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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with post-New York analysis of Clinton's winning coalition of voters.
Slate reports:
Until Tuesday night, I had assumed that my neighborhood, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was overwhelmingly supporting Bernie Sanders. Sanders bumper stickers and T-shirts outnumbered those for Hillary Clinton by what seemed like 20 to 1. A couple of times, I thought about putting my baby daughter in a Clinton onesie—whatever my hesitations about Clinton’s candidacy, I love the idea of my girl’s first image of an American president being female. But I always hesitated, not wanting to invite playground harangues from local dads about Goldman Sachs and the Fed.
When I looked up Cobble Hill on the nifty New York Times tool providing neighborhood-by-neighborhood results, however, it turned out that Clinton won the immediate area around my apartment by 59.4 percent. A block over, she won by 72.5 percent. She won all around me. A lot of Clinton supporters, evidently, have been keeping quiet about their allegiances.
There are a couple of explanations for this. Sanders fans seem to be more enthusiastic, though it takes a certain amount of enthusiasm to vote in a primary at all. Registered independents couldn't vote in New York’s closed primary, particularly given the absurd, undemocratic October deadline for switching parties. But I think there might be something else at work as well: an optical illusion that the candidate with the most white male support had the most support, period. I had let myself mistake the loudest people for The People.
The Daily Beast reports:
We talk endlessly about the youth vote in the Democratic primaries, as Bernie Sanders wins young voters four- and five-to-one. But young voters are typically around one-fifth of electorate; under 30s were 17 percent in New York, according to the exit polls.
But we talk less about the women’s vote, which made up an eye-popping 59 percent of the Democratic vote. That’s three out of five voters, with Clinton winning more than three out of five of those votes (63-37). But hey, they’re not an interesting story line.
Actually that 59 percent number isn’t eye-popping if you’ve done any homework. Women were 58 percent of the Democratic primary vote in New York in 2008, when Clinton beat Barack Obama by one point more than the 16 she topped Sanders by yesterday. And it tracks with other results this year. Women were 58 percent in Florida, 56 percent in Ohio, and 55 percent even in Michigan, which Clinton lost (although she carried women by 51-44 percent). There’s hardly a state where women weren’t at least 55 percent of the vote (in primaries; caucuses don’t have gender breakdowns), and there aren’t many states where Clinton didn’t win among women by double digits.
So what? True, it’s not surprising. But just because something isn’t surprising doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting or that it doesn’t have ramifications. This is, and does.
Daily News Bin reports:
Hillary Clinton can celebrate after having received far more votes in New York than any other Presidential candidate in either party. But while she defeated him in a blowout by more than a quarter million votes, Bernie Sanders was the second place New York finisher in either party. In fact Sanders defeated Donald Trump by nearly a quarter million votes in his own right. Almost bizarrely, Hillary received more votes in New York than all republican candidates combined. What kind of math is going on here?
Hillary already led Bernie Sanders by around 2.4 million votes nationwide, a tally which now climbs to around 2.7 million votes. Sanders had a strong night against the republicans, tallying 752,000 votes. But it turns out that Clinton and her 1.03 million votes are more than Trump, Kasich and Cruz received combined.
Cable news keeps harping on the lack of “enthusiasm” for the Hillary Clinton campaign, instead pointing to the larger turnout at rallies being enjoyed by Sanders and Trump. But neither of those two candidates could translate their gigantic New York crowds into votes. Perhaps it’s time for the media to stop measuring enthusiasm and popularity in terms of crowds, and instead measure it in terms of votes. After all, no one was ever elected to office by headcount at a rally.
The math that finishes off this primary might be financial, not electoral.
Feral Press Alliance reports:
Here’s why Hillary doesn’t hold large rallies. They’re God-awful expensive. Say you want to hold a rally in a park for 27,000 people (actually Bernie had about 11,000, but lied with the higher number) you can’t just say meet me at the park. You have to pay for a permit, arrange and pay for porta potties, and pay for almost all the security. The city/town pays for their regular patrols, the person holding the rally has to arrange for and pay security in advance. These are almost always off-duty cops who can wear their uniform. They make about $100-$200/hour. For a crowd of about 27,000 that’s at a minimum of $100,000 per hour. And the candidate has to pay for clean-up afterwards. A huge rally can cost the candidate a million in campaign donations. For what? He has a photo-op of him in front of a lot of people.
