More on Donald Trump as Media Creature

Ever since Donald Trump took a clear lead in the Republican presidential nomination race some months ago, a debate has been occurring over the extent to which the news media aided his rise. At one level, this question is purely analytical, engaging a topic that has long interested political scientists: what are the main sources of influence on the political behavior of citizens, and to what degree can exposure to new information via media exposure pull voters away from their pre-existing political orientations? The non-traditional nature of the Trump candidacy—and the unique manner in which it has been covered by the press—provides a particularly valuable case study with which to explore this relationship in a systematic fashion.

But few people, whether academics or not, find it easy to suspend normative judgment where Trump is concerned. As a result, suggestions that the media may well have played a role, even if unintentionally, in assisting Trump's campaign can easily take on the form of angry indictments of the journalistic profession—or are at least interpreted as such by defensive newspeople. In response to perceived accusations of abetting a candidate who is widely disdained and feared among well-educated metropolitans of the political left, right, and center alike, a pundit class that in other contexts openly acknowledges and even overstates the capacity of media coverage to influence electoral outcomes—how often have we been told by talking heads that "winning the news cycle" is the key to winning the election?—has pushed back repeatedly against the notion that it bears any responsibility for Trump's success in gaining the Republican nomination and advancing closer to the presidency.

A few days ago, John Sides and Kalev Leetaru published a detailed analysis that contains an extensive empirical examination of the media's role in boosting Trump. Sides and Leetaru present a variety of data, but their central point is simple: Trump received a disproportionate share of media attention during the Republican primaries, the coverage devoted to Trump was not unusually negative in tone compared to other candidates, and Trump's standing among Republican primary voters over time closely reflected the contemporaneous volume of publicity that his candidacy was generating in the press.

Sides and Leetaru mostly focus on analyzing news coverage since Trump announced his candidacy last summer, though they note that Trump's 30-year status as a national figure is itself a product of substantial media attention. "Celebrities," they observe, "including Trump, are created in part by their own efforts and in part by news outlets’ willingness to write about them."

If anything, I think Sides and Leetaru may understate the media's role in fueling Trump's political ambitions. They refer to Trump's career as a tabloid personality and reality TV star prior to his presidential campaign, comparing him to the Kardashians in his demonstrated success at creating a symbiotic relationship with news outlets who provided him with the publicity he sought.

But Kim Kardashian, for all her fame and gifts, would have a hard time getting millions of voters to view her as a good potential president. For decades, Trump has benefited from media coverage that not only has made him a household name, but has also portrayed him as having skills that would be generally considered assets in the world of politics. Trump managed to build a national reputation as an exceptionally shrewd businessman and negotiator through popular media accounts, and his years of appearances on morning shows, newsmagazines, and interview programs like Larry King Live often invited him to comment on current events under the assumption that his business success naturally gave him valuable insight on the political topics of the day.

The volume and generally deferential character of this media attention encouraged Trump to flirt with a political career as early as the late 1990s. His later phase as an outspoken critic of Barack Obama was similarly given substantial amplification by national media outlets; Trump made regular appearances on Fox News Channel (including a weekly "Monday Mornings with Trump" feature on Fox and Friends) and CNBC during much of Obama's presidency, treated once again as a captain of industry who could boast substantial expertise on the subject of politics.

Now that Trump is a viable candidate for president of the United States, political journalists have published and broadcast a number of more critical stories about his past and present career. Today, Trump is frequently portrayed as someone with severely limited knowledge of public affairs; as a candidate who intentionally skews the truth, appeals to popular prejudices, and incites violence among his supporters; and even as a business mogul who is much less successful, wealthy, and ethical than he claims. Members of the press who reject the "Trump as media creation" argument often point out that Trump is the most unpopular major-party nominee in the history of public opinion polling, suggesting that the coverage Trump has received has damaged rather than boosted him in the eyes of the electorate.

To be sure, it is likely that Trump will face mostly negative press coverage from now until November that will, if anything, make it more difficult for him to win the presidency. But critics both inside and outside the news media who view Trump as self-evidently unqualified for national office should examine the basis upon which millions of Republican primary voters formed the opposite impression. Donald Trump did not descend into the American electoral arena on an escalator from oblivion; the media presented him to us as a political authority for many years before they began to decide that maybe he was just an authoritarian.

Why Rubio Is Running

When he jumped into the 2016 presidential race last year, Marco Rubio announced that he would not seek reelection to his Florida Senate seat even if he failed to win the Republican nomination. At the time, this made sense. Unlike Rand Paul this year or Joe Biden in 2008, Rubio represents a large, politically competitive state where he would face serious opposition for reelection. He would be spending a lot of time out of state (and away from the floor of the Senate) on the presidential campaign trail, and keeping a foot in the Senate race might suggest to Republican voters and donors that he was not fully committed to seeking the presidency. Leaving Congress also allowed him to appeal to anti-Washington sentiment in the Republican electorate by rhetorically trashing the place on his way out the door. Even if Rubio lost the Republican nomination, he would have been a logical candidate for vice president on a ticket headed by someone like Scott Walker or Chris Christie.

