Where to from here

So far on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton has won contests in South Dakota, New Mexico and New Jersey, while Bernie Sanders had won the North Dakota caucuses and Montana. California is still outstanding.

California finally got called about 6:15 this morning.  It went 56-43 for her and was never seriously in play as the returns came in.  Sanders was scheduled to address his supporters in Santa Monica at midnight, but ...

The Vermont senator arrived almost an hour late ... The crowd was as frenzied as ever and hung on his every word. Sanders basked in the adulation, with much of the rally made up of Sanders standing and shaking his head because he was unable to speak over his cheering supporters.

He was reflective.

“It has been one of the most moving moments of my life to be out throughout this state in beautiful evenings and seeing thousands of people coming out, people who are prepared to stand up and fight for real change in this country,” Sanders said.

So the path ahead still looks a little ... winding.   Rocky even, maybe.

Sanders, who spoke with Obama on Tuesday night, will meet with the president at the White House on Thursday. He also has a meeting planned with Senate minority leader Harry Reid, a Clinton backer.

Also on Thursday, Sanders will rally supporters in Washington, D.C., in preparation for next Tuesday’s final Democratic primary here.

And Sanders has said that he will at some point return to Vermont to "assess" the direction of his campaign.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Sanders will be laying off a significant number of staffers. And Politico released an embarrassing report detailing the inner strife of what looks like the final days of a losing campaign. 

Pretty ugly.  Recriminations galore, as always, on the morning after defeats.  Chris Kofinis hits the right notes in this piece titled "Clinton hits magic number, here's why Bernie won't step aside":

Behind the scenes, emails and texts will undoubtedly flood top Sanders advisors, surrogate intermediaries will be used to carry messages to Sanders himself, and public pronouncements will be made by a host of political insiders, all in an attempt to prod, kick, or push Sanders out of the race (nicely, of course). Soon the chatter will begin: When will he endorse? When will he rally his supporters behind Clinton? Doesn't he realize how he is hurting her, not to mention emboldening Donald Trump? Etc., etc.

Maybe it will work, and Sanders will see the light, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Sanders to quit.

Tuesday night is only the beginning – if not for Sanders, at least for his supporters. 

Bingo.

While it is easy to believe that this is about the 2016 nomination – it is not. Sanders can do the math. He knows it is over. He knew it was over months ago, unless one truly believes that superdelegates will somehow change course at the convention (and, short of an act of god they won't). So, you may ask, why does he keep pushing for something he can't have? Maybe because it's about something much bigger than this one election.  

At 74, Sanders might not be of the fortitude to keep leading what's left of his revolution.  But as with most revolutions, who do you trust to take over?

If you listen to what Sanders is saying and has said throughout this primary season, this is about a revolution. And real revolutions only end when things have dramatically changed (i.e. those who revolt win) or when they are crushed by the powers that be.

Well, we are far from Sanders-like revolutionary change, yet the movement is far from crushed, so that leaves only one option – a revolution that needs fuel to grow.

While pledged and superdelegate math has foiled Sanders' 2016 presidential ambitions, what his campaign has sparked, he is determined to see continue. It will not simply be absorbed by a Clinton campaign, or appeased by a convention speech. Right or wrong, Sanders and his supporters want the party to move far to the left. And, if the goal is to move the Democratic Party to the left, that campaign has only just begun.

While the party hasn't gone "full Sanders," it's headed more to the left than it is to the center. From trade issues to the minimum wage, the party has moved noticeably more to the left now that it was twelve months ago.

Indeed, he's accomplished -- at least until Clinton pivots right -- all that was believed he could.  And quite a bit more.  For one thing, he changed the paradigm on how presidential campaigns can be funded.  (Vox lists four more ways.)

Does anyone really think this movement will now end on Tuesday?

Going forward, the huge challenge for Clinton is to embrace what Sanders is speaking about, not just to whom he is speaking to. In fact, in every political Democratic focus group my firm has conducted since 2015, Sanders' message moved people because it spoke to the economic anxiety people truly feel and the dramatic change they want – and that was true even among most focus group participants who supported Hillary Clinton.

In the coming weeks, the Clinton campaign must aggressively seek to tap this emotion and energy that has been unleashed. They can't take it for granted, even if it's logical to assume that most Sanders voters prefer her to Trump. Can they completely appease those who wholly believe in Sanders' vision of revolutionary change? Maybe, but probably not quickly. The most resolute Sanders voters will not be truly appeased unless the Democratic Party dramatically changes and speaks to their vision for the country and the world.

Regardless of when Sanders drops out, his supporters have only begun their fight to change the Democratic Party. And make no mistake: Sanders' supporters, and the others who want this "revolution," will be there watching and waiting to make sure that change happens – even if Bernie Sanders is in the U.S. Senate, and Hillary Clinton is in the White House. 

