The untold heroes of the 2016 election are the millions of Hillary supporters who, despite being disregarded, demeaned and marginalized, have carried Hillary to victory after historic victory.

In the face of a colossal onslaught, Hillary’s voters have shown dignity, courage and resilience, defying relentlessly negative media narratives and personal attacks to express their support for Hillary. Their indomitability mirrors Hillary’s.

The photo of a young women with her fists raised, proudly expressing her support for Hillary in the face of a group of (mostly) male anti-Hillary protesters, encapsulates the 2016 election. It conjures 227 years of history...

Joy Reid will return to hosting duties on MSNBC when she gets a new weekend perch on the NBCUniversal-owned cable-news outlet.

Reid, who had hosted an hour Monday through Friday for parts of 2014 and 2015, will host a new show that airs between 10 a.m. and noon on Saturday and Sunday on MSNBC. This show fills the time slot formerly held by Melissa Harris Perry, who parted ways with the network in a very public fashion over disagreements about being pre-empted for breaking news.

Reid will tackle the important topics of the week and tap a rotating panel of journalists to explore how the issues shape the national discourse. The program will premiere next Saturday, May 7 .

“MSNBC viewers crave not only the facts, but also in-depth discussion and analysis from a range of perspectives,” said MSNBC President Phil Griffin, in a prepared statement. “There is no one better equipped than Joy to lead this new project, and create a place for the kind of unique discussion our audience has come to expect.”

“Saturday and Sunday mornings will be a place to talk politics and do good journalism while bringing diverse, smart, and accomplished voices to the table,” Reid said in a statement.

During an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Bernie Sanders was asked: “Which is more important, a Sanders presidency or a Democratic presidency?” This should have been a no-brainer for a person who has promised to do everything he can to prevent a Trump presidency. But Bernie blew it.

Steve Inskeep gave Bernie two bites at the apple. All he had to say was that a Democratic presidency—that is, preventing a Trump presidency—is more important than a Sanders presidency.

Essentially, the question boils down to this: Is Bernie’s priority getting himself elected, even if that risks a Trump presidency, or is it getting a Democrat elected, even if it’s Hillary?

His non-answer makes his priorities abundantly clear.

INSKEEP: Another variation on this question from Twitter: Which is more important, a Sanders presidency or a Democratic presidency?

SANDERS: Well, I think that if you look at the issues facing this country, and the differences between Secretary Clinton and myself, I think, a) my policies and my agenda will be better for the working families of this country, and second of all, if you look at virtually every poll that’s out there—including one from CNN today—Bernie Sanders does better against Donald Trump than does Hillary Clinton. So if we want to make sure that we do not have a Donald Trump in the White House, I think that at this point Bernie Sanders is the strongest candidate.

INSKEEP: Do you mean a Sanders presidency is more important than this person’s suggestion that a Democratic presidency might be more important?

SANDERS: Well, what I’m just suggesting is—if you look at every poll that’s out there—Bernie Sanders does better against Donald Trump, more likely to defeat Donald Trump, than Hillary Clinton.

Now that Donald Trump is all but assured of becoming the 2016 Republican Party nominee for President, a sudden troubling realization has hit the nation: as per tradition, he’ll be given daily national security briefings during the course of the general election so that he can conduct his campaign accordingly. But with Trump being such a loose cannon and seemingly so likely to leak classified information just because he can’t help himself, the question has been posed of just who decides what’s included in Trump’s daily briefings. As it turns out, it’s up to his old nemesis President Obama.

During a general election, the sitting President makes the decisions to what the two final candidates to replace him do or don’t get to know when it comes to national security developments. The President has to give the share the same knowledge with both candidates, meaning that Donald Trump’s daily briefing will be identical to Hillary Clinton’s daily briefing, as pointed out by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell this evening. But this means that President Obama can hold back any particularly sensitive information from both candidates that he reasonably believes would be too harmful if Trump leaked it.

Although President Obama is too earnest to play any games with this power, and will certainly decide to give Clinton and Trump whatever information he thinks is appropriate and safe, it does put Obama in a rather poetic position. Trump built his political reputation by spending years harassing Obama about his birth certificate and making the claim that he was born in Kenya, laying the groundwork for his current racist platform. But now it’s President Obama who gets to dictate what Trump does or doesn’t get to know each day.