But now Rubio's unfulfilled presidential ambitions have dictated a change of mind. After swearing up and down ever since he ended his presidential campaign more than three months ago that he would not jump back into the Florida Senate race, Rubio confirmed today that he will indeed seek reelection. He is not being very coy about the reasoning behind this reversal; as the New York Times reported, Rubio wants to run for president again and believes that he would be a weaker candidate running from the private sector.

At first glance, this seems like an odd calculation. Plenty of ex-officeholders, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton, have successfully won a major-party presidential nomination. Running for president while out of office frees a candidate from the duties of another position (or from being accused of shirking those duties) and allows him or her to avoid the pitfalls of being forced to take positions on controversial legislation that might later prove politically disadvantageous—as Rubio himself knows well from his Gang of Eight experience. Moreover, Rubio is no shoo-in for reelection this year, especially on a Trump-headed Republican ballot; a defeat would likely be permanently fatal to his presidential chances.

But Rubio's calculus makes a bit more sense if we game out the next four years a bit. First, Trump's nomination makes Hillary Clinton a strong favorite to assume the presidency next January. If she wins, Republicans will spent the next four years in opposition mode, competing among themselves to lead the charge against her administration. And right there in the center of the arena will be Rubio rival—and runner-up in the 2016 Republican presidential race—Ted Cruz. With a Clinton victory ensuring that no incumbent will be running for the 2020 Republican nomination, the stage would be set for Cruz to mount a second presidential campaign of his own. If Rubio no longer served in the Senate, Cruz would be able to contrast his own ongoing legislative activity fighting for the conservative cause (and against Clinton) with Rubio's absenteeism.

Rubio still has a substantial fan base among Republican consultants and high-dollar donors, but his disappointing 2016 candidacy is a much weaker foundation on which to build a second presidential campaign than previous candidates, like Clinton, Romney, McCain, or Reagan, who needed more than one try to win their party's nomination. He may well be worried that leaving the Senate this year would permanently marginalize him as the GOP moves on to other candidates, while remaining in Congress would allow him to rebuild his public reputation. Under the circumstances, Rubio's decision to risk defeat for a shot at another Senate term makes political sense—but it is safe to say that his sights remain set not on the U.S. Capitol, but on a different white building farther down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Honest Graft on the Primary Concerns Podcast

This week, I was interviewed by Brian Beutler of the New Republic about the Bernie Sanders–Hillary Clinton race and the future of the Democratic Party, following up from my recent Vox interview on the subject. We were joined by fellow political scientist Theda Skocpol of Harvard. The interview is now posted as part of the New Republic's weekly Primary Concerns podcast, which you can listen to here or on iTunes.

The Democratic Endgame Begins (Or, How Trump Undercuts Sanders's Leverage)

Tuesday night's Democratic primary in the District of Columbia brought the 2016 presidential delegate selection season to an official end, four and a half months after it began with the Iowa caucuses. While Hillary Clinton has accumulated enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination, her opponent Bernie Sanders remains—for now—an active presidential candidate. At some date in the near future, Sanders will no longer be a candidate and will instead be a supporter of the Clinton campaign. The precise sequence by which Sanders moves from A to B is presumably the main topic of discussion at a private meeting between Clinton and Sanders that occurred in Washington Tuesday evening.

It is clear that Sanders intends to use his current status as an active rival candidate to extract concessions from Clinton and, by extension, the Democratic National Committee. Clinton supporters frustrated at Sanders's behavior might object that their own candidate, in a similar position eight years ago, dropped out of the race at the end of the primaries and immediately endorsed the victorious Barack Obama without apparent conditions. Yet Clinton did receive something quite valuable in exchange for her unequivocal support of Obama in June 2008: credentials as a loyal Democrat and team player that not only gave her the opportunity to hold a high-level position in the Obama administration, but also allowed her to position herself as Obama's (tacitly-sanctioned) successor in the presidential office once he reached the constitutionally-prescribed two-term limit.

Sanders has a different set of interests. His age prevents him from being a realistic candidate in 2024 or even 2020, and his independence makes him a poor fit for a position in somebody else's presidential administration. Instead, he has three other objectives in mind: (1) winning demonstrable influence over the Democratic platform in order to be able to boast to his supporters that they succeeded in pulling the party to the ideological left; (2) forcing reforms to the presidential nomination process, both as another achievement to claim for his campaign and as a procedural benefit to future insurgent candidacies; and (3) visiting revenge upon DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whom Sanders blames for exhibiting a perceived favoritism toward the Clinton campaign during the nomination process.

This is an ambitious wish list for a losing presidential candidate to expect from the winner, and it seems unlikely that Sanders will be in a position to insist upon all of his demands. Indeed, his leverage over Clinton is quickly beginning to weaken—in part because of the identity of the presumptive Republican nominee.

