Presumptuous Politics : Apr 6, 2016

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Canadian Cruz Cartoon

Trump is crushed by Cruz: Now what? It's all about the map, the math and the matadors

Under the guise of such other bad omens as black cats, broken mirrors and the Chicago Cubs as World Series favorites, we have Donald Trump’s failure to win Wisconsin’s Republican presidential primary.
Going back to 1968 and the early days of the open primary era, each and every winner of Wisconsin’s GOP vote has earned the party’s nomination.
Does that record remain spotless in 2016, with Texas Sen. Cruz making good on Tuesday’s sweeping victory, or does Trump alter the historical pattern?
With just eight weeks of presidential primaries remaining, here are three ways to view the always entertaining, never endearing Republican race:
The Map. Wisconsin was the 31^st state to hold a GOP primary or caucus. It was also the first vote after a two-week break in the action, with the next contest not scheduled until April 19. Let’s presume Trump carries that primary – as fortune would have it, in his home of state of New York where The Donald hasn’t been below 50 percent in any March or April poll.
After New York, three contests will further define the GOP race: April 26 in Pennsylvania (non-Republican voters had until March 28 to register for the closed primary, so it’s a good indication of the Trump campaign’s organization); May 3 in Indiana (like Iowa and Wisconsin, another chance for Cruz to take advantage of an electorate with Midwestern sensibilities); June 7 in California (a mother lode of 172 delegates, 159 subdivided in 53 congressional districts).
On paper, the edge goes to Trump since none of the remaining states will hold caucuses (Trump’s lost six of nine) and, for the next three weeks, the race will remain in the friendlier Mid-Atlantic region.
What works against Trump? Not enough delegates.
The Math. After Wisconsin, only 804 of the 2,472 Republican delegates are still in play. Translation: Ohio Gov. John Kasich, with less than 150 delegates, can’t win on the first ballot; Cruz, who’s surpassed the 500-delegate mark, would have to win roughly 90 percent of the remaining delegates to get to a 1,237-vote majority.
That also won’t happen.
Though the 42 delegates at stake on Tuesday night aren’t quite a 2 percent drop in the bucket, Trump’s Wisconsin loss seriously jeopardizes his already-slim chances to get to 1,237.
Here’s why.
Two weeks ago, The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculated a path for Trump to reach 1,239. That required winning 30 delegates from Wisconsin. FiveThirtyEight had Trump finishing just shy of a first-ballot win at 1,203. That scenario had Trump earning 25 Wisconsin delegates.
So where does Trump go now to make up the lost ground? Either he springs an upset in one of three upcoming primaries that play to Cruz’s flyover strength (Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota). Or he all but runs the table in California, winning the popular vote and carrying close to 40 of the Golden State’s 53 congressional districts.
In the meantime, Trump (and Cruz, for that matter) will have to deal with some new players in the game . . .
The Matadors. A toreador is to a bull what House Speaker Paul Ryan has become with regard to presidential speculation: he avoids the charging beast with skill and dexterity; he makes the most of his time in the ring.
Ryan says he’s not a 2016 candidate, but his denials are sometimes coy, such as this back-and-forth with talk radio’s Hugh Hewitt. And you might recall his strong denials of any interest in the Speakership last fall.
Perhaps Ryan will adjust his attitude should the Republican National Convention line up as a messy multi-ballot affair. And that seems more likely, thanks to those other matadores – delegate counters – complicating matters for Trump.
What happened between the March 22 votes in Arizona and Utah and Tuesday night’s Wisconsin’s outcome? Trump threatened a lawsuit over Louisiana delegate rules (he won the popular vote there but split the delegates with Cruz).
In North Dakota and Tennessee, state parties approved delegate slates over the objection of Trump supporters.
In Arizona, the Cruz campaign is trying to recruit delegates likely to dump Trump in Cleveland on the second ballot.
And so it will continue as the Republican race slowly, methodically moves from coast to coast. Trump should win contests East and West. Cruz will have his moments in the heartland. California could settle matters; or, fitting for home of some of the nation’s worst traffic, it could add to the political gridlock.
Meanwhile, leery Republicans will look for signs that Trump is capable of speaking and conducting himself in a more dignified, presidential manner. Over the next few weeks, that means more in-depth policy speeches and fewer descents into misogynist tweets and juvenile sore-loser screeds.
Oh for the simpler days, when Wisconsin offered not just clarity, but finality.

