It was a great and anticipated climactic contest in the Midwest, and the outcome, while expected, thrilled the millennials, especially (and a good deal of older supporters, too). While the favorite won, it was still a sweet victory.
But enough about UConn, there was also a primary.
Much of the best stuff about WI will be in tomorrow’s pundit round-up, but there’s some great pieces today about more than just horse race. Much is about the fascinating R side because there’s going to be an opponent for the D’s. We might as well learn more about who they are and what their voters are up to.
In any case, Bernie takes WI (with more to be assigned, he picked up 14 delegates so far, which illustrates his delegate math problem), with an expected win coming up in 14 delegate WY… and then things get tougher.
Ted Cruz, with a big win (Trump gets 3 delegates to Cruz’ 33 so far), resets the narrative of a contested convention. Donald Trump still looks strong in NY and PA, and chaos awaits the GOP in Cleveland.
NY Times has some great interactive graphics on what voters want (both sides):
Mrs. Clinton does best with voters who want the next president to continue President Obama’s policies, while Mr. Sanders is favored by people who think the next president should be more liberal than Mr. Obama has been.
Peter Wehner:
Mr. Trump is so negatively viewed, polls suggest, that:
…he could turn otherwise safe Republican states, usually political afterthoughts because of their strong conservative tilt, into tight contests… without an extraordinary reversal — or the total collapse of whoever becomes his general-election opponent — Mr. Trump could be hard-pressed to win more than 200 of the 270 electoral votes required to win.
Here’s more ominous news for Republicans to be gleaned from the story:
- Among women, nonwhites, Hispanics, voters under 30 and those with college degrees – those who represent the country’s demographic future – Trump is wildly unpopular. He’s viewed unfavorably by a 2-to-1 margin by each of those group.
- Among independents, a group that Mitt Romney carried even as he lost to President Obama in 2012, Trump’s favorability rating is 19 percent while 57 percent view him unfavorably.
- Among white women, a bloc Governor Romney easily won even in defeat, Trump is viewed by less than a quarter of them (23 percent) favorably while well over half (54 percent) have an unfavorable opinion of him.
- Half of all voters said they would be scared if he were elected president, according to the Times/CBS poll.
- Trump is viewed unfavorably by a majority of whites without college degrees, a group that has been his strongest demographic.
- According to several polls, Mr. Trump trails Mrs. Clinton by 20 or more points among women. The largest gender gap in the last 36 years was Bob Dole’s was an 11-point loss among women against Bill Clinton in 1996.
“There is no precedent for this,” said Neil Newhouse, a veteran Republican pollster. “In the modern polling era, since around World War II, there hasn’t been a more unpopular potential presidential nominee than Donald Trump.”
The Fix:
Here’s exactly how a brokered Republican convention would work
The NY Daily News interview Bernie gave is getting terrible reviews. Here’s an example from Vox:
In a new interview with the New York Daily News, Bernie Sanders said something striking — he basically doesn't think the US should be trading very much at all with countries where wages are much lower than its own.
"You have to have standards," the senator said. "And what fair trade means to say that it is fair. It is roughly equivalent to the wages and environmental standards in the United States."
From Sanders's point of view, this makes sense. He has recognized, correctly, that freer trade with countries like China has hurt a subset of American workers (while benefiting others).
But there's one big problem, according to development economists I spoke to: Limiting trade with low-wage countries as severely as Sanders wants to would hurt the very poorest people on Earth. A lot.
Here’s the Fix:
Bernie Sanders sat down with the New York Daily News editorial board on Monday, seeking its endorsement in the upcoming April 19 Empire State primary. It did not go well for the senator from Vermont.
Time and again, when pressed to get beyond his rhetoric on the evils of corporate America and Wall Street, Sanders struggled. Often mightily. (The Daily News published the full transcript of the interview so you can check it out for yourself.)
I’m not dumping on Bernie; this is a pundit round-up, noting how media is responding. To be fair, Hillary should give one, and the paper should be just as tough on her as on Bernie.
Here’s a rebuttal, taking Sanders critics to task, from Zach Carter:
NY is a tough place. If you run there, you gotta get used to it:
Quartz:
Vaccines don’t cause autism. But a tiny, tenacious group of anti-vaccine advocates really, desperately, hopelessly want them to.