The looming nomination of Donald Trump undercuts Sanders's bargaining position in three ways. First, Trump's routine dominance of the daily political news directs attention away from the Democratic race, making it more difficult for Sanders to win the publicity he needs to press his case. Second, Trump is something of a custom-built Democrat repellant, which will encourage even Clinton-wary Democratic voters to rally quickly around her as the only person standing between their archnemesis and the White House even if Sanders himself remains a holdout. Third, Clinton and her advisors likely view Trump as eminently beatable whether or not they receive Sanders's blessing, which makes them more likely to call Sanders's bluff than if they were facing a race against Marco Rubio or John Kasich.

Given Sanders's rapidly eroding strategic position, here's my best guess for how the Clinton-Sanders contest gets resolved:

(1) Sanders will soon suspend his campaign and make a public gesture of support for Clinton—though he might save a wholehearted endorsement until the convention itself.

(2) With Clinton's support, Sanders will win approval of platform language echoing his anti-Wall Street campaign message.

(3) The Democratic convention will approve a resolution calling for an internal party commission to study potential "democratizing" reforms to the presidential nomination process prior to the 2020 elections. It is less likely that the resolution will commit to specific reform provisions sought by Sanders such as requiring open primaries or abolishing superdelegates.

(4) Wasserman Schultz will stay at the DNC through November.

Vox Interview on Clinton, Sanders, and the Future of the Democrats

I was interviewed this week by Jeff Stein of Vox.com about the legacy of the Sanders presidential campaign, and you can read an edited transcript of our conversation here.

The Reason Sanders Wouldn't Have Won Lives in the White House

Over the weekend, the Washington Post published a long retrospective article on the Sanders presidential campaign entitled "How Bernie Sanders Missed His Chance to Beat Hillary Clinton." While the story departs from the official Sanders campaign line in conceding that the Democratic nomination race is effectively over, it is otherwise an extremely sympathetic account told from the perspective of Sanders, his wife, and his top advisors.

These figures—and, by extension, the Post writers—characterize the election as a tantalizing near-miss for Sanders, who supposedly fell just short of victory due to a variety of relatively minor factors under his own control. The article suggests that if Sanders had started just a bit earlier in building a national campaign infrastructure, in forging an appeal to black and Latino Democrats, in criticizing Hillary Clinton, and in (I'm not kidding here) posing for more selfies with voters at his rallies, he might have pulled off an astounding upset victory over Clinton.

It's only natural for a candidate in Sanders's current position to engage in this sort of "if-we-had-only-done-X" thinking, but the understandable frustrations produced by electoral defeat do not necessarily lead to sound analysis. In particular, a stronger Sanders campaign would have provoked a more formidable strategic response from Clinton, who more or less coasted after Super Tuesday (and especially after her March 15 victories) on a secure delegate lead rather than directly engage in counterattacks on Sanders. Nate Silver noted that the Clinton campaign and pro-Clinton super PACs have about $77 million in cash that could have been spent against Sanders had he continued to pose a threat to her nomination.

What would an anti-Sanders rhetorical offensive have looked like, and how effective would it have been? Sanders has various political vulnerabilities, but surely the biggest in this particular race would have been his longstanding ambivalence about the Obama presidency. Sanders has smartly avoided direct criticism of Obama during his run—though, as Clinton noted from time to time, some of his attacks on her served as implicit rebukes to the sitting president as well—but he was on record suggesting that Obama should be opposed from the left prior to the 2012 election. Retrospective analyses like the Post's that lament the time it took for Sanders to become comfortable speaking in black churches and discussing racial issues—suggesting that he could have seriously competed with Clinton for black support had he only found his footing a bit earlier—need to contend with the likely effect that a hypothetical television ad based on film of Sanders criticizing Obama and encouraging a primary challenge would have had on his popularity among African-American voters.

If Clinton had really found herself in trouble, she would have been able to call on campaign help from Obama himself. Obama has chosen to formally remain on the sidelines so far, but it is hard to believe that he would have refused to come to Clinton's aid against Sanders had the need arisen. Indeed, he is preparing to do so once she reaches the required number of delegates to secure the nomination, and will work to begin unifying the Democratic Party behind her despite Sanders's pledge to soldier on to the convention in July.

Given Obama's popularity among Democrats, it is difficult to see how it would have benefited Sanders had the race become anything like a referendum on the incumbent's performance. Sanders ran an impressive campaign and far exceeded initial expectations, but he never had much chance of actually winning the Democratic nomination.

What the Trump vs. Sanders Polls Do, and Don't, Tell Us

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows what has become a familiar pattern: Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 4 percentage points in the national popular vote (45 percent to 41 percent), while Bernie Sanders leads Trump by a 9-point margin (48 percent to 39 percent). These results are consistent with other recent poll results; the Pollster.com aggregator estimates Clinton's current lead over Trump at 2 points as of today, while Sanders leads Trump by 11 points.

