dogged African-Americans for years.

Sanders’ “ghetto” gaffe underlined a persistent problem that may have crippled his bid for the 2016 nomination. He has struggled to connect with black voters, and his choice of words has often undercut a populist economic message that might have resonated with people of color.

Even if Sanders had the best of intentions, it was not his best moment, as evidenced by one of his most prominent African-American surrogates — former NAACP chairman Ben Jealous — who told NBC News: “Sen. Sanders is from Burlington, he grew up in old Brooklyn, he knows white folks live in ghettos.”

On Monday, Sanders attempted to clarify his debate statement, telling a gaggle of reporters in Detroit: “What I meant to say, is when you talk about ghettos, traditionally what you’re talking about is African-American communities.”

Bernie just can’t stop digging, can he?

Jonathan Capehart on the “ghetto” goof: ‘Excuse me!’ Bernie Sanders doesn’t know how to talk about black people.

When Sanders said that, I tweeted, “He knows that all Black people don’t live in ghettos, right?” His answer so threw me that I didn’t even hear him say that white people “don’t know what it’s like to be poor.” Sanders’s cab story might be true, but it also struck me as rhetorical grasping at straws. And for it to be an illumination to Sanders that he doesn’t “understand what police do in certain black communities” is more damning than you think. For in this one exchange, you see Clinton’s fluency in and understanding of the language of race and Sanders’s glaring ignorance.

You also see who the true Democrat is. It’s not Sanders.

Democrats, especially those with national ambitions, know how to talk to people of color, especially African-Americans. They are the base of the Democratic Party. You learn the nuances of their concerns and the issues important to them. You take them to heart. Fail to do that and watch your political career perish. As a former first lady of Arkansas, former first lady of the United States and former Senator from New York, Clinton can speak to Blacks with a fluency that lets African Americans know she gets it and gets them.

After Sanders’ early work on desegregation in Chicago, he doesn’t seem to have focused much on Civil Rights or even the anti-war movement of the 1960s and ’70s. He left Brooklyn in 1968 and moved to Vermont along with many other white people who were fleeing big cities; and it seems that he stayed in his white bubble right up until he began campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.

How much longer do I have to listen to this shouting?

I thought this was interesting out of Sanders’ hometown.

Brooklyn Paper: Turn up, tune in, Bern out: Sanders supporters say not all of Bushwick is behind Brooklyn’s son.

Not all of Bushwick can feel the Bern.

A band of hipster Brooklyn Bushwickans on the stump for Bernie Sanders from inside local industrial loft spaces is having a tough time convincing old-school neighbors to get out and vote for Brooklyn’s son, say the passionate organizers.

“There’s the original Bushwick community and the gentrified Bushwick community,” said Magenna Brink of the Bushwick Berners, who regularly gather to call voters over some brews while they plan their door-to-door outreach at their Forrest Street headquarters as well as the notorious McKibbin Street lofts. “The gentrified community, with all the hipsters and the young kids, are totally behind Bernie. The other community is kind of half-and-half.”

The berners say they have hit the streets to spread the word about their candidate of choice only to find many of the native residents are either not enamored with Sanders’ socialist policies or completely unaware he exists.

“In the lower-income communities, there were a ton of people who said they were Hillary supporters, but they didn’t even know who Bernie Sanders was,” said Brink.

New York is another state Sanders claims he can win, but the polls don’t agree with him.

Today could be interesting on the Republican side too. It seems to me that Donald Trump has not been performing as well as he should be in recent contests, Ted Cruz has been showing a great deal of strength, and Marco Rubio has just about hit bottom. Here are a few interesting stories on the GOP race.

Politico: Is Trump peaking? We’ll find out today.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump will discover whether his weekend struggles were a speed bump — or the first signs of larger troubles ahead.

If the polls are to believed, Trump is in for a dominant day, with blowouts in Michigan and Mississippi to be complemented by another win in Idaho. If Trump falls short, and particularly if he falls short to Ted Cruz for the second time in four days, the businessman’s delegate math gets more complicated, and the soothsayers who’ve long predicted Trump’s collapse will finally see hope for vindication.

For the first time since Iowa, a non-Trump Republican took home the day’s largest haul of delegates last weekend, as Cruz on Saturday won handily in Maine and Kansas and ran a close second in Louisiana and Kentucky. Repeating that feat Tuesday would put more momentum behind the Texas senator’s campaign and strengthen his case as the GOP’s best, only hope of nominating someone other than Trump. Trump’s standing among Republican registered voters—down 3 points from January—nationwide fell slightly in the latest ABC News/Washington Post national poll released Tuesday, while the poll put Cruz up 4 percent, though Trump maintained a 9 point lead over Trump in the poll.

A relative lack of polling adds unpredictability to Tuesday’s votes. While Michigan has been heavily surveyed, Hawaii has gone uncovered, and sparse polls in Mississippi and Idaho are now out of date. Trump had large leads in past surveys, but they were conducted before Marco Rubio and several super PACs went all-out against Trump, before two raucous anti-Trump debates and before his losses to Cruz on Saturday.