Illinois couple defiant despite $80G fine for refusing gay union at B&B

An Illinois couple who refused to host a gay civil union ceremony at their idyllic bed and breakfast five years ago was defiant Tuesday after being ordered to pay an $80,000 fine and hold a celebration for the pair.
Jim and Beth Walder, owners of the Timber Creek Bed &
Breakfast in Paxton, rejected Mark and Todd Wathen's rental inquiry in 2011, telling them they "believe homosexuality is wrong” and refusing their patronage.
The state had recently passed a law allowing civil unions, and the pair filed a complaint with the state Human Rights Commission, which argued their case before an administrative law judge. That judge ruled against the Walders last September, and this month imposed the fine, which included $30,000 in damages and another $50,000 for legal fees.

“We may be out of step with an increasingly anti-Christian culture, but we are in compliance with God’s design..."
- Jim Walder

“Evidently religious freedom does not exist within the
Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act or the Illinois Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act,” Jim Walder said in a statement provided to FoxNews.com. “In our opinion, neither the State of Illinois nor the U. S. Supreme Court has the authority to tamper with the definition of marriage."
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a brief in support of the gay couple, Jim Walder also told the pair “homosexuality is immoral and unnatural” and that “it’s not too late to change your behavior.”

Same-Sex Marriage Legality Over Time | Graphiq

In the last five years, gay marriage has become much more widely accepted, culiminating in last June's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry.
“We may be out of step with an increasingly anti-Christian
culture, but we are in compliance with God’s design and that is what ultimately matters,” Walder said.
The Walders were also ordered in the recent court ruling to
cease discrimination of same-sex couples, a violation under the Illinois Human Rights Act. Walder said he will not comply with the order and plans to appeal the fine.
Attorneys for Todd and Mark Wathen did not immediately
return requests for comment, although Todd Wathen recently released a statement regarding the ruling.
"We are very happy that no other couple will have to
experience what we experienced by being turned away and belittled and criticized for who we are," Todd Wathen said in the statement.

Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin: It's about authenticity, stupid

It was never supposed to be this close.
Bernie Sanders’ win Tuesday in Wisconsin adds another victory to his impressive total and raises the question of whether or not this process is making Hillary Clinton stronger or is exposing her very real vulnerabilities.
There’s one metric that has consistently worked in Sanders’s favor and has decided many primaries: authenticity. In Tuesday’s exit polls, Wisconsin Democrats said by a margin of 82 percent to 16 percent that Sanders was more honest and trustworthy than Clinton. And while she beat Sanders 85 percent to 14 percent in terms of which candidate had the right experience for the job, voters ranked honesty and trustworthiness as their number one issue. The second most important issue? It was “cares about people like me” – another winning category for Sanders.
This will continue to plague Clinton throughout the primaries and, indeed, the general election. It’s not just the email scandal or her speeches at Goldman Sachs or flip flopping on key issues to Democrats like trade agreements. It’s an overwhelming feeling that Clinton operates in her own self interest as opposed to the good of the many and that she is, fundamentally, inauthentic.
That feeling appears to be overwhelming the electorate in many states.
To be sure, the states that Bernie Sanders is winning are largely white and tend to be more liberal. Clinton continues to consistently win African-American and Latino voters, two key voting blocs that will help her as the race moves to more diverse states again.
But in a campaign that has been so driven by momentum, Wisconsin certainly helps Sanders as he heads to New York. He already raised an astounding $44 million in March and will no doubt do the same in April. And though New York is Clinton’s adopted home-state after serving as senator there, Sanders is making inroads. He’s now only 12 points behind Clinton when he was upwards of 40 points behind her just a few months ago.
Momentum is the reason that the Sanders campaign is now talking about Clinton not getting the delegates she needs to win the nomination before the convention, and making the case to super-delegates that they should support him over her.
His team has been invoking 2008 when super-delegates left Clinton for Obama. That scenario was decidedly different in that Obama was the frontrunner for much of the race and Sanders will not be the frontrunner as we head into Philadelphia.
But Sanders will have a case if he manages to keep up this pace and pull off some bigger wins – he needs larger margins to make a dent in her delegate count – and therefore argue that the electorate is behind him; or at least behind him enough that they should think twice.
The odds of this scenario playing out are still quite unlikely. Tuesday’s win won’t seriously hurt Clinton as Wisconsin splits delegate proportionally. That said, an increasingly close race in New York, where a Sanders’s rally at Washington Square Park is scheduled just five days before the primary, is certainly unsettling for the Clinton camp.
We’ll say it again. It was never supposed to be this close.