The reason for this persistent gap is not difficult to divine: Sanders is viewed much more favorably than Clinton in the broader electorate. Pollster.com calculates his current favorability rating at +9 (49 percent favorable to 40 percent unfavorable); Clinton is currently at –16 (40 percent favorable to 56 percent unfavorable) and Trump at –21 (37 percent favorable to 58 percent unfavorable).

Purist insurgencies like the Sanders campaign usually lack direct evidence that they might be stronger general-election nominees than their primary opponents, which causes them to fall back on "hidden vote" theories claiming that they would inspire large numbers of previously inert citizens to flock to the polls to their behalf—thus compensating for their comparatively weaker standing among habitual voters. (This was Barry Goldwater's professed path to victory in 1964, an election that he lost by 23 points.) But Sanders and his supporters can currently point to national surveys suggesting that he would be a more electable candidate for the Democratic Party, which have become incorporated into his current pitch for why superdelegates should reverse the results of the pledged delegate count in order to award him the nomination.

Of course, popularity in June does not guarantee popularity in November. The flaw in Sanders's argument is that he has yet to demonstrate that he can survive a sustained blast of negative attacks. His advocacy of higher taxes on the middle class, support for government-run universal health care, past dalliances into leftist foreign policy, and self-identification as a "socialist" all represent potentially serious political vulnerabilities for Sanders, who represents a small, left-leaning state where he hasn't faced a serious electoral challenge in over 20 years and who therefore has little experience in defending his record against well-financed opposition in an unfriendly political constituency.

The fact that Sanders is currently polling well in a hypothetical matchup against Trump therefore don't necessarily predict how a general election between the two would turn out. Sanders would begin the race unburdened by the negative popular evaluations that now weigh down the Clinton campaign; on the other hand, November is a long way off, and there would be plenty of time for him to lose his current relative appeal—while Clinton, as more of a known quantity, may be less vulnerable to further Republican attacks and may in fact make a modest recovery in the polls once the Democratic nomination contest has concluded. Most Democratic leaders view Clinton, for all her flaws, as still representing a safer choice for the party's nomination (putting aside the question of whether it would be appropriate for the superdelegates to overturn the results of the pledged delegate count).

But these polls do tell us something useful about the election all the same. Some observers who view Trump as a potentially formidable general election candidate have suggested that he could receive a significant crossover vote from Democrats. "Because Trump isn’t a doctrinaire conservative—because he appeals on emotion and not policy—the theory is that he can win white working-class Democrats and other disaffected voters in the Democratic coalition," wrote Jamelle Bouie of Slate in a March critical appraisal.

If Trump had a unique appeal to non-Republicans, however, we'd expect to see evidence of it in trial heat polls against Sanders, who may be viewed as more or less a generic Democratic candidate by a general electorate who is not yet very familiar with him. Sanders's fairly wide lead at this stage indicates that there is no substantial population of Democrats who are sufficiently attracted to the Trump candidacy that they would support him over either candidate of their own party.

Perhaps things will change, and Trump will succeed in crafting a message that appeals to Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents—or perhaps the Democratic nominee will alienate a sufficiently large sector of the electorate that such an achievement won't be necessary. But while the polls can't tell us for sure whether Clinton or Sanders would be a stronger general-election candidate, they do continue to demonstrate that the Trump fan club has very few non-Republican members. Regardless of the final outcome in 2016, it is therefore unlikely that the Trump candidacy will fundamentally redefine the two parties' mass bases of support.

The Press Buckles Up for Six Months of Backseat Driving

As former Jeb Bush advisor Tim Miller recently revealed, among the unwelcome challenges faced by the modern presidential campaign is the relentless proffering of advice by top financial donors, who take the opportunity presented by personal access to the candidate or senior staff to promote their own theories on how best to win votes:

We could have probably had 19 full-time staffers dedicated just to the donor advice. . . . Donors had a lot of thoughts about [the candidate's] cable TV look. Donors are obsessed with cable TV. The most feedback we got was with regards to cable TV: Why aren’t you on enough? When you are on? Why is he not wearing a suit coat rather than a sweater? Can he get a new suit coat jacket?’

In some walks of life, professional expertise is given a modicum of deference; few airline passengers think that they know better than the pilot how to fly the plane, while most patients trust their dentist to fill a cavity correctly without the need for them to weigh in on the subject. Not so in politics. No record of previous experience or success is sufficient to insulate either politicians or their staff from the passing opinions of others, even if they are as ridiculous as the belief that entire elections can turn on the candidate's choice of suit coats.

Aside from wealthy supporters who are accustomed on a daily basis to being treated as if every utterance is sacred wisdom, a particularly rich vein of unsolicited input is supplied by journalists and pundits—especially if a candidate is trailing or falling short of his or her expected performance in the polls. Politicians also vary in the extent to which they are credited with political smarts by reporters and commentators, and those deemed less savvy are more likely to be the recipients of frequent second-guessing.

