Hillary Wins

Any doubt should be put to rest this morning about Stathis Kouvelakis' statement mentioned a couple weeks back, that with the erosion of support for major parties throughout the West the corporate media has filled the void to prevent a more precipitous collapse of the status quo. On the eve of the final day of primary voting, the Associated Press preordained the outcome and announced that the Democratic nominee would be Hillary Clinton (Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy, "Hillary Clinton Has Clinched Democratic Nomination, Survey Reports").

Based on the polling, it did not appear as if Hillary was in any serious danger of losing California to Bernie Sanders, particularly given the fact that last week she received the endorsement of longtime California Governor Jerry Brown. So this AP "rush to judgment," as the Sanders campaign is calling it, seems like paranoid overkill. Possibly the intent is to create a situation in the six states voting today where Hillary will walk away with enough pledged delegates (the AP report had to do with superdelegates) to prevent Bernie from contesting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Sanders has predicted that Hillary will not have enough pledged delegates after today's vote, and that, on this basis, he will march his children's crusade to Philly.

One thing is certain, to me at least. This primary campaign has illuminated the extent to which U.S. society is a closed one. It took a billionaire schooled for decades in the most brutal, omniscient media market on the planet to break through. But, if last week is any indication, Trump will be sliced and diced before August is over.

Hillary, competing in her fourth presidential campaign, did several things well, given how tarnished a candidate she is. Though her Super Tuesday "Southern strategy" did not work exactly as planned, because it was designed to knock Bernie out of the race, it will likely end up providing her the margin of victory she needs in pledged delegates; also, it cemented the narrative that black voters overwhelming favor her. Most importantly, Hillary proved an adroit manager of Democratic Party machinery, including the big international unions, and the corporate media monopoly.

A Quick Look at the Super Tuesday Results

The New York Times has an excellent page devoted to the outcome of yesterday's Super Tuesday primary, a Dixie-heavy set of eleven statewide elections. In the Republican contest, Trump won seven; Cruz did better than anticipated by winning three; and Little Marco cleared the tiny tot hurdle, set for him by an adoring establishment, by winning a single state, Minnesota. On the Democratic side, Hillary ran the table in the South -- except for Oklahoma -- while Sanders picked up wins in Vermont, Colorado, Minnesota and Oklahoma. A pretty feather for Clinton's cap is that she held on by 20,000 votes to win Democratic terra firma -- the land of Jack, Bobby and Tip -- Massachusetts. If Bernie had won in Massachusetts it would have been a powerful statement of the potency of his insurgent candidacy. As it turned out, basically a draw, with Hillary winning 45 pledged delegates to Bernie's 43, it illustrates the deep chasm in the Democratic Party, one me thinks cannot be bridged by November.

The only swing state to hold a primary election on Super Tuesday was Virginia. The results foretell a perplexing general election. The Republicans tallied 1,027,897 votes to the Democrats 784,392. Hillary ran strong with over half-a-million votes. Pundits will say that if you add Bernie's totals to Clinton's, toss in a hefty chunk of Rubio's and Kasich's votes, you come away with a walk-off Democratic home run in the Old Dominion. But I don't think you can slice and dice the vote predictably.

If Hillary has an advantage in any swing state it is Virginia with its multitude of government workers in the state's eastern suburbs. The question becomes how many Bernie backers vote Trump or third party. If Clinton wins a majority of Sanders' vote, I think she can carry Virginia because she will have many Rubio voters as well, and they out-polled Bernie in Virginia by 50,000 votes.

Super Tuesday

It was a depressing weekend. The Clinton margin of victory among blacks in South Carolina, even greater than what she racked up in Nevada, is a death knell for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, as Nate Cohn explains in "Hillary Clinton’s Winning Numbers in South Carolina Suggest Sweep in South":

[Hillary] has won South Carolina in a rout, 73.5 percent to 26 percent, exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. Black voters represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.

The result positions Mrs. Clinton for a sweep of the South in a few days on Super Tuesday and puts the burden on Mr. Sanders to post decisive victories elsewhere. If he does not — and the polls, at least so far, are not encouraging — Mrs. Clinton seems likely to amass a significant and possibly irreversible lead.

For Mrs. Clinton, the path to the presidential nomination is straightforward: fight Mr. Sanders to a draw among the nonblack voters who dominate the party’s contests in many Northern and Western states, and win by huge margins among black voters, who represent about a quarter of Democratic voters nationally. They represent the majority of Democrats in the South, which will play a crucial role on Super Tuesday.

The results in South Carolina — as well as in Nevada, where Mrs. Clinton also won black voters by a wide margin — suggest that she can count on big wins in six Super Tuesday states where black voters represent an above-average share of Democratic voters: Alabama, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia. The polls say the same thing.

As a result, the Sanders campaign has effectively conceded the South on Super Tuesday. The campaign is not airing advertisements there, according to NBC News data. It’s instead concentrating resources in five states with far fewer black voters and far fewer delegates: Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts and Vermont. It is a strategy that aims to maximize Mr. Sanders’s chance of winning states, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent Mrs. Clinton from running up huge delegate leads from the South.

The likelihood of a Clinton landslide in the delegate-rich South means that Mr. Sanders can’t compensate with a few narrow, feel-good wins outside the South. The thing to watch on Tuesday night is whether Mr. Sanders can win by big — even double-digit — margins in states like Minnesota or Massachusetts. The margins matter, because delegates are awarded proportionally in the Democratic nomination contest.

Even this might not be enough in a place like Minnesota or Massachusetts, depending on whether one assumes that Mr. Sanders has an advantage in caucus states like Minnesota or a state bordering Vermont like Massachusetts. If Mrs. Clinton has an advantage among Hispanic voters, in addition to black voters, then the burden on Mr. Sanders would grow even more to dominate with white voters in states like Massachusetts or Minnesota.

