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From The Reporter’s Notebook
Confidence is building that if Marco Rubio cannot pull off a primary victory in his home state of Florida and if he drops out of the race, the establishment may come around to supporting Trump. Ed Rogers, a Republican strategist told TPM’s Lauren Fox that “I think you are going to see a lot of establishment support coming Cruz’s way. And even after many in the party have turned away from Cruz after he led a government shutdown in 2013, all that becomes very very secondary if he is the pone standing between Trump and the nomination.”
Agree or Disagree?
Josh Marshall: “As long as there is not an organized conservative third party candidate in the election, I think the overwhelming power of contemporary partisanship will pull the vast majority of ‘anti-Trump’ mainstream into the Republican Trump-supporting camp. But Republicans and Republican-leaning independents don’t make up 51% of the electorate. What all of this means is that a Trump v Clinton general election will be fought over the roughly 10% of the electorate which is not firmly anchored in the right/center-right or left/center-left blocs of American politics. It will likely be fought out over the distinction between Trump’s policies and the Democrat’s. But it will be fought out on conventional political norms – not ones in which rule-breaking and transgressive behavior are positive good in themselves. This is not wishful thinking.”
Say What?!
“Go home to mommy. Tell her to tuck you in bed.”
– Trump to a protester at a North Carolina rally.
BUZZING: Today in the Hive
From a TPM Prime member: “So the argument that Jane Sanders made on All In With Chris Hayes after Super Tuesday, was basically the same argument that the Clinton camp made in 2008, was that their campaign had won the more important Democratic States. It was problematic in 2008 when Clinton made it, and it’s problematic now, although I think it makes even less sense for the Sanders camp to make it now, given what they’ve won and lost.* The unintentionally racist part, is that it’s saying states in the Deep South don’t matter to Democrats in the general election, so their primary voters shouldn’t get a say in the general election. That seems like a bad argument to be making if you want to be a national party, but that aside, the defining characteristic of those states is their large Black populations. So no, to be very clear, I don’t think Bernie is meaning to say that Black votes don’t matter, but the effective result of the argument is “those Black votes don’t matter” which is troubling. To be very clear, I’m not arguing that anyone in the Sanders campaign is trying or intending to be racist, I don’t think they are at all, and I think the Sanders deeply believes in racial justice in this country. I think they’re playing the only hand they have available to them. I’m just trying to point out that the argument has some troubling consequences when you follow it to it’s natural conclusion. It was problematic when Clinton made it in 2008, and I don’t think it helped her in that election, and I think it’s problematic in 2016 and isn’t helping Sanders in this election.”
Related: Sanders gains ground, but Clinton is still ahead by 7 points.
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What We’re Reading
Founders of the satirical magazine “Spy” have been tormenting Trump for 30 years. (NPR)
An oral history of the Golden Girls. (Frontiers Media)
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