Why Trump and Clinton are suddenly stumbling despite their huge leads

It’s a rather remarkable phenomenon: The two front-runners are having trouble closing the deal.
By this point in the campaign, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should be thinking about running mates and planning for the fall. Instead, they both had their hands full trying to stave off defeat in Wisconsin.
And both campaigns, in an apparent sign of frustration, put out preemptive memos defending their positions against the press and the prognosticators.
Ted Cruz easily won Wisconsin yesterday, a symbolically important victory even though only 42 delegates were at stake. And Bernie Sanders romped in Wisconsin, with Fox calling the race as soon as the polls closed at 8 p.m. central.
Trump was on an incredible roll two weeks ago, having won 20 states and driven all but two rivals out of the race. Instead, Wisconsin gave a big psychological boost to Cruz, who captured his first major primary outside his home state of Texas.
But it’s important that the pundits not go overboard here. Trump is still going to the convention with a big lead, even if yesterday’s contest made it slightly harder for him to get to 1,237. Cruz has almost no hope of reaching the magic number and would have to win the nomination after the first ballot.
Many forces combined to deny Trump the win. The GOP establishment, in this case led by Scott Walker, did everything it could to derail him. He made a series of missteps, from abortion comments that ticked off the pro-life and pro-choice sides to retweeting an unflattering photo of Cruz’s wife. The press smelled blood in the water.
And maybe Wisconsin was never a great state for Trump. Although some areas have plenty of blue-collar workers, its voters are, on average, better educated and more religious than in most other states, and that isn’t The Donald’s base.
Little wonder, then, that Trump senior adviser Barry Bennett complained in a leaked memo that the “pathetic” and “idiotic” media were exaggerating the candidate’s problems.
Cruz also deserves credit for staying on message, garnering support from politicians who don’t much like him, and counterpunching without getting too personal (except for the “sniveling coward” moment).
Clinton’s loss is even more inexplicable. She has now been beaten in six out of seven contests by a 74-year-old self-proclaimed socialist who never should have been much of a rival.
The media have focused far less on the Democratic race because of a nearly universal conviction that Clinton, regardless of her stumbles, is a lock to win the nomination.
But strange things are happening. Bernie raised $15 million more than Hillary last month, and he hasn’t held a single fundraiser. Grass-roots liberals are filling his coffers, despite the widespread chatter that he will lose, while Hillary holds big-money events that further brand her as the candidate of the monied establishment.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook felt compelled to issue a pre-Wisconsin memo insisting that “Hillary Clinton has built a nearly insurmountable lead among both delegates and actual voters. Contrary to the claims of the Sanders campaign, in measure after measure, Clinton has shown the broadest support of any candidate currently running for president.”
And yesterday, when Sanders’ top aide told CNN his campaign would work on flipping superdelegates at the Philadelphia convention, Hillaryland sent out a blast saying he wants to overturn the will of the voters.
Wisconsin fit the Sanders formula, a predominantly white state with a strong progressive tradition. But he is the one generating the big crowds and excitement, while she increasingly sounds like the Hillary of 2008, promising sensible change and scoffing at the inspirational rhetoric of her opponent.
Oddly enough, the Sanders team conceded in a lengthy New York Times piece that had the senator been more aggressive against Clinton in 2015 and spent more time on the trail, he might be well positioned now to win. Although Hillary might have responded in kind if Sanders had whacked her over the email scandal and other matters, the story read like a post-mortem reflection on defeat.
So how is it that Trump and Clinton have hit this rough patch?
They could not be more different. Trump is the bombastic outsider with no political experience, Clinton the consummate insider since her days as first lady.
Trump mostly wings it; Clinton speaks in position-paper paragraphs. Trump is entertaining; Clinton, who says she’s not a natural politician, can be dull. He speaks the language of a native New Yorker; she sounds like a former New York senator.
Clinton met with world leaders as a globe-trotting diplomat; Trump has built hotels and golf courses around the world.
But they share one thing in common: high negatives. They would, according to current polls, be the most unpopular major-party nominees in memory. Trump has high unfavorable ratings from women; Clinton, despite her gender advantage, has had trouble winning over younger women.
And that, in a nutshell, is why neither one has been able to wrap things up.