And that alone has to infuriate Donald Trump, who seemingly got into the 2016 race as an excuse to harangue President Obama as much as anything else. That’s far from the only embarrassing moment that Trump is facing in the two days since he effectively locked up the nomination. He’s also being snubbed by two republican Presidents.

"Frankly, (Hillary Clinton) doesn’t do very well with women."
— Donald Trump on Monday, May 2nd, 2016 in an interview on CNN's "New Day"

So, Clinton’s 19-point average lead over Trump among women -- if it held all the way to November -- would give her the biggest winning margin among women of any presidential candidate since at least 1980.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Clinton is not universally beloved by women -- but her ratings are a whole lot better than Trump’s. In April’s GWU/Battleground poll, for instance, Clinton scored a 51 percent favorable rating among women, with 47 percent unfavorable. By contrast, Trump’s rating among women in the same poll was 26 percent favorable, 71 percent unfavorable.

The flip side is that Clinton does under-perform among men; the GWU/Battleground poll found that views of Clinton among men are 33 percent favorable, 66 percent unfavorable. Karlyn Bowman, a poll analyst for the American Enterprise Institute, considers this "a big problem for her."

But the silver lining, she added, is that "if past elections are a guide, more women will vote than men – probably about 53 to 54 percent."

Our ruling

Trump said, "Frankly, (Hillary Clinton) doesn’t do very well with women."

The evidence he used to support this claim during the CNN interview -- his large margins among women in recent GOP primaries -- is undeniable, but says nothing about how well Clinton does among women. In fact, looking at a cross-section of April polls, Clinton’s average lead over Trump among female voters is bigger than any nominee has registered in an actual presidential election election in at least 36 years. We rate Trump’s statement Pants on Fire.

For months, various prominent conservative journalists and bloggers have forewarned that if the reckless and clueless Donald Trump became the 2016 Republican Party nominee, they might be forced to step outside of their own preferred party and ideology in order to vote for Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton just to save the nation from itself. Now that Trump is the nominee and their bluff has been called, at least two prominent conservative editors are in fact backing Hillary.

Daily Caller, the conservative site founded by Tucker Carlson of Fox News fame, has at least one top writer who has hopped on the Hillary Clinton train, if reluctantly. Senior Editor Jamie Weinstein says that he prefers Clinton over Trump “just as I’d prefer Malaria to Ebola.” That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for Hillary, but it serves to demonstrate how some knowledgeable conservatives would rather tolerate four years of Clinton moving the country in a more liberal direction rather than risk Trump becoming, in his words, an “honest-to-God American dictator.”

Red State, another prominent conservative site, also has at least one top writer choosing Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Contributing Editor Ben Howe has declared “I’m with her” and is encouraging his fellow conservatives to phone bank for Clinton in order to keep Trump out of the White House. Howe may ultimately find himself joined by Red State Managing Editor Leon Wolf, says he’ll be waiting to see if Trump ends up pushing him into voting for Hillary.

It’s noteworthy that these are prominent conservative political writers who have little in common with Hillary Clinton’s liberal leaning ideology. They simply appear to have recognized two things: she’d make a qualified and competent President who would keep the United States in one piece, and her opponent Donald Trump could well destroy the nation if he takes office.

But the simple truth is that there hasn’t ever really been much reason to think this. Both candidates have had ample time to make their case, but their opponents have still garnered a greater share of the votes. While supporters of both have endless excuses for this, arguing that the majority is either being bamboozled or bought off, the more likely explanation is that their opponents simply have a more appealing pitch to the voters.

Ultimately, Cruz and Sanders share a fatal flaw, one that is common in politics generally but becomes more pronounced in campaigns built around ideological purity: The assumption that “people like me” are more common and representative than they are, simply because you see more of them in your day-to-day life. Call it the “silent majority” fallacy, if you will. Cruz’s assumption that there are millions of unacknowledged evangelicals laying in wait, ready to spring into action once activated, is likely the result of him personally knowing a lot of evangelicals and assuming they are more common than they are. Similarly, Sanders and his supporters have a tendency to speak as if the people who come out to vote for him are the mainstream, and to talk about Clinton supporters in dismissive terms, as if they are fringe or unrepresentative.