If Hillary picks Elizabeth Warren as running mate, be assured that there has been a real impact made by the Sanders run.  If she picks a Latino, the 2016 race galvanizes around the swelling opportunity that caucus presents for the Democratic party in future elections.  I think she'll stick to that, but am less inclined to think the choice is named Castro.  They're still too green for national politics (and much too conservative for my palate and certainly that of the Berners who might be on board with Warren).

Does Sanders lead the parade over to the Greens, or some other progressive party, perhaps one he starts himself outside the duopoly?  Don't think so.  His supporters might go that direction anyway, but he won't be pushing them.

So as we watch and wait for these developments to unfold over the next five months, Sanders gets to endure the second round of ad hominem from the poor sports among the winners.  As long as he's bothering them to some degree, be it minor or major, I can be happy.

Agitation remains the order of my day.

Update: Mother Jones has a nice look back at how we got to this point.

What we might expect this evening

Probably more scenes like this one.  This is SNL territory.  To the action.

Six states are going to the polls on the Democratic side, with a total of 694 delegates at stake. The most important of them by far is California, which has 475 of those delegates and where polls close at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. The second-biggest prize is New Jersey, where 126 delegates are at stake; polls close at 8 pm Eastern.

The other four states to vote are New Mexico (34 delegates, polls close at 7 pm local time), Montana (21 delegates, polls close at 8 pm local time), South Dakota (20 delegates, polls close at 7 pm local time), and North Dakota (18 delegates, caucuses begin 7 pm local time). And technically there's one more contest after this — the District of Columbia Democratic primary is a week from today, on June 14.

Now, the race in California appears tight — Sanders hasn't led a single poll of the state, but he trails by just 4 percentage points in the HuffPost Pollster average. By contrast, New Jersey looks like a blowout for Clinton, and the other (small) states have scarcely been polled.

As reported here two weeks ago, they'll call it -- for real this time -- after the Garden State stops voting at 7 p.m. our time.

Yes, the big question is what Sanders and his supporters do next.

In recent days, the Vermont senator has maintained that if this is the outcome, he'll stay in the race until the convention — and spend the next month and a half lobbying superdelegates to abandon Clinton and support him instead. And his campaign spokesperson Michael Briggs reiterated that sentiment last night, saying in a statement, "Our job from now until the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump."

[...]

There is reason to be skeptical of Sanders's pronouncements, though. Presidential candidates have often argued that they'll fight all the way until the convention, only to reverse course when defeat is finally unmistakable. And Matt Yglesias argues that Sanders will likely do the same.

Whatever Sanders's intentions, the Democratic Party is eager for Hillary Clinton to move on to the general election and focus on taking on Donald Trump. Indeed, according to recent reports from the New York Times and CNN, several key Democratic figures who have remained neutral so far, like President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, will likely endorse Clinton in the coming days, as an effort to signal to Sanders that it's time to throw in the towel.

Gadfly is skeptical (shock me!) but there will be some significant amount of support lost from the Democrats in the days to come.  It depends, of course, on what the definition of the word 'significant' means.  Where the bulk of the defections land -- Trump, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or NOTA -- is perhaps the more interesting question.

Stein will be appearing on Truthdig's Facebook Live this evening.

“I used to practice clinical medicine, taking care of patients,” (Stein) said in an interview with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer. “Now I practice political medicine, because it’s the mother of all illnesses.”

Stein will be in the Truthdig offices Tuesday evening for a “Facebook Live” discussion on the final state presidential primaries, including California’s, which will be a deciding factor in the presidential race.

In a country dominated by a two-party political system, Stein wants people to know that the Green Party’s platform is not “radical” in the typical sense. “[W]e reflect the solutions that people are hungering for, and we actually have quite a bit of experience on the ground at the local and the county level making this happen,” she told Scheer.

Stein has been making media waves, with some hoping for a potential third-party ticket with Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. She has clear progressive policy stances and recently noted in Rolling Stone that her platform is better for women than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s.

[...]

Amid fears that Tuesday’s primary will be the end of Sanders’ campaign, Stein is certain that she could be a viable candidate for his supporters. “The whole reason for having an independent third party that cannot be silenced is [that] there are 25 percent of Bernie’s voters who are not going into that dark night to vote for the No. 1 cheerleader for Wal-Mart, for Wall Street, for an endless war,” Stein told Truthdig’s Bill Boyarsky. “They are looking for another place to hang their hat.”

If you're in Houston in early August, come meet Jill Stein at the USGP's presidential nominating convention, being held at U of H.  The convention's theme is "Houston, we have a solution".

