Steve M over at No More Mister Nice Blog made an interesting point about how the push for a third party candidate may be an attempt to recreate the conditions in 1992 and 1996, where Bill Clinton did not get a majority. I don’t really buy the argument (nor does he) because it doesn’t matter what happens when a Democrat is elected president: the Republican Party treats them as though they are invalid. Most conservatives are convinced that if it weren’t for voter fraud, the Republicans would win every election in a landslide.

But he wrote something that I am very skeptical about, “That may not be completely crazy polls show that Clinton would lose to a Republican who was less offputting than Trump or Ted Cruz — Kasich, for instance.” And he linked to a study by Morning Consult, 50 State Snapshot. I don’t buy it — at all. We can start with the fact that polls this early are generally meaningless. But it is especially meaningless when it comes to John Kasich.

There are a few things that make any polling results related to John Kasich particularly stupid. First, most people don’t even know who he is. And those who do know don’t know much about him. And everything that is known about him is put through the lens of Donald Trump. Kasich is the “reasonable” Republican. The fact is that he is ridiculously conservative and not a very nice guy (very much like Chris Christie). This is not the kind of thing that would stay hidden in a general election.

So what this study really shows is how people feel about Hillary Clinton generally. And like anyone who is well known, she has high disapproval ratings. So that poll is more or less Clinton vs Clinton. And the fact that she comes close to winning even in that theoretical match up is pretty amazing. But to show you how absurd it is, the match up indicates that John Kasich would win Oregon, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. There is no way they are going red, so that brings Clinton’s total up to 255. And I also have a hard time believing that Michigan would go red in a presidential election, and that would put Clinton over the top.

None of this is to say that the Democrats can just skate through this election. The economic fundamentals are very slightly negative for the Democrats. But what I expect is for the unemployment rate to stay roughly flat during the next five months, which will make this campaign roughly a wash. But if unemployment starts to take off, a candidate like John Kasich really could have won. I tend to think that Donald Trump is so horrible a candidate, that even a stark rise in the unemployment rate wouldn’t put him over the top.

I’m willing to admit that a head-to-head polling match up between Clinton and Trump might have some predictive value. They are both, after all, widely known and for a long time. And you could make a case for Cruz (who actually loses worse in the poll, because he doesn’t win Maine). But ultimately, this is going to be another race between a Democrat and a Republican. John Kasich may have the reputation of being a different kind of Republican, but he isn’t. And his negatives would go way up in a general election.

Although I’ve long been as certain as I am about anything that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, I have never wanted Bernie Sanders to drop out. Part of this is just an intuition that I’ve had that these hard-fought battles really don’t hurt candidates in the general election. So I was pleased to see some backup on this from political scientist Julia Azari over at FiveThirtyEight, Sanders Shouldn’t Drop Out For Clinton’s Sake. The take away from the article is that it doesn’t look like hard-fought primary fights affect the general election.

But this, I think, is key, “You could cherry-pick studies to argue that contentious primary races hurt a nominee, but even those effects are small.” So this idea that Sanders ought to drop out of the race for the good of the Democrats’ general election chances don’t really hold up. I don’t blame Clinton supporters for calling for him to step down. (To her credit, Clinton has not called for him to drop out, as far as I know.) This is always what supporters who are winning say. But the idea that Sanders is doing something wrong is sub-mental (ie, tribal). And I think we really should allow this process to continue, even though I don’t personally like the conflict.

On the other hand, if Sanders really does want to litigate this at the DNC, I might change my mind — especially given that he is likely to lose California by a good deal. But I don’t really think that’s what’s going on. I think Sanders is just positioning himself to get as much out of this campaign as possible. And as one who thinks that the Democratic Party has moved much too far to the right (and thus deserves a good deal of blame for the Republicans moving into crazy-land), I want to see some changes. And the fact of the matter is that there are only about five percentage points separating Clinton and Sanders. And I don’t think that’s nearly a fair assessment of the Democratic Party base, because Clinton has a long history and a lot of good will among the base.

What was most interesting in Azari’s article was here discussion of a recent study that found that hard-fought primary battles don’t divide parties, but rather the other way around. Hard-fought primary battles are the result of divided parties. And I think that’s clearly the case in the Democratic Party. The party has moved steadily rightward and it is due for a correction. (And I’ve written before about how the right turn of the party was not necessary, so I won’t go into that.)

But there are some practical issues here. Clinton didn’t drop out this early in 2008. She stayed in the race until after the final primary. And I mean no disrespect, but we should remember that Sanders has done better as time has gone on, and the opposite was happening to Clinton in 2008. So if she didn’t drop out then, why should Sanders drop out now?

