The last public poll conducted two weeks ago showed her with a very comfortable 71-23% spread. (You may recall that her win here in Texas at the beginning of this month was by a 66-33 margin.) So what does she have to gain by debating? Nothing, and she stands to lose some if she does.
The ever-cautious and calculating leader much prefers to sit on her lead, run out the clock.
FiveThirtyEight.com projects an almost even split of the NY delegation, which strikes me as ass-covering on their part after their earlier embarrassments. Fresh polling, somewhere in the pipeline, will likely show the lead shrinking; that's what the polls have done throughout this cycle, tighten up as election day draws closer. So in the three weeks between now and April 19 -- when New Yorkers vote -- her campaign has probably calculated that can withstand some Twitter flak and even the grievous attacks of her nasty handlers and their enabling, sycophantic third-rate media (Blue Nation Review, need I say more?) and still come away with both a convincing victory and the talking heads on teevee spinning as loudly as we have yet heard for Sanders to exit the contest.
California's primary in early June, where she holds just a 7-point lead, looks long in the distance.
I still see a Democratic convention where Bernie gets a prime time speech in one of the first couple of nights, concedes gracefully, and politely herds his supporters onto the Clinton bandwagon. There will be some larger-than-usual quantity of bitter-enders, but the safe bet is that like the PUMAs in 2008, most of the #NeverHillary-ites fall in line.
On a side note, has anybody been called a Sandbagger (scroll down to the comments) yet?
In presenting this week's blog post roundup, the Texas Progressive Alliance is sad that Rick Perry won't come out of retirement to run as a third-party alternative to Donald Trump. (Sad for all the missed comedy opportunities, of course.)
Hillary Clinton is eager to get her war on, and PDiddie at Brains and Eggs really doesn't want to go down this road again: war protests, war criminals, torture, disabled vets who can't get their VA benefits handled properly, etc. and so on.
Egberto Willies talked to an insider about why we no longer get the truth from our media: news is packaged and sold for ratings and clicks.
TXsharon at Bluedaze was at the seminar in Denton where experts from across the country said that a 100% renewable community was possible, ending the need for additional gas plants.
Dos Centavos posts some of the races and candidates he's watching in the Harris County Democratic Party's runoff election, to be held May 24.
And the Lewisville Texan Journal had a concert review of Texas legend Jimmie Dale Gilmore and his son Colin who put on a music show locally.
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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.
In an Easter ritual where the most evil thing is cleansed, Trail Blazers reported that Mexicans burned effigies of Trump (as 'Judas') in the streets of that country.
Grits for Breakfast revealed the business model for the company that manufactures Tasers: they also supply police bodycams and intend to be the dominant vendor in that market.
Prairie Weather points out the Democrats' forty-four-year-old paranoia, and its name is George McGovern.
Texas Election Law Blog reports that the Firth Circuit Court of Appeals in its entirety (en banc) will review the Texas voter ID lawsuit, and the plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to block the law from implementation in the 2016 election.
Zachery Taylor is on board the "Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein, but never Hillary Clinton" bandwagon.
Carl Davidson at The Rag Blog premises that there are actually six political parties in the United States (and that's within the two that wear the "major" label), and has some suggestions for working within them for progress.
The TSTA Blog highlights a rural school district that is trying to hang on.
Better Texas Blog celebrates the 6th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.
(God love Charles Kuffner for doing the blogging I cannot bring myself to do: Ken Paxton, Sid Miller, the statewide and Harris County runoffs. There's just no resolve in me to commiserate about causes lost two years ago, and barely any for the Houston political scene. Maybe next month I can manage a post or two about our awful state officials and our stultifying local elections. I'm hoping. For the moment it's just too dreary.)
Last week when Miz Lindsey picked poison over a bullet to the temple, I didn't bother with anything but a single Tweet to note the moment. A blog post? Why? I just figured ... well, Lindsey Graham. Once a dumbass douchebag, always, ya know?
"Ted is a consistent, principled conservative who has demonstrated the ability to appeal to voters and win primary contests," Bush said in a statement provided to CNN.
"Washington is broken, and the only way Republicans can hope to win back the White House and put our nation on a better path is to support a nominee who can articulate how conservative policies will help people rise up and reach their full potential."
It's no surprise this ringing endorsement was posted to Facebook instead of holding a presser. Had Bush done so in more conventional fashion, he wouldn't have been able to suppress his gag reflex, and the media wouldn't have been able to suppress their guffaws.
But to be certain, this is the ongoing "lesser of two evils" balsamic reduction for the GOP.
Like Graham, Bush seems to have made his decision based on whom he hated least. The former governor had refrained from endorsing Rubio while he was still in the race, a Republican source told Politico, because he believed his fellow Floridian and one-time protégé “was not up to the job of being president.” In endorsing Cruz, a Tea Party-aligned extremist, Bush follows in the footsteps of Chris Christie, who was driven to endorsing Trump by his obvious disdain for Rubio, and Ben Carson, who threw his support behind Trump in part out of animosity toward Cruz, whose dirty tricks in Iowa the retired neurosurgeon never forgave.
-- The Apache State sets this week's record for futility, incompetence, and/or fraud at the polling place. Be sure you understand the difference between unicorns (Greg Abbott's voter "fraud") and actual election fraud.
1. Lines were so long people literally spent an entire work day waiting in line
The queues were lengthy because the election administrators failed to properly allocate resources.
