David Frum has some pertinent thoughts on what the Republicans have to look forward to:
Click where it says Storify to read it there.
Andrew Prokop on the GOP lovefest (after Marco Rubio suggested his voters vote for Gov. Kasich in OH) and the jockeying going on before Tuesday’s OH and FL votes:
Indeed, though both Rubio and Kasich's campaigns are in awful positions right now, Rubio appears worse off despite his bigger delegate lead. According to recent polls and state results, Rubio's campaign is in free fall and Kasich's is actually on a bit of an upswing. And polls show Rubio down much further to Trump in Florida than Kasich is in Ohio (indeed, Kasich even led the most recent Ohio poll).
So, far from being an altruistic effort to stop Trump, this gesture by Rubio smacks of desperation. Kasich has spurned it because he feels he's in a stronger position than Rubio is.
The problem, of course, is that ceding Florida and its 99 winner-take-all delegates to Trump makes it more likely that the billionaire will win that outright majority of delegates and avoid a contested convention altogether. So Kasich is playing a dangerous game. In his attempts to become the last "reasonable" man standing, he could well help deliver the nomination to Trump.
This is one of the best pieces I’ve read on the disaffected vote from philly.com:
Bernie, The Donald, and the stunning rise of Ignoreland
“This isn’t about whether he’s going to do a better job or not,” said Ken Magno, 69, leaving his polling place in Everett, Mass., Tuesday morning, wearing a red Donald Trump winter hat. “More or less, it’s the statement: Listen, we’re sick and tired of what you people do. And we’re going to put somebody in there — now that it’s our choice, we’re going to put somebody in there that basically you don’t like.”
Of course, Trump's not the only candidate making the formerly "silent majority" feel like speaking out; Sen. Bernie Sanders has been winning this voting bloc on the Democratic side, helping him stay alive despite solid black and Latino support for his rival Hillary Clinton. On some level, both Trump and Sanders take traditional political messaging and turn the volume up to 11, or maybe 17. Trump is a bully who punches down, bypassing traditional coded "dog whistles" to instead sound loud, audible racist alarms about Mexican "rapists" or banning Muslims from America. Sanders punches up at the actual millionaires and billionaires who've leveraged most of Congress with their campaign checks, which lead to tax breaks for those millionaires and billionaires and for their companies even as they move millions of jobs out of Ignoreland.
A long and very revealing read from Jeffrey Goldberg:
The Obama Doctrine
The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.
You’ll miss him when he’s gone.
Greg Sargent:
The point is that the GOP primaries are offering Trump a kind of cosseted environment, in which the parameters of acceptable policy debate before the GOP primary audience ensure that Trump is not being subjected to anything close to the scrutiny he’ll endure in a general election, on either his specific proposals or his lack of policy depth in general.
Last night, looking towards the general election, Trump predicted that he’ll “win it easily.” He can be forgiven for believing this, given how soft the policy scrutiny has been on him thus far. But should he win the nomination, he’s in for a pretty nasty awakening.
Jay Rosen on horse race journalism:
As long as the available alternatives are posed this way: chronicling the ups and downs of the race and figuring out who’s likely to win — also known as horse race journalism — on one hand, vs. “issues” and “policy” coverage (dutiful business…) on the other, nothing will really change. We will continue to be stuck in these fruitless debates wherein supporters of the candidates who are not winning in the estimation of journalists cry foul because they get less attention, which then makes it harder for them to win.
Bernie Sanders supporters are currently trapped in this catch-22; it enrages them, but it is not unique to their candidate. These complaints will continue to fall on deaf ears (sorry for the cliché) because journalists receiving them actually believe: “If you wanted your candidate to receive more coverage, you should have backed someone who was more likely to win!” But journalists who think that way won’t say it that way because a.) it sounds mean, uncharitable in the extreme, and b.) somewhere they have a bad conscience about surrendering to their own horse race tendencies...
Campaign journalists have a system for determining who gets the most coverage. They have no system for determining who deserves the most coverage.