What I most dislike about this idea is that I think it does represent a kind of aristocratic impulse in people. Ultimately, people do want a coronation — if they think they happen to be winning. And this is something that really bothers me about us as a species. I think that liberals are a good deal more rational than conservatives in the modern political context. Yet we are all motivated by these primitive instincts. It’s sad.

But it is way too early for Sanders to drop out.

As I checked in every day at New York Magazine, I kept seeing that the top story was, “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny.” I figured it was just another story about Donald Trump, and frankly, so what? I really don’t like Trump, but I don’t see how he is really any different than the other people the Republicans had on offer for the presidency. But finally, I clicked over — probably more because of the Zohar Lazar’s Bernie Wrightson-esque illustration. What I found was an article by Andrew Sullivan with the actual title, Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.

Oh brilliant! Now Andrew Sullivan comes back to explain to us that Donald Trump is the result of too much democracy. Oh, and he read The Republic in graduate school! And maybe read It Can’t Happen Here at some point too! Oh, what an erudite man, Sullivan is! But the almost 8,000 word essay is a mass of contradictions. In particular, there is too much democracy that is allowing the people to elect a man who will bring tyranny; and the people are angry because the elites haven’t been listening to them since the early 1990s. But what does any of that matter?! Andrew Sullivan is a perfect example of a Very Serious Person.

And it is in this capacity that I found the article most hilarious. He noted that, “The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.” Obviously, this doesn’t really go along with the “too much democracy,” but whatever. Andrew Sullivan thinks that the people want “compromise.” They aren’t upset about a lack of compromise. They are upset about things like NAFTA — a great example of compromise — and something that Sullivan has always been a big supporter of.

The idea of “compromise” for Very Serious Idiots like Andrew Sullivan is that it is a way for them to get their preferred conservative economic policies. His list of elite failure is “massive and increasing public debt,” “a disastrous war in the Middle East,” and allowing financial markets to crash the economy.

The first item is standard Very Serious Simpson-Bowles nonsense. If only we could get conservative Democrats and standard Republicans together, everything would be wonderful! Is Sullivan for raising taxes on the rich? Is he for raising the cap on Social Security? In general, no. Sullivan is a Thatcherite to the core; he hasn’t changed, it is just that the Democratic Party has moved to him.

We did get a disastrous war in the Middle Easy — one that was cheered on by Andrew Sullivan. And the fact that he thinks it was financial markets that crashed the economy rather than the bursting of an $8 trillion housing bubble is typical of the Very Serious People in that they all “know” what the others “know” which is usually wrong.

But let’s be clear of what’s actually going on with Trump. Nate Silver wrote a very interesting article yesterday, The Mythology Of Trump’s “Working Class” Support. It turns out that Trump voters are quite well to do — not as well to do as Kasich voters, but much more well to do than Clinton and Sanders voters. So Trump voters aren’t these poor working class people who are getting screwed; they are resentful whites who don’t like seeing their group identity lose its supremacy.

This is particularly interesting because in his own article, Andrew Sullivan pushes this same kind of white resentment. He used the phrase “white working class” five times. He only used the phrase “working class” without the white modifier once. And this is, after all, the guy who pushed Black People Are Stupider Than White People into the (Liberal!) mainstream.

After all those words, there really is nothing of value in Andrew Sullivan’s article. But it is funny that he seems so unaware of his own complicity in the false narrative he created.

Afterword: Andrew Sullivan on Bernie Sanders

Sullivan claims that Bernie Sanders’ core critique is that money in politics is destroying it. That is not his core critique. That is part of his core rhetoric. But his core critique is about economic inequality. Of course, Sullivan isn’t interested in that. He also refers to Sanders as “the demagogue of the left.” Sullivan should have put down The Republic in graduate school and picked up a dictionary. What a fool! So of course he’s taken Very Seriously.

Matt Yglesias wrote an article that at first struck me as obvious but now seems profound, Donald Trump Could Be a Generation-Long Disaster for the Republican Party. He made a branding argument. The Republican Party already struggles with support from any group that isn’t white and dying off fast. The key to Trump’s success in the GOP primary has been that he’s made text of the party’s long used subtext. And this doesn’t just speak for Donald Trump; it speaks of the Republican Party. As Yglesias conjectures, Latinos (but also African Americans, Muslims, and even young people) will not soon forgive and forget.

The key to the argument is Pete Wilson. He is well known in California and now more or less a cautionary tale. He was twice selected US Senator and then twice elected governor. On paper, he’s an incredibly successful politician. But he is also largely responsible for destroying the Republican Party in California. And that is due, in large part, to his association with Proposition 187.