Consider: 2012 primary had 300,000 voters and 200 polling places. 2016 primary has estimated 800,000 voters at 60 polling places. #12News
Maricopa County (Greater Phoenix, nation's sixth largest city, 1.5 million people as of 2010) Recorder (the chief elections official) Helen Purcell blamed the voters for the delays.
Purcell may have been responsible for a new Maricopa County record: The last ballot in her county wasn’t cast until after midnight local time, or 3 AM Eastern time. The elections are such a mess in Arizona that the Secretary of State and the Office of the Maricopa County Recorder are admitting they can’t handle running an election. Both Purcell and Secretary of State Michele Reagan support legislation that will turn the administration of elections over to state party organizations.
2. Clear voter suppression in Latino neighborhoods
Just click over and read about it, and then ask yourself if you're surprised that a place that elects Joe Arpaio sheriff conducts its elections this way.
It gets worse.
3. Democrats mistakenly registered as independents, given provisional ballots
As Arizona voters were still waiting to cast their ballots, US Uncut reported on allegations that voters who had previously registered as Democrat were instead listed in the voter database as “independent” or “no party listed.” In Arizona’s closed primary system, independent voters are denied their voice by having to vote with a provisional ballot. But what voters classified as “independent” who cast provisional ballots don’t realize is that their ballots are never counted.
Emphasis mine. A reminder: NEVER ACCEPT a provisional ballot if offered. It's nothing but a pacifier. Its sole purpose is to fade heat; to shut you up, making you think you participated in an election when you actually did not.
42-year-old Kelly Thornton, who worked as an Election Day Technician in Yavapai County voting center 5 on Tuesday, told US Uncut that roughly two thirds of voters who came to her precinct had been mistakenly identified as independent by the election software. All of those voters were subsequently forced to cast a provisional ballot.
“One man was a lifelong Democrat who was listed as independent. He left the precinct, went to his house, and came back with a card showing that he was registered as a Democrat,” Thornton told US Uncut. “But when I called the election center (administered by the county recorder’s office), they told me to just give him a provisional ballot anyway.”
[...]
Thornton was also given a script by the Yavapai County recorder’s office to read to voters, verbatim, when they asked if their provisional ballots would be counted. The script outright tells the voter that if they cast a provisional ballot when the system lists them as independent, their vote will not be counted...
This is where it gets ugly for Democrats.
“I called the Arizona Democratic Party office around 1 PM, and I said, ‘Something is not right here.’ They said someone would call me back, and nobody called me back,” Thornton said. “This is the exact same thing that voters have been experiencing in Pima and Maricopa County all day.”
Given that one of Bernie Sanders’ largest bases of voter support comes from independents, it isn’t hard to see why the Vermont senator lost Arizona handily: his core supporters’ ballots weren’t counted.
So when you hear calls from Democrats for Bernie Sanders to drop out -- on the heels of the calls that Sanders isn't/wasn't a Democrat anyway, that he should play by the Democrats' rules, i.e. superdelegates -- be clear on the understanding that these are the rules they are talking about.
Democrats predictably might just blame Purcell, the Republican elections official, who is certainly the right and proper scapegoat. She's of course blaming all the dysfunction on Democrats for registering wrong.
Helen Purcell might be worse at her job than Harris County's own Stan Stanart, which makes this episode a similar Catch-22 we have in Texas' largest county: not enough Democrats voted in the election when Republicans like Purcell and Stanart were on the ballot themselves, due in no small part to the Republicans in charge practicing voter disenfranchisement of Democrats as hard as they can ... and round and round it goes. Like the water in the toilet when you flush it.
There's more at the link about how this set things up nicely for Hillary Clinton's comfortable win in the Grand Canyon State last night (or this morning), and it's certainly not one of the two reasons I anticipated when I predicted nearly a year ago that Sanders would be ultimately be denied the Democratic nomination. The bottom line, unvarnished ...
Still, for Sanders to emerge as the nominee, he has to win a majority of the remaining states and win by some very big margins. On Saturday, Alaska, Hawaii and Washington hold Democratic caucuses.
-- As a result of yesterday's (or today's) returns, calls grow louder for Bernie to take a seat on the bench. Markos Moulisas has no standing -- whatever he believes about the power of his influence -- to bring the contested primary to an end, or even to censor posters to his blog who disagree with his choice of presidential candidates. Yesterday, in the richest of ironies, he sent me a blegging e-mail, touting Daily Kos traffic stats and asking me to chip in $5 'to continue their work'.
So over and done with that guy and his shitty blog.
But more to the point: when Bernie finally does leave the race, he's taking a lot of Democrat votes with him somewhere. Whether they are going to the Greens' Jill Stein, a futile Sanders write-in campaign, or back to sleep on the couch is to be determined.
More and more people are coming to the same realization I did last summer, and there's significantly more anecdotal evidence on my social media feeds -- and, I'm guessing, yours -- that indicates D voters in droves are getting off the bus. Probably doesn't mean anything for Hillary's electoral prospects countrywide, but could have severe ramifications for Democrats downballot in places like Harris County. This is more evidence that Clinton's value at the top of the ticket in Texas is unlikely to change the electoral color of the Lone Star State.
No need to get your hopes up, Chuck; any early poll will probably be done by the Texas Tribune/UT/YouGov conglomerate, which has consistently demonstrated its extraordinarily lame predictive value on its best day, and its absolute worthlessness this far out.
-- As the results in the two states with heavy Mormon populations that voted yesterday suggest, Trump is a hard sell in the LDS caucus. Ted Cruz took advantage with an ad showing a little too much of Melania Trump's assets, and that started the weekly catfight we have come to expect now from the GOP 'presidentials'.