This kind of thinking makes it hard to build a coalition, because you assume that your existing constituency is enough and you don’t really need to do the hard work of wooing people that are different from you. The results speak for themselves. The Cruz campaign basically ignored the millions of conservatives who aren’t particularly moved by religion and the result is a losing campaign. The Sanders campaign has written off traditional Democratic constituencies, like people of color and working women, concentrating instead on turning out independents and the white male voters that they already had.

It’s too late, really, for the Sanders campaign to learn much from the missteps of the Cruz campaign. But it’s worth noting these similarities when it comes to future campaigns from insurgent candidates who want to hold down a position further from the center than their opponent. Believing yourself to be on a moral crusade can help you weather storms, but it can also lead to blinkered thinking and poor outreach. Cruz has admitted that he’s lost this round. Sanders should probably consider doing the same.

We’ve all watched Donald Trump tap dance his way around attempts to pin him down on policy details, or give a blank stare when asked about his support from white supremacists. “Why don’t they make him answer the question?” is the frustrated viewer’s response.

As it turns out, Hollywood powerhouse Rob Reiner, who has been politically active for decades, shares our frustration. He let loose on Morning Joe, and Mika and Joe were on the defensive:

Those are some big “ifs,” and therein lies the problem.

When journalists interview Hillary, they are frequently hostile and openly challenge what she says as false (even though we know she’s the most honest candidate). But that’s not the only problem. Hillary’s every utterance is subjected to withering scrutiny, with endless panels of pundits parsing every word she said and experts brought on to cast doubt on her statements.

Let’s contrast this with the major boost Donald Trump gets from his false claim (frequently used as an attack on Hillary) that he opposed the Iraq war. He didn’t. Yet Media Matters has documented at least 16 times Trump has made the claim during interviews and went unchallenged.

Media figures and outlets have repeatedly pushed the myth, or allowed Donald Trump to push the myth, that he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning. There is no evidence to support this claim and February reporting from BuzzFeed News showed Trump voiced support “for invading Iraq” in 2002 and termed it a "tremendous success" after the invasion began.
BuzzFeed: "The Media Keeps Letting Trump Get Away With His Iraq Lie"

BuzzFeed Editor-In-Chief Ben Smith: "Media Can’t Seem To Dispel, Or Even Challenge" The Fiction Of Trump’s Iraq Lie. Smith criticized media outlets who have allowed Trump to falsely claim that he opposed the Iraq War, noting that in February BuzzFeed had uncovered audio of Trump saying before the invasion that he supported it and calling it a "tremendous success" the day after U.S. forces invaded. From his May 3 article:

Donald Trump did not oppose the invasion of Iraq. Further, there’s no evidence that he’s ever been a “dove” — and a great deal that he’s been an impulsive supporter of military intervention around the world.

We know this because BuzzFeed News’ intrepid Andrew Kaczynski unearthed an audio recording of him saying he supported it. You can listen to it above. The audio quality is clear.

In the recording, made on Sept. 11, 2002, when it mattered, Howard Stern asked Trump whether he supported the invasion. His answer: “Yeah, I guess so.” On the war’s first day, he called it a “tremendous success from a military standpoint.”

It was the most recent in a series of belligerent statements about Iraq. In 2000, he opined at length in his book how U.S. airstrikes did nothing to stop Iraq’s WMD programs and said it “is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion” in the context of a new war. He said many times in the late 1990s and early 2000s that George H.W. Bush should have toppled Saddam during the Gulf War.

Trump’s opinions during that period have all the force and thoughtfulness of a man who isn’t paying much attention and whose opinion doesn’t matter. His support for the war is also totally unambiguous.

And yet, since Kaczynski found the audio recordings, most of the leading American media organizations have either repeated Trump’s lie or allowed him to deliver it unchallenged. [BuzzFeed, 5/3/16]

FactCheck.Org: “There Is No Evidence" Trump "Spoke Against The War Before It Started.” FactCheck.org has reported that it and its fellow fact-checking institutes were unable to confirm that Trump publicly voiced opposition to the Iraq invasion:

There is no evidence that we could find, however, that he spoke against the war before it started, although we did find he expressed early concerns about the cost and direction of the war a few months after it started.

Others have looked, but no one else — including PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker — has been able to find any evidence to support his claims, either. [FactCheck.org, 2/19/16]