Revolutionary News Update (Vol. 7: It's Over -- the AP said so)

It also can't be a revolution any longer, at least not in the traditional sense and certainly not inside the binary logic box that is the D versus R, left vs. right, right v. wrong, black/white either/or yin yang state of American politics.  The headlines from last night include the following:

-- Clinton becomes presumptive nominee

--  CNN ignores DNC request to not count superdelegates before they vote

-- Six states are casting presidential primary ballots today:

Clinton and Sanders are poised to split the 694 Democratic delegates up for grabs in New Jersey, California, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota. The District of Columbia, which offers 20 delegates, is the last to vote on June 14.

--  Establishment media commit massive act of malpractice, claim Clinton clinched

The Associated Press and NBC News inappropriately reported Hillary Clinton made history and “clinched” the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. It spurred other media organizations, such as CNN and the New York Times, to follow suit and splash their home pages with big headlines indicating Clinton was the nominee.

In engaging in this act, establishment media improperly influenced five primaries scheduled for June 7, including the California primary, one of the biggest contests in the presidential race thus far. They collectively stooped to a new sycophantic low.

The reports of “clinching” are entirely based on an unofficial survey of superdelegates, which the AP and NBC News has conducted throughout the 2016 election. They both determined Clinton reached the “magic number” needed to clinch, which is 2383 delegates.

But if it is true that history happened, why didn’t Clinton’s own party congratulating her? How come there was no statement from the Democratic National Committee?

As of 12 am ET on June 7, the DNC had released no statement. There was no status update on the DNC’s Facebook page. There was no message sent or retweeted about Clinton making history.

There is a Tweet from Hillary in in the top link, and she says we've still got voting to do.

-- Obama had a heart-to-heart with Bernie Sunday afternoon.

-- Michael Lindenberger, writing for the Dallas Morning Views, says, "get on the bandwagon, Berners!" in the most condescending way possible.  This might mean that the Snooze isn't going to endorse Trump, but I won't be restricting my autoneurological respiratory function by having my cortex override my medulla oblongata.

-- Walter Bragman (unfortunately even more melodramatic than HA Goodman) still manages to make a few good points.

Clinton’s problems can be attributed to the internet and the way she conducts herself politically. She is a politician of a bygone era of insider politics. Like Mitt Romney before her, Clinton has fallen victim to the fact that, today, anyone can readily pull up a video on YouTube of her saying different things to people on different sides of various issues.

This is spot on.  In their zeal for 'first woman president', Clinton supporters ignore or weakly discount every single flaw of hers.

I had been of the opinion that Clinton-(VP) could hold serve until 2032, but even if she picks Elizabeth Warren, Hillary is going to be lousy one-termer in the Herbert Walker mold.  The royal flush in 2018 against Democrats will rival 1992 1994's (thanks to DBC in the comments for the correction), her husband's first midterm.  And once her lying, economic misfires and the war she starts on Iran catch up to her, we'll have a Republican president and Congress in 2020 ... just in time for decennial redistricting.

For Democrats, 2020 presents the first chance in a decade to win back the House of Representatives. The election coincides with the next Census, which means the party that takes the majority of the state legislatures will redraw the congressional districts. The GOP won the down-ballot race the last time there was a Census — in 2010 — which allowed them to gerrymander the House districts heavily in their favor, and the Democrats have been unable to win control since.

This time around there are fewer restrictions on the redistricting process because the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder, struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act — the formula for states and localities to fall under the Section 5 preclearance requirements. If the Democrats lose down-ballot in 2020, they will not regain control of the House until 2031. Put simply, progress of any kind for the next decade will come down to turnout, and down-ballot voting in the next presidential election. 

Egberto reinforced the point about all politics being local recently.

Far beyond Bragman's fear-mongering about the Democratic party destroying itself by nominating and electing Hillary Clinton, there will be some ominous ramifications for duopolists in the future.  No, the GOP won't die off in the wake of Trump's defeat, certainly not in Texas, the South, or the Mountain states.  Neither will the Dems do so in 2020, if he's correct about them getting swept out of office.  We could wish for these things, but change in politics is too goddamned incremental for either one of the two monoliths to just keel over.  It should continue to be a slow death for both, though, at least until they feel threatened enough by minor parties' ballot strength to adapt and co-opt their most popular initiatives to sustain themselves for some time longer.

By that time all of that happens, we (humans) should have been burned off the Earth like wasps out of their nests.  Mother Nature is going to shake us off like a bad case of fleas, as George Carlin presciently observed.

But until then, some of us will party like it's 1999, roll coal, turn the A/C down to 68, stock up on snacks and watch the revolution on teevee.  The AP will call it before ten p.m. so they can get to bed early.  Maybe even a couple of days in advance.

In related news, writers Etan Cohen and Mike Judge, and star Terry Crews (fictional wrestling champ-turned-president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho) of Idiocracy are going to be making anti-Trump ads this cycle.  That's as perfect as irony gets.