Cruz, Sanders pick up convincing wins over Trump, Clinton in Wisconsin

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders scored big victories in Wisconsin's presidential primaries Tuesday, dampening Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's hopes of wrapping up the race any time soon -- and putting heavy pressure on the front-runners to recapture the momentum in contests later this month.
Both Cruz and Sanders charged out of Wisconsin claiming momentum was turning in their favor. Sanders, who notched his sixth victory in the last seven state contests, won all but three of the Badger State's 72 counties.
“And we have won almost all of them with overwhelming, landslide numbers,” Sanders told an ebullient crowd of supporters Tuesday night.
Sanders was speaking in Wyoming, which holds a caucus contest this weekend. But the next big primary will be in New York on April 19, and Sanders has vowed to take on Clinton in her adopted home state.
Cruz also pointed to his win Tuesday as a sign the tides are turning against Republican front-runner Trump, who faced one of the roughest weeks of his campaign going into the primary.
"Tonight is a turning point," Cruz declared at a rally in Milwaukee. "It is a rallying cry. It is a call from the hard-working men and women of Wisconsin to the people of America: we have a choice. A real choice."
Yet Cruz, despite winning in Wisconsin and outmaneuvering Trump lately in the grueling battle for delegates, still faces challenging terrain in the weeks ahead. Trump has a clear lead in New York polls, and his campaign claimed "total confidence" they would win that race.
Trump's campaign also put out a biting statement Tuesday night that said Cruz was "worse than a puppet--- he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump."
Even if Trump holds his ground in New York, however, Cruz's Wisconsin win only increases the odds that the Republican Party will hold its first open convention in four decades this July, a scenario Trump seemed to be referring to.
Any candidate would need 1,237 delegates to clinch the nomination before then, and Cruz's Wisconsin victory makes that number very difficult for Trump to obtain.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Cruz led with 48 percent of the vote to Trump's 35 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich was trailing far behind on 14 percent of the vote.
Exit polls showed disquiet about Trump among Wisconsin Republicans. In the Fox News survey of 1,532 primary voters, 58 percent of respondents said they were either concerned or scared about the prospect of Trump being elected president. More worryingly for the Trump campaign, 37 percent said they would not vote for him if he faced Clinton in November's general election.
On the Democratic side, returns showed Sanders with 56 percent of the vote to Clinton's 43 percent with 99 percent of precincts reporting.
The victory helps fuel Sanders' argument that the Democratic primary is far from over, even as front-runner Clinton tries to turn her attention to the general election.
Exit polls in the Democratic race show Sanders won in part with the help of independent voters, 72 percent of whom broke for the Vermont senator.
While the Cruz and Sanders wins in Wisconsin won't necessarily shorten the odds on either winning their party’s nomination, the losses by the front-runners keep an aura of uncertainty hanging over both races.
Cruz, enjoying the support of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, campaigned harder than anybody in the Midwestern state. Buoyed by conservative talk show hosts and others opposed to a Trump bid, the Texas senator led in most GOP polls leading up to Tuesday’s primary.
For Trump, the long lead-up to Wisconsin's contest has included one of the worst stretches of his candidacy. He was embroiled in a spat involving Cruz's wife, which he now says he regrets, was sidetracked by his campaign manager's legal problems after an altercation with a female reporter, and stumbled awkwardly in comments about abortion.
Still, Trump made a spirited final push in the state. His campaign said Tuesday night he withstood an "onslaught of the establishment" in Wisconsin.
Complicating the primary landscape for both Cruz and Trump is the continuing candidacy of Kasich. The Ohio governor's only victory has come in his home state, but he's still picking up delegates that would otherwise help Trump inch closer to the nomination or help Cruz catch up.

Trump has joined Cruz in calling for Kasich to end his campaign. But Kasich cast Trump's focus on him as a sign that he's best positioned to win over the businessman's supporters.
For Republicans, 42 delegates were at stake Tuesday. According to an Associated Press count late Tuesday, Cruz won 33 of 36 allocated Wisconsin delegates, with Trump winning the other three and six delegates still outstanding. With the latest results factored in, Trump has 740 delegates to Cruz's 514. Kasich is a distant third with 143 delegates.
For Democrats, 86 delegates were on the line Tuesday in Wisconsin. With his victory, Sanders won 45 delegates to Clinton's 31, with 10 delegates outstanding, according to an Associated Press count. When including superdelegates, the party officials who can back any candidate, Clinton holds 1,743 delegates to Sanders' 1,056. It takes 2,383 delegates to win the Democratic nomination.
On the eve of voting in Wisconsin, Clinton's campaign manager argued that Sanders' only path to victory "relies on overturning the will of the voters." In a memo to supporters, Robby Mook wrote that Sanders' strategy now is "a combination of trying to flip pledged delegates at state and county conventions, while also convincing superdelegates that he deserves their support."