That’s what led to a media frenzy this past weekend when it surfaced that Robert DeNiro, cofounder of the Tribeca Film Festival, explicitlyrequested that the festival include an anti-vaccine documentaryproduced by Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced gastroenterologist who was stripped of his medical license after publishing a now-retracted study attempting to connect the MMR vaccine to autism. The documentary dredged up the mythical association between autism and vaccines, with the added twist of claiming that the US Centers for Disease Control covered it up.
The media responded by unanimously decrying the move and reiterating how many times that fear has been debunked. DeNiro then reversed course, yanking the film from the screening line-up. Predictably, cries of censorship rose up from the anti-vaccine camp. But like it or not, what happened at Tribeca isn’t censorship, says Karen Ernst, executive director of Voices for Vaccines, a parent-led, pro-vaccine advocacy group. The anti-vaccine movement is as old as vaccines themselves.
“My own theory is that DeNiro agreed to include this film and then screened it and realized it wasn’t very good and not worth including,” Ernst says. “I think it was a fair decision and that Tribeca Film Festival gets to pull a film that isn’t up to the quality they expect. The film still exists and can be seen by others.”
Panama Papers coverage from BBC:
- Iceland PM Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson resigned - the first major casualty of the leaked Panama Papers that have shone a spotlight on offshore finance
- Fifa president Gianni Infantino signed off on a TV rights contract with businessmen subsequently accused of bribery, leaked documents showed
- France returned Panama to a list of countries which fail to co-operate over tax evasion
- Panama said it is considering retaliatory measures against France, but reiterated that is ready to co-operate with any investigations stemming from the leaks
- In Chile the head of anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International's country branch, Gonzalo Delaveau, stepped down after his name emerged in the documents
- US President Barack Obama said tax avoidance is a global problem and governments should not make it easy for illegal funds to move around the world
- Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ordered a judicial investigation into allegations of family links with offshore companies
Lynn Vavrek:
But there was a sense in the fall and winter of 2015 of one change. Using analytic tools provided by Crimson Hexagon, I calculated the average monthly increase in the share of news articles about the 2016 election with the word “angry.” Between November 2015 and March 2016, the share of stories about angry voters increased by 200 percent.
Some evidence suggests that the ire came from politics. When asked by pollsters about trusting the government, the direction of the country,American progress or the president, Americans were gloomier than their economic assessments might have predicted. Broken out by party, these pessimistic views reveal a growing partisan divide, one that’s been distilling around racial attitudes for nearly two decades.
The increasing alignment between party and racial attitudes goes back to the early 1990s. The Pew Values Survey asks people whether they agree that “we should make every effort to improve the position of minorities, even if it means giving them preferential treatment.”
Over time, Americans’ party identification has become more closely aligned with answers to this question and others like it. Pew reports that, “since 1987, the gap on this question between the two parties has doubled — from 18 points to 40 points.” Democrats are now much more supportive (52 percent) of efforts to improve racial equality than they were a few decades ago, while the views of Republicans have been largely unchanged (12 percent agree).
Sean McElwhee:
The Democratic Party’s great White flight: How racism spurred a demographic reckoning
Some argue that whites are voting less for Dems owing to a lack of progressivism. The data tells a different story
Christopher Ingraham:
Racial prejudice could play a significant role in white Americans' opposition to gun control, according to new research from political scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In their paper, published in the journal Political Behavior in November, Alexandra Filindra and Noah J. Kaplan found that whites were significantly less likely to support gun control measures when they had recently looked at pictures of black people, than when they had looked at pictures of white people. The study, which surveyed 1,000 white respondents, also found that the higher they scored on a common measure of racial prejudice, the stronger negative effect the photos of black people had on the respondents' support for gun control.
Taken together, those two findings "demonstrate that racial prejudice influences white opinion regarding gun regulation in the contemporary United States," Filindra and Kaplan conclude. But why would that be the case?
Philip Bump:
Put another way: If we stick a thermometer in a big pool of Trump voters, we can tell how warmed up they are, but not necessarily why. That's important context for a new survey from Quinnipiac University, which does exactly that. And Trump voters are boiling.
Nine out of 10 Trump voters, for example, say they strongly or somewhat agree with the statement that "my beliefs and values are under attack in America these days." Seventy-eight percent agree that they're falling further behind economically. Eighty percent agree that the government "has gone too far in assisting minority groups."
But Trump voters aren't entirely alone. Eighty-five percent of all Republicans think that their beliefs and values are under attack. Two-thirds say they're falling behind economically. There are wide splits between the candidates -- and wider splits between the parties.