Washington Post: Seeing Trump as vulnerable, GOP elites now eye a contested convention.

The presentation is an 11th-hour rebuttal to the fatalism permeating the Republican establishment: Slide by slide, state by state, it calculates how Donald Trump could be denied the presidential nomination.

Marco Rubio wins Florida. John Kasich wins Ohio. Ted Cruz notches victories in the Midwest and Mountain West. And the results in California and other states are jumbled enough to leave Trump three dozen delegates short of the 1,237 required — forcing a contested convention in Cleveland in July.

The slide show, shared with The Washington Post by two operatives advising one of a handful of anti-Trump super PACs, encapsulates the newly emboldened view of many GOP leaders and donors. They see a clearer path to stopping Trump since his two losses and two narrower-than-expected wins in Saturday’s contests.

Read more at the link.

The Washington Post: Trump leads GOP race nationally but with weaker hold on the party.

Donald Trump continues to lead his rivals nationally in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination. But his hold on the GOP electorate has weakened since the primary season began, and the party is now deeply divided over his candidacy, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Trump maintains the support of 34 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, compared with 25 percent for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, 18 percent for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and 13 percent for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Trump maintains the support of 34 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, compared with 25 percent for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, 18 percent for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and 13 percent for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Trump’s margin over Cruz has narrowed from 16 points in January to nine today. As a succession of Republican candidates quit the race, Cruz’s position has ticked up four points since January, Rubio’s has risen by 7 and Kasich’s grew by 11. Trump’s has dipped by three points, within the poll’s margin of sampling error.

What stories are you following? Let us know in the comment thread. We’ll have a live blog later this evening to discuss the primary and caucus results. Have a great Tuesday!

Lazy Saturday Reads: South Carolina in the Spotlight

Hillary Clinton invited to bachelor party in SC

 Good Morning!!

Today should be a big day for Hillary Clinton. She is expected to win the South Carolina Democratic primary by a large margin. According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, she has “a greater than 99% chance of winning” the state’s “first in the South” contest.

I’m totally psyched for for this. I plan to be on the internet most of the day following developments in SC. We can use this post as a live blog until the thread gets too long. We will put up new threads if necessary. It should be a fun day for Hillary supporters. So enjoy yourselves, Sky Dancers!

The Washington Post: In South Carolina, will Clinton’s expected victory shift momentum?  (I think the momentum shifted in Nevada, but the media needs to keep their narrative going.)

The Democratic presidential contest has moved to South Carolina, where voters began casting their ballots Saturday in a primary that serves as two starkly different milestones for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Clinton is looking to her expected victory here to prove her strong support among African American voters — and to cement her status as the presumptive front-runner heading toward Super Tuesday three days later, when six of 11 Democratic contests will take place in Southern states with large populations of black voters….

Clinton began a barnstorming tour of South Carolina on Tuesday. She and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, crisscrossed the state on separate itineraries, hitting a total of about a dozen events over three days, speaking to predominantly African American audiences of a few hundred in cities and small towns. Each drew on decades of experience with the powerful church- and civic-based black voting turnout machine.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that this article is mostly dominated by Sanders ass-kissing. If you want to read that stuff, you can head over to the WaPo link.

Supporters cheer Hillary at SC rally.

Post writer Anne Gearan reports from SC: What happens when Hillary Clinton crashes a bachelor party? She’s in the photos.

Joe Schreck and his 10 groomsmen were toasting Schreck ahead of his wedding with a round of Bloody Marys when Clinton and her entourage swooped into Saffron, a cafe and bar in Charleston, S.C.

They asked her for a photo — all 11 of them. When Clinton realized she was in the middle of a pre-wedding party, she exclaimed: “He’s getting married today! That’s pretty exciting.”
A day before the South Carolina primary, Hillary Clinton stumbled upon a pre-wedding party at Saffron Cafe and Bakery in Charleston, S.C. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
The campaign trail has taken Hillary Clinton through coffee shops and bakeries, diners and ice cream parlors, stands at state fairs where they fry things that shouldn’t be fried. And, Friday, it took her to a bachelor party.

Joe Schreck and his 10 groomsmen were toasting Schreck ahead of his wedding with a round of Bloody Marys when Clinton and her entourage swooped into Saffron, a cafe and bar in Charleston, S.C.

They asked her for a photo — all 11 of them. When Clinton realized she was in the middle of a pre-wedding party, she exclaimed: “He’s getting married today! That’s pretty exciting.”

Clinton’s personal photographer asked the men to pose, arranging them to Clinton’s left and right. The photographer, Barb Kinney, playfully suggested that a few of them kneel around Clinton — just as they would do later around the bride. This happened.

“I love having men at my feet,” Clinton said, laughing, as Kinney and the men all took photos.

“This is exciting,” she said.

“This is cool,” one man agreed.

Shreck was asked what his future bride would think about all this, and he said “She’ll love it!”

