March 2, 2016

510 to 359, with 165 pledged delegates pending. It's time to come to Jesus.

http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16/D-PU.phtml


Hillary is now leading in the PD count by a mere 151. The 165 to be allocated remain in Texas, Tennessee and Dems Abroad. Hillary will take the lion's share of those.

While 151 is not an insurmountable difference to overcome, the margins of each candidate's respective victories is. Hillary has absolutely clobbered Sanders in the south. But Sanders victories (other than in NH and VT) have not been by similar margins.

As we move forward there are a few more southern states which Hillary will pad her lead with. The other states, even if Bernie took them all (which he won't), it will not be by margins to overtake Hillary's count.

At this point, I don't see a viable path to the nomination for Bernie. However, I still support him and the continuance of his campaign because things can happen. And I would prefer that Bernie be the one standing strong in second with a ole of delegates should an unforeseeable circumstance compromise Hillary.

I also think there is value in a show of how much support and excitement Bernie's message can generate through continued campaigning.

And this may not be popular here (and I was a strong proponent of Bernie going negative harder and earlier), but the rest of the campaign should be issue and message focused. It will not serve us for either candidate to be smeared or to focus on electability arguments. Either candidate can and must beat the gopper proffer, particularly if Trump.

March 2, 2016

Looks like Hillary won't hit viability in VT, total delegate shut out.

With 77% reporting, Sanders up 86 to Clinton 13

If Hillary doesn't reach 15%, she's not viable and Bernie takes all the pledged delegates.

When was the last time a candidate in a two person race failed to reach viability in a state? Ever?

March 2, 2016

Waiting on the Bernie states: MA, MN and CO

All other have been called with no surprises, except perhaps the Bernie win in OK.

Three big ones left to be called and the margin delegate count.

March 2, 2016

Hillary will sweep the southern states, and congrats. Eye on MA, CO, MN and OK

Those are the states tha Bernie needs to show he is viable. If he can't win at least some of those then his only path to victory is a Hillary implosion.

I am all for Bernie staying in to the convention regardless, he has staying power and delegate support to be a player, but if he can't win in MA, MN and CO, then the rest of the map doesn't look any better.

March 1, 2016

Inside the Clinton Team’s Plan to Defeat Donald Trump

In the days after Donald J. Trump vanquished his Republican rivals in South Carolina and Nevada, prominent Democrats supporting Hillary Clinton arranged a series of meetings and conference calls to tackle a question many never thought they would ask: How do we defeat Mr. Trump in a general election?

Several Democrats argued that Mrs. Clinton, should she be her party’s nominee, would easily beat Mr. Trump. They were confident that his incendiary remarks about immigrants, women and Muslims would make him unacceptable to many Americans. They had faith that the growing electoral power of black, Hispanic and female voters would deliver a Clinton landslide if he were the Republican nominee.

But others, including former President Bill Clinton, dismissed those conclusions as denial. They said that Mr. Trump clearly had a keen sense of the electorate’s mood and that only a concerted campaign portraying him as dangerous and bigoted would win what both Clintons believe will be a close November election.

That strategy is beginning to take shape, with groups that support Mrs. Clinton preparing to script and test ads that would portray Mr. Trump as a misogynist and an enemy to the working class whose brash temper would put the nation and the world in grave danger. The plan is for those themes to be amplified later by two prominent surrogates: To fight Mr. Trump’s ability to sway the news cycle, Mr. Clinton would not hold back on the stump, and President Obama has told allies he would gleefully portray Mr. Trump as incapable of handling the duties of the Oval Office.

Democrats say they risk losing the presidency if they fail to take Mr. Trump seriously, much as Republicans have done in the primary campaign.

* * *

The plan has three major thrusts: Portray Mr. Trump as a heartless businessman who has worked against the interests of the working-class voters he now appeals to; broadcast the degrading comments he has made against women in order to sway suburban women, who have been reluctant to support Mrs. Clinton; and highlight his brash, explosive temper to show he is unsuited to be commander in chief.

Much more, good read: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/us/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-general-election.html?_r=0

February 29, 2016

State Department to release final Clinton email batch (1,700 emails)

The U.S. State Department said it would release the final batch of Hillary Clinton's emails from her time at the department's helm later on Monday evening, meeting an extended deadline set by a federal judge.

The release of the remaining 1,700 emails yet to be made public does not mark the end of a controversy that has dogged Clinton's campaign to be elected president in November since her use of a private email server in her home first came to light a year ago.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken the server and U.S. Department of Justice attorneys are investigating whether laws were broken through the unusual arrangement. The State Department's inspector general and at least two Republican-led congressional committees are doing similar inquiries.

The State Department itself is investigating how much of the information in more than 1,800 emails now marked as classified was classified at the time it was sent, in breach of government rules.

Members of the public are still fighting the department in, court for access to thousands of public records connected to some of Clinton's closest aides. And just last week a Democrat-appointed federal judge granted a request by a conservative group suing the State Department under open records laws to seek sworn testimonies from department officials and Clinton aides later this year to see whether the arrangement was intended to thwart public access to government records.

State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday that an additional email between Clinton and President Barack Obama was being withheld in full from the public, bringing the total number to 19, and that an additional email was being withheld in full at the request of an unspecified law-enforcement agency.