The justness of campaign journalism will change only when the people who produce it have enough confidence to declare an agenda that is not ideological or political, that does not tilt the field for this candidate or that party but rather instructs the press in where the spotlight belongs. (Example of what I mean.) Until that day, these abstractions will float around — issues, policy, substance, process — and people will continue to get mad.
I spent an hour and a half talking to Travis and Rachel of Irreverent Testimony: my homework assignment was to play senior Team Hillary to their millennial Team Bernie, except we all kept scoring goals for the other team. Listen to it here:
Gail Collins:
There’s a Republican conviction that Social Security is under some sort of zombie curse, in which inevitable collapse is right around the corner unless we start cracking down on benefits. It’s true that in about 20 years the system will no longer take in as much as it has to spend out. There will be a gap. Most of which would be bridged if Congress eliminated the rule saying that people can stop paying the payroll tax on any income over $118,500.
Nobody mentioned that factoid. “Anyone who tells you that Social Security can stay the way it is, is lying,” Rubio lied. O.K., misrepresented.
The only Republican presidential candidate who doesn’t want to mess with the Social Security system is Trump, who also refuses to acknowledge any solution that involves increasing taxes on the wealthy. His plan is to:
1) Make this country great again. (More money for everything!)
2) Get rid of waste, fraud and abuse. There is nothing Donald Trump hates more than waste, fraud and abuse. Except possibly people dying in the streets.
HuffPost pollster:
DO POLLSTERS HAVE A 'BERNIE BLINDSPOT'? - Issie Lapowsky: "Nearly every time Bernie Sanders wins a primary or caucus, it comes as a surprise to pollsters. In Minnesota,Oklahoma, and Kansas, all states Sanders won, polls had Clinton out ahead by at least a small margin, and in some cases a very large one. Even his virtual tie with Clinton in Iowa was unexpected. But of all the surprises Sanders and his supporters have brought to this cycle, last night’s big Michigan win was by far the biggest….The fact is, these misses are no fluke. Instead, it seems that pollsters across the board have something of a Bernie blind spot. One key reason for that—though not the only reason— is that Sanders supporters are overwhelmingly young, and lots of pollsters still haven’t found a way to reach young voters where they are: their smartphones." [Wired]
Maybe, but it's not consistent - There have been 10 primaries and caucuses so far where 5 or more polls were conducted. Of those, exactly half underestimated Sanders, while the rest actually overstated his margins. The misses in contested states like Michigan and Massachusetts suggest that pollsters might have failed to pick up high youth turnout or last-minute swings toward Sanders. A problem with predicting whether young people will turn out, though, isn't the same as a failure to call enough young people. If likely voter models assume fewer young people will actually vote, it doesn’t matter how many were called. While landline-only polls do present an issue for the industry, there's no sign they're leading to a systematic bias against Sanders -- and in Michigan, surveys that included cell phones also missed the mark in weighting the composition of the state's electorate.
Jill Lawrence:
The immigration bill and the gutter attacks on Trump illuminate the core of Rubio’s problem. It is one of confused identity created by his tendency to careen from one position and tactic to another.
There were the recent veers from Reaganesque optimism to Trumpesque vulgarity to regret over having gone there. (“That’s not something I'm entirely proud of. My kids were embarrassed by it, and you know? If I had to do it again, I wouldn't,” he said this week when NBC’s Chuck Todd asked if he regretted the “schoolyard stuff”)
And there was his boomerang in 2013 when he realized that the Gang of 8 immigration bill and his role in it were going over very badly with the militant GOP base. To restore his Tea Party cred, he abruptly became Obamacare’s enemy no. 1 — even pushing for a government shutdown, along with Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, in an absurd quest to make Obama kill his own signature achievement.
At the time, political scientist Dante Scala made a prescient observation about Rubio’s lane changes from insurgent to establishment and back. "It appears right now as if the path is not clear for Rubio. And sometimes if one foot is in each camp, neither camp adopts you as their own," he told me. Another prescient commenter: Craig Robinson, an Iowa Republican who said of conservatives: "I think it is going to be a while before they're mesmerized by Marco Rubio again."