It's safe to say that very few members of the national media, whether liberal, conservative, or in between, are supporters of Donald Trump's campaign. In fact, many view him as a uniquely unqualified and destructive potential president. To these analysts, it is therefore critical to the health of the nation that Hillary Clinton defeat Trump in November. 

But Clinton is not particularly well-liked by the press in her own right, and her acumen as a candidate is routinely given little respect. Conditions are thus ripe for members of the media to spend the upcoming campaign picking over every strategic and tactical choice made by Clinton or her advisors, not only questioning the political wisdom of each decision but also suggesting that Clinton bears grave moral responsibility for keeping alive the possibility of a Trump presidency.

This behavioral tendency is already visible. On May 9, the New York Times ran a story about a series of anti-Trump attacks made via Twitter by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. One might think that it would be unadulterated good news for the Clinton campaign that a well-known liberal Democratic senator popular with Bernie Sanders supporters (and formally neutral in the Democratic primary race) was leading a rhetorical charge against Trump, laying the groundwork for a united partisan front behind Clinton in the general election. But to Maggie Haberman, a reporter with the Times who contributed to the story, Warren's offensive was actually important because she was "maybe signaling she doesn't think HRC is doing [a] bang up job [attacking] Trump" herself. Thus an article about Warren's successful engagement with Trump to Clinton's potential benefit (which contained no direct evidence in its text supporting Haberman's suggestion that Warren was in fact unhappy with Clinton or her campaign) became one more supposed indication of Clinton's own political limitations.

In the same vein, a May 6 press release produced by the Democratic National Committee that referred to Trump as "Dangerous Donald" drew an unusual amount of attention among journalists. Receiving boilerplate press releases is presumably an unremarkable daily occurrence for political reporters and is rarely worthy of comment. This time, however, members of the media acted as if the Clinton campaign had settled on its primary anti-Trump message for the entirety of the election season, collectively judging said strategy to be hopelessly lame—which therefore represented an unacceptable case of political malpractice in the face of the Trump threat. Anti-Trump (and anti-Clinton) conservative David Frum sketched out a Trump victory scenario for the Atlantic which suggested that the Clinton campaign might be so incompetent as to drive significant shares of Obama-supporting racial minorities, ideological moderates, and college-educated whites into Trump's corner—a prediction that seems fanciful given current evidence about these groups' opinions of Trump but nonetheless was taken seriously by some analysts. (Trump has a chance of winning, of course, but not because he is likely to attract a large percentage of the Latino vote.)

Expect this dynamic to hold for the remainder of the presidential race. Any indication of a rise in the polls for Trump will inspire a frenzy of media analysis about what Clinton is doing wrong—even if she remains in the lead and a favorite to win in November—while a widening of Clinton's popular margin will be interpreted as reflecting Trump's weaknesses rather than the political effectiveness of the Democratic opposition. The chief strategic decisions made by Clinton and her advisors may not always be correct, but they will be based on opinion surveys, focus groups, and other forms of data employed by modern campaign professionals—yet they will be subjected to routine second-guessing by media analysts who lack confidence that Clinton will defeat Trump on the basis of superior political skill.

Process Obsessions Aren't Enough to Sustain Sanders Past June

Yesterday, I wrote a long post interpreting the melee at the Nevada state convention on Saturday as reflecting the broader tendency of liberals to get bogged down in process arguments when denied political success, which can often prove counterproductive to their long-term goals. The Bernie Sanders campaign has become increasingly preoccupied with procedural issues, citing them as excuses for their inability to defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

The New York Times provides additional evidence with an article eye-catchingly headlined "Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch." The piece seems intentionally written to provoke nervous Democrats into uncontrollable bouts of hand-wringing over the possibility of an angry and undaunted Sanders waging a kamikaze mission against Clinton all the way to, if not after, the national convention this summer. Stripping away the various inferences, suggestions, and on-background complaints from the Sanders campaign, however, leaves us with the following on-the-record quote from Sanders strategist Tad Devine, which is hardly a call to storm the barricades:

The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14 [the date of the final primary]. We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states. If we do that, we can be in a strong position to make the best closing argument before the convention. If not, everyone will know in mid-June, and we’ll have to take a hard look at where things stand.

It seems more likely that Sanders and his top aides don't really know today what they'll do once the primary season is over, and there may be some internal difference of opinion on the subject. That they remain privately as well as publicly preoccupied with process questions is clear: the Sanders camp is still nurturing long-held grievances about perceived unfair treatment by the Democratic National Committee, and one suggested set of demands at the convention would involve unspecified "fundamental changes to how presidential primaries and debates are held in the future."