What does Hillary have? Photo-ops of her sitting with some guys and winning at Dominos; eating an ice cream concoction named after her; dancing the Meringue in Harlem with a small crowd going wild and dancing with her; visiting and talking with children; and meeting and listening to people having problems. Oh, and the best one of all looking at and coveting that piece of cheesecake as one of her campaign aides digs into a slice of strawberry cheesecake. Total cost for Hillary maybe $10,000.
Bernie is burning through his cash. Hillary spent a few million in advertising. Bernie spent more in New York than Clinton, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich combined.
Bernie has about $4 million in the bank. Hillary has about $33 million.
Clinton visited Philadelphia yesterday, with the major event being a roundtable discussion with former Attorney General Eric Holder and the Mothers of the Movement:
Time reports:
“I do think the evidence people use to justify stop-and-frisk doesn’t hold up under scrutiny,” Clinton told a room of mostly black listeners at St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Philadelphia, part of her most extended public comments on the controversial practice to date. Police “should be looking for probable cause.”
“Some people will be stopped,” she continued, “but it will not be the kind of wholesale stopping you have seen in too many places.”
“I would hope that the federal government” encourages local police departments “to begin to retrain and change the mindset and practices in police departments to get back to a much more community-grounded approach toward trying to prevent crime,” Clinton told the mostly black audience.
“Everyone knows we have to prevent crime, but we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work,” she continued. “I think federal government can play a much bigger role in providing both the carrots and sticks to local departments so we can do what works better than what maybe is just the lowest-common denominator that people fall back on and just keep doing whether or not the evidence is there.”
Two people asked Clinton about stop-and-frisk during the event. One asked whether she would consider appointing a Supreme Court Justice who would overturn Terry v. Ohio, a landmark Supreme Court case that paved the way for stop-and-frisk.
“Anybody I would consider appointing to the Court would be somebody who wants to take a hard look at what has worked and what has not worked and that includes standard for probable for cause,” Clinton said.
U.S. News & World Report reports:
Clinton began her tour of Philadelphia Wednesday with a low-profile but highly emotional exchange with former Attorney General Eric Holder and members of the Mothers of the Movement group – women who lost children and loved ones to gun violence or after altercations with police officers.
"This weekend in Philadelphia, you had 12 shootings. You had four people murdered, including a 4-year-old girl. You had a policeman shot. That was just one weekend in one American city," Clinton said. "The federal government has a role to play, but we also have to change laws and approaches in the states and cities as well. We need to develop a national consensus."
"We obviously have to do a whole lot more to avoid what they call the school of prison pipeline," Clinton said Wednesday. "We also have to look at the sentencing structures and the mandatory minimums and the whole set of issues that have been raised that we have to address."
"Anytime you have to go back to 1994 to find something bad on a person, she must be a bad sister, OK?" says Geneva Reed-Veal, whose daugher, Sandra Bland, was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas. She noted that Clinton's interest in her cause sealed the deal for her.
"When you're openly grieving and the Secretary of State steps to you, you'd better endorse her," she said. "Because she's already endorsed you."
Finally, Clinton is again zeroing in on gun control.
Huffington Post reports:
Hillary Clinton closed her New York victory speech on Tuesday night with a spirited tribute to the activism of Erica Smegielski, the daughter of slain Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung.
“There is a remarkable young woman here tonight. Her name is Erica, Erica Smegielski,” Clinton said. “She lives the truth of what I have been saying every day.”
Clinton paused, then revealed why Smegielski’s activism was especially moving.
“Erica’s mother, Dawn, was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School,” Clinton said, drawing some audible gasps from the crowd. “And she died trying to protect her children, her students.”
“She’d never been in politics before. But she has made it her mission to advocate for common-sense gun safety reform,” Clinton continued, prompting loud, sustained cheers. “You know, like the mothers of Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin and so many others, Erica has turned her sorrow into a strategy and her mourning into a movement.”
“It isn’t easy, but as Erica said the other day, ‘What if everyone who faced tough odds said, It’s hard, so I’m going to walk away? That’s not the type of world I want to live in,’” Clinton concluded. “Erica, it’s not the type of world we want to live in. And we refuse to live in that.”
Here’s Clinton’s new ad featuring Smegielski, called “My Mom”:
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States.