Jackie DeBose, center right, with her friends at Clinton field office

The New York Times: For Black Women in South Carolina, It’s Clinton’s Turn.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Jackie DeBose woke up early on Sunday, well before sunrise, grabbed her rhinestone-bedazzled Obama hat and her vintage “Hillary for President” button, loaded her suitcase in the trunk of her Lexus and headed to pick up three friends for a road trip to South Carolina.

The next day, still weary from an 11-hour drive, the four retirees from Ohio and Virginia walked into the old Kiki’s Chicken and Waffles restaurant that serves as the Clinton campaign’s field office here.

“It’s a very important state, and I didn’t want her to lose, so I said, ‘If we don’t do our part, who is going to do it?’ ” Mrs. DeBose said, holding a flip phone issued by the Clinton campaign in one hand and call list in the other.

The four, all black women in their late 60s or early 70s, counted themselves among Mrs. Clinton’s most ardent supporters eight years ago. But when Barack Obama emerged as a leading candidate during the 2008 primaries, Mrs. DeBose and her friends had to make an agonizing choice between supporting a candidate who could become the first female president, or the one who might become the first black one….

They ended up voting for Barack Obama, but this time they are determined to help put the first woman in the White House.

Voting booths in SC

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. EST and anyone still in line at 7 p.m. will still be allowed to vote, the state’s election commission says. South Carolina has 53 Democratic delegates up for grabs, with an additional six unpledged Superdelegates who are party officials who can commit to whomever they want.

South Carolina operates under an open primary system, which means people can participate in the primary even if they’re not registered Democrats. People who already voted in the GOP primary, however, cannot participate.

The primary comes a week after Clinton won Nevada’s Democratic caucuses 53 percent to 47 percent, where she performed well among black voters. More than three-quarters of black Democratic voters in Nevada caucused for Clinton, signaling she would also come out strong in South Carolina.

In 2008, 55 percent of South Carolina Democratic primary voters were black and then-Sen. Barack Obama wound up winning that primary. But this time around, polls show Clinton will almost certainly prevail. A CBS News Battleground Tracker Poll released earlier this month showed Clinton with a 19-percentage-point lead ahead of Sanders, 59 percent to 40 percent.

I wonder if Bernie Sanders will congratulate Hillary if she wins tonight? He failed to do that in Nevada.

After the SC primary the candidates will move on to Super Tuesday states, which will be voting in just a couple of days. Nate Silver has a useful article on what Bernie Sanders would have to do to catch up with Clinton in the all-important race for delegates.

Jane and Bernie Sanders with top surrogate and Obama hater Cornell West

Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Need Momentum — He Needs To Win These States.

The media narrative of the Democratic presidential race is that Bernie Sanders has lost momentum to Hillary Clinton. After nearly beating Clinton in Iowa and then crushing her in New Hampshire, Sanders had a setback on Saturday, the story goes, losing Nevada to Clinton by 5 percentage points. And this weekend, Sanders is about to lose South Carolina and lose it badly.

All of this is true insofar as it goes. But it doesn’t do nearly enough to account for the demographic differences between the states. Considering the state’s demographics, Sanders’s 5-point loss in Nevada was probablymore impressive than his photo-finish in Iowa. It was possibly even a more impressive result than his 22-point romp in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, a big loss in South Carolina would be relatively easy to forgive.

That doesn’t mean Sanders is in great shape, however. Based on the polling so far, Sanders is coming up short of where he needs to be in most Super Tuesday (March 1) states, along with major industrial states like Ohio andPennsylvania where he’ll need to run neck and neck with Clinton later on.

These conclusions come from a set of state-by-state targets we’ve calculated for Sanders and Clinton, which are based on some simple demographic factors in each state. As has been clear for a long while, Sanders performs better in whiter and more liberal states. But the abundance of new polling from Super Tuesday states, along with the Nevada result, gives us the data to establish more accurate benchmarks than the ones we set before. (See last week’s article “Bernie Sanders’s Path To The Nomination” for our previous estimates.) In particular, although Sanders might not have won the Hispanic vote in Nevada, he’s clearly made up ground among Hispanic voters. African-Americans, in contrast, remain overwhelmingly in Clinton’s camp. There may also be an urban/rural divide in the Democratic vote, with Sanders performing better in more rural areas.

Click on the link to check out the numbers.

Hillary Clinton during a forum at Denmark-Olar Elementary School in Denmark, S.C., February 12, 2016. PHOTO: REUTERS

In Other News:

NYT: Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump.

Politico: 8 times Chris Christie suggested Donald Trump shouldn’t be president.

NYT: Conservative Group to Air Ads Featuring Ex-Students Saying Trump University Deceived Them.

WSJ: IRS Commissioner Says Donald Trump Audit Scenario ‘Rare.’

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg View: Trump’s Debate Was a Disaster. If Voters Notice.

Candace Kirby at Medium: Why Are the Media Afraid to Ask Bernie Sanders the Uncomfortable Questions?

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters: Speech Transcripts: The Press Finds A New Hoop That Only Clinton Must Jump Through.

Excellent summary of the case against Sanders at DailyKos: #RevealTheDeal; At Long Last Senator Sanders, Will You Reveal the Deal?

What stories are you following today?