But complaints about nomination procedures, however valid they might be, are simply not important or motivating enough at the mass level to sustain a presidential campaign—especially a campaign that will not be able to claim the most votes or the most pledged delegates once the primary calendar is complete. Superdelegates, party activists, and Democratic voters are unlikely to view the Sanders campaign's gripes as justifying a post-primary battle over the nomination in the face of a general-election race against Donald Trump. It's one thing to continue a debate within the party over substantive policy priorities that might affect millions of people, but it's hard to run a serious campaign for the office of president of the United States that is primarily dedicated to the cause of exacting revenge on Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Why Bernie Sanders Loves to Argue About Process

The conflict that broke out last weekend at the Nevada Democratic Convention—which not only encompassed protests and physical altercations during the event itself but also included the subsequent defacing of the state party headquarters as well as multiple nasty phone and text messages directed toward the state party chairwoman and her employer—demonstrated that some liberal activists are neither as tolerant and cheerful as they might portray themselves nor as wimpy and passive as their detractors on the right might suggest. The nub of the disagreement concerned the procedural conduct of the convention itself, which was in charge of selecting members of the Nevada delegation to the Democratic national convention this summer.

Some Sanders supporters believed that the Nevada Democratic Party, which is under the firm control of Senate minority leader (and Clinton endorser) Harry Reid, had acted improperly in order to marginalize their candidate's strength (e.g. by rejecting the credentials of a few dozen would-be Sanders delegates). At issue was a handful of national delegate slots that might have allowed Sanders to gain a greater share of the Nevada delegation than he would normally be entitled to receive based on the results of the February caucus, which Clinton won by a five-point margin.

Though Reid strongly hinted after the rebellion in Nevada that Sanders would—and should—accept the results of the convention as legitimate and call on his followers to refrain from directing abusive behavior at the state party and its leadership, Sanders issued a statement that was relatively defiant, listing several grievances while minimizing the transgressions of his supporters. "If the Democratic Party is to be successful in November," he warned, "it is imperative that all state parties treat our campaign supporters with fairness and the respect they have earned."

These latest developments represent the fruition of a trend that has been building over the past few months. Ever since Sanders fell behind Hillary Clinton in the delegate count on Super Tuesday, his campaign has increasingly complained about matters of process, from the existence of superdelegates to the use of closed primaries (which prohibit participation by registered independents) in several states.

Liberals are particularly susceptible to process arguments for two reasons. First, liberal concerns about social equality more generally make it easy for left-leaning critics to accuse any disliked procedural attribute of being "unfair" and therefore unacceptable. For example, the Democratic National Committee's "Fairness Commission" prohibited the use of winner-take-all delegate allocation in primaries in the 1980s, on the stated egalitarian principle that delegates should properly be awarded in proportion to the popular vote, while Republicans—who are less deferential to claims that internal procedures are undemocratic—continue to allow states to use winner-take-all rules if they hold primaries after early March.

Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, liberals tend to view themselves as self-evidently standing for the rights and interests of "the people" against the elites. In a democracy, of course, the many should rightfully prevail over the few—so any political battle in which the left suffers defeat is easy to dismiss as the product of an undemocratic process rather than revealing the limits of liberalism's popular appeal. It is very telling that the statement released by Sanders after the Nevada convention began by referring to "establishment politics and establishment economics" and criticizing "big-money campaign contributions." Some critics, such as Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, found this strange—"you open with your stump speech?" he asked Sanders rhetorically.

But from Sanders's perspective, it makes perfect sense: the economy is rigged, the campaign finance system is rigged, and so too are the state parties and the nomination process—all by the same dreaded "establishment" controlled by the "millionaires and billionaires." Otherwise, suggests Sanders, he would be winning—or would have already won, since the chief barrier to the implementation of democratic socialism in the United States is, in his mind, not the will of the American people but rather the illegitimate influence of moneyed interests. (He once remarked that the Republican Party would get only "5, 10 percent of the vote" if not for the behavior of the corporate media.)

This viewpoint also explains why the Sanders campaign has in fact been quite selective in its complaints about process. One could easily impugn the caucus system as undemocratic, yet Sanders's successes in caucus states make that argument an uncomfortable one. Even superdelegates, though a regular target of criticism from Sanders, are also cited by his campaign as representing their candidate's sole remaining path to a numerical majority, justifying his continued presence in the race. The events in Nevada arose out of an attempt to effectively overturn the results of the popular vote in the state on Sanders's behalf, which sounds undemocratic on its face—but if one views a Sanders victory as more legitimate by definition than a Sanders defeat at the hands of "establishment" figures Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, such tactics begin to look increasingly justifiable.

Sanders is far from the only left-winger who believes that if the political system itself is reformed (by overturning Citizens United, easing voter registration requirements, prohibiting gerrymandering, eliminating superdelegates, and other measures), an endless parade of liberal victories would follow. This line of thinking greatly exaggerates the degree to which public opinion in America collectively lines up on the left side of the ideological spectrum. The fiction that only the likes of the Koch brothers stand in the way of implementing progressivism in the United States makes it easier for the left to claim righteously that it represents the true voice of the people against the privileged few, but also represents an overly simplistic view of reality that cannot, in the long term, be a solid ground on which to build a political movement.

Liberal preoccupations with process may be ultimately counterproductive to the political aims of the left in other ways as well. If the lesson drawn by Sanders and his supporters from the 2016 nomination race is "the fix is in" rather than "good start—let's get 'em next time," it will be harder to sustain momentum for their agenda within the Democratic Party and the electoral arena more broadly past the end of this campaign.