The emails will be released at 6 p.m. EST on Monday (2300 GMT), the State Department said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-clinton-emails-state-department-idUSKCN0W22IA

February 28, 2016

Pledged delegate count: H - 93, B - 63

Hillary is without question or qualification the front runner in the race now.

In 3 days, a total of 1034 pledged delegates (about 25% of the final amount) will have been allocated and the race will be truly off the ground.

We will soon know whether SC represents a trend or a unique outcome. Hang tight, Hillary is leading and it is (as it awaits has been) a huge uphill battle for Bernie. But it ain't close to over, yet.

February 27, 2016

To be clear, it is the candidate's job to convince voters

and build a winning coalition.

If a demographic doesn't support a candidate it is because the candidate eithe did not seek them as part of their coalition or failed in their attempt to bring those voters in.

If, as is likely the case, Sanders has failed in bringing in African American voters, it is on him and his campaign.

February 27, 2016

For shits and giggles my prediction through Super Tuesday thread

As of today: H-52 B-51

53 pledged delegates up for grabs in SC tomorrow. I give Hillary 32 and Bernie 21.

878 pledged delegates in play on Super Tuesday, as follows (with my numbers as (H/B)):

Texas - 222 (134/88)
Georgia- 102 (61/41)
Massachusetts - 91 (40/51)
Virginia - 95 (53/42)
Minnesota - 77 (34/43)
Colorado - 66 (29/37)
Tennessee - 67 (36/31)
Alabama - 53 (32/21)
Arkansas - 32 (19/13)
Oklahoma - 38 (20/18)
Vermont - 16 (0/16)
American Samoa - 6 (3/3)
Democrats Abroad - 13 (6/7)

Once the Super Tuesday dust settles, I think the delegate count will be around: H - 551 B - 483.

A difference of 68 delegates, with only about a quarter of them being allocated. After ST, there will be 3017 pledged delegates up for grabs and a long way for either candidate to get to a majority of the pledged delegates: 2026.

I use 2026 as the number to win rather than 2382 because 2382 is the number needed to clinch the nomination at the convention, and includes the super delegates. I believe the supers would only allow the nomination to go to the candidate with a majority of the pledged delegates.

Disclaimer: these predictions are based on a mix of recent polls, trends, media-driven narratives, pulling it out of my ass and some guesses.

February 26, 2016

Hillary Clinton has a race problem — and it’s resurfacing at a dangerous time

According to a Feb. 16 CNN/ORC poll, a whopping 65 percent of South Carolinian black voters are planning to support Hillary Clinton in Saturday’s primary, while only 28 percent are planning to support Bernie Sanders.

The furor that broke out last night, however, may just shift the political winds.

In the middle of a $500-per-person Clinton fundraising event in Charleston on Wednesday evening, a young Black Lives Matter activist stepped out in front of the former secretary of state, turned toward the small audience, and held aloft a banner emblazoned with the phrase, “We need to bring them to heel.”

The protester, as she later explained, “wanted to make sure that black people are paying attention to [Clinton’s] record” by drawing attention to the racist rhetoric Clinton used in 1996, when she, as first lady, strongly supported the “tough on crime” method of governance, and successfully lobbied for a bill based on that method to be passed into law.

“They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” Clinton warned the public at the time. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we need to bring them to heel.”

The crime bill that Clinton advocated for is now widely regarded as a “terrible mistake,” and the demonizing language that she used to describe young people who belong to gangs (a group that, because of institutionalized racism and oppression, is majority black and Latino/a) would now be political suicide.

Since the ’90s, the Democratic Party — and Hillary Clinton along with it — has morphed from voicing demagogic, dangerous ideas about black children and supporting catastrophic crime policies to, today, speaking of how “we have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance,” and promising an end to the decades-long era of mass incarceration, which, of course, they hold much responsibility for creating.

But, despite Clinton’s sudden populist transformation, the memory of the American people isn’t quite so short and fleeting.

Americans remember that Hillary Clinton’s ‘90s policy stances punished those born into systemic racism and poverty by instituting mandatory minimums, eliminating rehabilitative programs for inmates addicted to drugs, implementing the three-strikes law (which Bill now admits “made the problem worse”), expanding the death penalty (which Hillary still supports), and building more prisons countrywide.

Indeed, the ‘94 legislation threw millions of black women and men into prison; in fact, throughout Bill Clinton’s presidency, the black prison population increased by 50 percent.

All of this spelled mass incarceration and mass disenfranchisement for the black Americans of South Carolina.

Today, due to felonies, one out of every 27 black voters in South Carolina is disenfranchised, and, although black people make up just 28 percent of the state’s population, they account for a devastating 62 percent of the prison and jail population, in no small part because of the draconian measures the Clinton administration, along with the strong support of its first lady, took in the name of being “tough on crime.”

And now, 20 years later, at the end of February 2016, Clinton finds herself being directly challenged by a young Black protester named Ashley Williams on her past rhetoric and role in creating America’s stringent criminal justice system, under which people are still being penalized today, including those in South Carolina.

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/26/hillary_clinton_has_a_race_problem_and_its_resurfacing_at_a_dangerous_time/