Proposition 187 was passed in 1994 — at the same time that Pete Wilson won his second term as governor. It was the first ever state anti-immigration law that was supposed to stop, for example, undocumented children from using our public schools. It was a really vile law that was quickly found to be unconstitutional and was never put into effect. It was also an embarrassment. It was much like Proposition 8 in 2008 that made same-sex marriage illegal. People voted for it, but the state as a whole quickly saw it as a mistake.

So even though Wilson won in 1994, he branded the GOP as the party of intolerance. It is a little funny as a Californian. The state isn’t nearly as liberal as others think. But more important, the state isn’t as liberal as its own residents think. It isn’t just demographic factors that turned Prop 187 into an embarrassment. And it isn’t demographic factors at all that turned Prop 8 into one. Californians work themselves up into a froth over issues like that and then, in the clear light of day (without the drumbeat of an election), we are embarrassed because we don’t see ourselves as the intolerant people our voting often suggests.

California used to be a swing state. As I remember with great annoyance, George Bush Sr beat Michael Dukakis by over 3.5 percentage points. (Note: where I live in the Bay Area, Dukakis won; Prop 8 lost; and Prop 187 lost.) But now it is one of the bluest of states.

Barbara Boxer used to be a US Representative from liberal Marin County. She was widely considered a liberal extremist. I never thought she would be able to win any statewide election. She did win in a fairly close race in 1992, largely because of Bill Clinton. But since then, she’s been reelected by large margins: 10 percentage points in 1998, 20 in 2004, and 10 in the Republican’s huge year of 2010.

What’s more, the state assembly and senate are both currently 65% Democratic.

The issue for the Republican Party nationwide is whether this will happen to them. Pete Wilson and the Republicans won the battle in 1994, but lost the war — and quickly. In Donald Trump’s case, it doesn’t even look like he will win the battle. But he is doing a great job of branding the party as intolerant jerks. If you look at the data from Gallup, Trump has had strong approval from Republican voters from the beginning. His net favorability right now is 24 percentage points!

George Will hopes that the Republican Party can just put Trump behind it, lose in 2016, and come back strong in 2020. And maybe it can. But there will be even fewer white people then. And there will be more Latinos. And as much as they may be seen more and more as “white,” they are not likely to forgive and forget what the Republican Party is all about.

Update: Pete Wilson’s Endorsement

I wrote this early morning yesterday, not thinking about the Indiana primary. A few days ago, Pete Wilson endorsed Ted Cruz. Well, that’s all over now.

Matt Bruenig wrote a great article over the weekend, Does It Matter That Blacks Oppose Marriage Equality? It counters what is a very common argument on the left: that we shouldn’t sympathize with the white working class because they are just a bunch of bigots anyway. There are many problems with this thought.

One issue is that the white working class may over all be bigoted toward black and brown skinned people, a large percentage of them are not bigoted in the obvious way that, say, Donald Trump supporters often seem to be. This is where Bruenig got the title for his article. It turns out that as a group, African Americans are really bigoted toward the LGBT community. While blacks and whites were pretty much together on the issue of same-sex marriage back in 2001, support has almost doubled among whites, but has barely changed among blacks.

Given this, should we say that the African American community does not deserve our sympathy because it does not have the same beliefs that we do? It sounds absurd when put that way. And it is especially true when it was the “liberal” president Bill Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage Act. And given that in 2001, only about 30% of Americans were in favor of marriage equality, does it mean that no Americans deserved sympathy in 2001?

But to me, the bigger issue is just how class-based this idea is. The issue isn’t about the bigotry of the white working class; it is about the form of that bigotry. Because here is the unfortunate truth: we are all bigots. And if we are going to slice and dice the acceptable from the unacceptable bigotry, then we are lost.

I can find plenty of reasons to excuse the LGBT bigotry of the African American community. But I can do the same thing about the racial bigotry of the white working class. And doesn’t it say something of the educated liberal class that it finds one group more acceptable than the other? After all, among the educated liberal class, marriage inequality was the default position quite recently.

It’s interesting that this issue is at the core of Thomas Frank’s new book, Listen, Liberal. The rise of the New Democrats (and related groups) was based in large part on the idea that the white working class was made up of a bunch of pro-war bigots. And that’s how we get to our current Democratic Party that is liberal on social issues but most definitely not on economic issues. (Good God: Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist when he’s just a traditional, New Deal liberal.)

But there is something that Eric Alterman has written about in this regard that I think is really important. In the 1960s, when we decided that we needed to reverse segregation, it wasn’t upper class whites who were asked to sacrifice. It was working class whites. And although northern whites might not have been as offensively and outwardly bigoted as southern whites, anti-segregation programs worried them.

So it is a little much for the same class of people who were were willing to do nothing themselves to fight against our country’s long racist tradition to stand up now and say that white working class people don’t deserve our sympathy. The educated class has been making this argument for decades. You might even say that they are bigoted toward the white working class.