In part, this is because complaints about a rigged system may breed more apathy and cynicism than motivation to remain productively active in party politics. But blaming defeat on outside forces also discourages the kind of internal stock-taking and retrospective evaluation that can allow a political movement to learn from its mistakes and increase its future effectiveness. If the Sanders cause is to outlast the Sanders presidential campaign, it needs to put the process complaints aside and figure out how to win more votes.

Emotion Meets Calculation in Both Parties

Late spring is an odd time in every presidential election year. The presumptive nominees of the two parties have reliably emerged by this point (if not before), yet the schedule of primaries and caucuses continues at a slow, drawn-out pace, sometimes contested by an active opponent or two who can still score a few popular state-level victories despite the unforgiving arithmetic of the national delegate count. The leading candidates prepare to fight each other for the support of swing voters in the general election, even as they attempt to inspire unity and enthusiasm within the popular bases of their own respective parties. With six months to go before the election itself, the political press and other attentive observers follow every strategic move with great interest while most voters remain only intermittently engaged in the day-to-day combat of the campaign.

Things are even stranger than usual in 2016. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have both claimed an insurmountable lead in delegates—Trump is now running unopposed in the Republican race—yet visible segments of both parties have not become reconciled to their nominations, as demonstrated by the events of this weekend.

Saturday's Washington Post brought news of a draft campaign that is actively attempting to recruit an anti-Trump Republican to contest the general election as an independent candidate. The ringleaders of this scheme (Mitt Romney, Erick Erickson, and Bill Kristol, along with a few veteran Republican political consultants) appear undecided about what qualities they are looking for beyond (1) antipathy to Trump and (2) some commitment to run as a conservative—as is clear from the rather incoherent collection of names on their wish list, which includes John Kasich, Condoleezza Rice, ex-Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, first-term Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, a couple of retired generals, and even Dallas Mavericks owner (and reality TV star) Mark Cuban.

It's easy to understand the frustration felt by conservative elites who currently face the prospect of choosing among Trump, Clinton, and a pro-choice/anti-interventionist Libertarian Party nominee on their November ballots. But their lack of success so far at persuading any of their targets to volunteer for this mission isn't hard to figure out, because it would be a big mistake for any sensible politician to agree. Siphoning off Republican votes from Trump would clinch a sizable Democratic victory—ignore the nonsense about how it might throw the election to the House of Representatives—and ensure that the candidate would go down in party history as the Republican version of Ralph Nader. Ex-McCain and Jeb Bush strategist Mike Murphy's idea that an anti-Trump conservative might only contest a handful of swing states is even sillier; why would a significant share of voters turn out to support a candidate who couldn't even claim a hypothetical chance of victory?

On the Democratic side, the Sanders campaign and some of its most fervent supporters have largely declined to acknowledge the true state of the delegate math, instead nurturing unrealistic theories that superdelegates will overturn Clinton's victory in pledged delegates at the national convention this summer. Such hopes sit with a certain awkwardness alongside claims that dastardly Democratic "bosses" have illegitimately manipulated the nomination process to prevent a Sanders nomination—a point of view that even fueled open conflict at this weekend's state party convention in Nevada.

Once the primary season is over, however, the political environment will change in a way that will make the Sanders campaign's position strategically unsustainable. Many of the superdelegates who are now publicly undeclared will likely endorse Clinton on or shortly after the final primary date (as occurred in 2008, with Obama in the front-runner position) One of those undeclared superdelegates is Obama himself, who can be expected to offer his public support to Clinton once the primaries are over. Sanders's own backers among the ranks of Democratic elected officials and national committee members will then exert pressure on the campaign to begin the process of promoting party unity.

Sanders may well withhold his formal endorsement until he secures concessions from the Clinton camp at the convention itself. But any attempt to continue an active fight against her past the end of the primary calendar will leave him open to substantial criticism from within the party that he is becoming a spoiler in the Democratic Party's battle against a potential President Trump.

In both parties, resistance among the losing factions in the nomination contest is still unusually elevated at the moment, preventing each side from quickly uniting around its future standard-bearer. But the strong emotions of disaffected activists are beginning to collide with the cold calculations of actual and potential candidates, who perceive substantial political risk from maintaining or exacerbating divisions within the party as it turns to face the opposition in a general election in which the political stakes will be particularly high. By October, it is likely that most of the current intraparty strife will be a distant memory, and the population of Republicans who remain unreconciled to Trump (perhaps a smaller and less visible group than those who are currently vowing to stand in opposition) will probably lack a prominent candidate of their own, leaving them with an unappealing choice between voting for Clinton and sitting out the presidential race.