The polling, at least for now, says Mr. Sanders is not positioned to win by these sorts of margins. He’s in a tight race in Massachusetts. He’s in a tight race in Oklahoma, a state with a below-average black population and a large number of working-class Democrats. There is not much polling in Colorado or Minnesota, but there isn’t much evidence of a blowout there or in neighboring Wisconsin.

I think Cohn's analysis is on the money. Hillary has proven herself Obama's equal in winning a huge percentage of the black vote. And while it is true that Bernie wins a majority of white voters, though apparently not in South Carolina, it is more a split than a landslide. Absent a bombshell like an indictment, Hillary's path to the nomination seems safe.

Hence, the low feeling this weekend. Particularly after reading the massive two-parter by Jo Becker and Scott Shane (The Libya Gamble: "Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall" and "A New Libya, With 'Very Little Time Left' ") about the disastrous Hillary-backed coup of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Hillary's fingerprints are all over the destruction of North Africa, the Middle East and now Europe.

The good news though is she going to have great difficulty winning a general election against Trump. Cohn is too busy lining out the limitations of Bernie's campaign to note the weakness of Hillary's. For starters, Democratic turnout has been less than the GOP so far. Trump broke records for turnout in South Carolina and Nevada. This has to be very troubling for Team Clinton. For the winning formula of the Obama coalition to work, Hillary will need not only the constituency groups -- blacks, Latinos, youth -- but she will need juiced turnout by those constituents. Hillary has the blacks, but so far she does not have young people and there is no evidence that she is winning the Latino vote by a significant margin. Most importantly, Hillary is not inspiring new voters to come to the polls the way Trump is. Read Matt Taibbi's excellent "How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable" and ask yourself, "How does Trump lose any of the big swing states to Hillary?"

One possible answer is found in "Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump" by Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman and Johnathan Martin. The GOP will campaign against Trump in the general:

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

The article also limns Republican plans to steal the nomination from Trump at the convention.

Maybe the GOP will incinerate itself. We can only hope. One thing is for sure: If Hillary does as well tomorrow as is generally predicted, Bloomberg will not run. The elites will all line up with Hillary, and it will be Hillary vs. the world.

Hillary 2016 D.O.A.

The local representative of the AFL-CIO walked into the office on Monday. He said that he has a friend on the ground in Iowa, and that friend told him, "Take it to the bank. Bernie is going to win Iowa."

This word-of-mouth report emanating from the Hawkeye State is basically the same message as that being relayed by "the newspaper of record" in the last couple of days. Hillary is in free fall in Iowa. She has squandered a 20-point lead and is now engaging in fear-mongering attacks on Sanders, saying he is captive to the gun lobby and that he will raise taxes on working-class Iowans.

All one need do is read "Hillary Clinton Races to Close Enthusiasm Gap With Bernie Sanders in Iowa," by Patrick Healy and Yamiche Alcindor, to get the sense of the dire situation Team Clinton is in:

A poll published on Tuesday, by Quinnipiac University, found that Mr. Sanders had jumped to a lead in Iowa, with 49 percent to Mrs. Clinton’s 44 percent, after trailing her by 11 points in mid-December. The Quinnipiac poll also found that liberal Iowans were the most enthusiastic about the election, and that Mr.Sanders was the favorite among these voters. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Tuesday showed Mrs. Clinton’s once formidable lead shrinking from 20 points a month ago to seven points.

The tightened race is revealing a sharp generational divide within the Democratic Party, with primary voters under age 45 favoring Mr. Sanders by a roughly 2-to-1 ratio.

*** 

Mr. Sanders’s supporters point to his grass-roots strengths: He has more than 14,000 volunteers in Iowa, and he has spoken to more than 40,000 people at events in the state so far, huge numbers that include young people, independents and new voters who might not be on pollsters’ call sheets. (Mrs. Clinton’s advisers declined to say how many volunteers she had or people she had spoken to in Iowa.) 

“I think his secret weapon, maybe his silver bullet even, is the young adult population that hasn’t been involved in politics up until this point,” said Katie Mitchell, 28, a middle school teacher who lives in Des Moines.

Taking into consideration there is still almost three weeks to go before the February 1 caucus, I'm declaring Hillary dead on arrival based on a reading of just those four paragraphs. Iowa is a caucus state. Caucuses require commitment. It is not as if you can walk into a voting booth make your choice and get out of there. Caucuses require you to be in crowded close quarters with strangers who are sometimes hostile for an hour or more. Caucuses are not for the moderately motivated citizen. Caucuses are for the true believers. The New York Times in its coverage of the last few days is acknowledging in so many words, without saying it explicitly, that Bernie is going to win Iowa because his supporters are much more fervent than Hillary's.

What this means is that Sanders will win Iowa and he will win in New Hampshire and Clinton will have to rely on her Super Tuesday firewall of Southern states to save her bacon. This creates the unsavory scenario for Team Clinton and the Democratic National Committee where Hillary's candidacy is dependent on primary victories in red states she has no hope of carrying in the general. This has been my mantra when people ask me about the Democratic presidential race: Think twice about Clinton's viability in the general election.

Another stake in the heart of Hillary 2016 is the debunking of the Clinton-peddled talking point that she can win by returning the Obama coalition to the polls. She can't return the Obama coalition to the polls because we now know that one vital bloc of that coalition -- youth -- will not turn out for her. So until the Clinton campaign can come up with another model to explain how she wins 270 electoral votes we have to conclude that she is D.O.A.

At this point because of Hillary's strength in red state primaries I'm not willing to say Sanders can knock her out and win the nomination. What I'm saying is Hillary as the Democratic nominee has big problems. Maybe she could beat a Ted Cruz. Maybe. But Donald Trump? No way.