Indiana Recap: We Have a Republican Nominee

1. The decisive victory by Donald Trump in the Indiana primary knocked Ted Cruz out of the race and confirmed Trump as the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee. The magnitude of Trump's victory compared to previous results in neighboring midwestern states suggests that he has gained popular momentum over the past month or so, which would have put him well within reach of a pledged delegate majority even if the margin in Indiana had been closer than it was. With Cruz departing the contest and John Kasich receiving an embarrassing 8 percent of the vote in a state adjacent to his own, Trump now faces an open path to a sweep of the remaining states on the primary calendar and an uncontested first-ballot victory at the national convention.

2. While he had previously declared that the Indiana results would be decisive, Cruz's exit in the immediate wake of his defeat was not universally expected. But Cruz, unlike Kasich, is young enough to consider seeking the presidency again in 2020 or thereafter. Staying in the race with little prospect of victory might only alienate Republicans whose support Cruz might wish to seek in a future contest. A guaranteed Trump nomination is also a better outcome for Cruz, in a strategic sense, than the possibility of an open convention throwing the nomination to an alternative compromise candidate. Trump will probably lose in the fall, and Cruz can run again in the future on the premise that the party suffered defeat by failing once again to nominate a true, principled conservative.

3. All the best evidence that can be brought to bear on the question indicates that Trump begins the general election with little probability of victory. Of course, dissenters will reply that few political experts foresaw Trump's nomination in the first place. But primaries are much more unpredictable than general elections, and Trump's political weaknesses are more vulnerable to attack by Democrats than by fellow Republicans. The complicated strategic dynamics of the multi-candidate Republican nomination race allowed Trump to escape being the target of a sustained negative campaign, but the Clinton campaign and allied Democratic groups will begin firing attacks in his direction immediately, hoping to "define" him quickly as an unacceptable candidate.

4. Yet a long campaign contains inevitable ups and downs in the standing of the candidates, as measured by public opinion surveys or as sensed by the political pundit class. Any signs of competitiveness or "tightening" will probably be heavily publicized by the segment of journalists who find stable races boring, are unimpressed with Hillary Clinton, and/or view Trump as having the potential to fundamentally reorder the electoral coalitions of the two parties. It is also clear that Trump is, in effect, judged by a different set of standards than other candidates; if Clinton or Obama or Mitt Romney had personally accused a rival candidate's father of associating with Lee Harvey Oswald based solely on a report by the National Enquirer, for example, it would be the biggest media story of the month and widely treated as a self-evidently disqualifying catastrophe. Expect much of the press to leap on any sign that Trump has become more "serious" or "presidential" over the course of the campaign—not because journalists are intentionally slanting coverage to favor Trump, but because change is always a better story than more of the same and "both sides do it" is often the default presumption.

5. We should not make too much of declarations from Republicans at this stage of the race that they will not vote for Trump in November. No doubt some disaffected partisans will indeed refuse to support him, though staying home or skipping over the presidential race on the ballot are both more likely forms of Republican protest than actually crossing party lines to vote for Clinton. But general election campaigns are usually effective at rallying partisans around their nominee—if only by reminding them of what they dislike about the opposition—and, unless Trump completely implodes, he is likely to gain the support of the vast majority of Republican identifiers who participate (with the possible exception of Republican Latinos, who may defect at higher rates). Even if Trump suffers a decisive defeat, this residual party loyalty will prevent the Democratic opposition from winning a double-digit victory in the popular vote or carrying more than 30–32 states. There is almost no chance of a true national landslide on the scale of 1964, 1972, or 1984 in today's highly partisan electoral environment—especially when the Democratic nominee is not particularly popular in her own right.

What Does Trump Tell Us About the Republican Party?

Donald Trump has confounded so many expectations, breaking so many supposed "iron laws" of American politics along the way, that it is tempting for those of us who initially and incorrectly dismissed his chances as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination to compensate for our error by proclaiming that the United States has unexpectedly entered a very different political age in which none of the old rules apply and a brave new Trumpian future awaits us all. In this vein, Ross Douthat of the New York Times, a conservative who shared many other normally-perceptive observers' previous skepticism of the Trump candidacy—as late as March 8, Douthat was predicting a Trump defeat—has written a new column trying to make sense of what the Trump phenomenon reveals about the state of American politics in general and the Republican Party in particular.

Douthat cites several previous characterizations of the political world that have been challenged by Trump's rise, including my research with Matt Grossmann concluding that the American party system is asymmetrically split between a party defined by a common ideological identity (the Republicans) and a party organized around a coalition of social groups (the Democrats). He writes:

But there was also a fair amount of political-science evidence that the Republicans really were a more ideological party than the Democrats, less inclined to view compromise in favorable terms, more inclined to regard politics through a philosophical rather than an interest-group service lens. 

Until Donald Trump blew this model up. Yes, Trump has adopted conservative positions on various issues, but he’s done so in a transparently cynical fashion, constantly signaling that he doesn’t really believe in or understand the stance that he’s taking, constantly suggesting a willingness to bargain any principle away. Except for immigration hawks, practically every ideological faction in the party regards Trump with mistrust, disgust, suspicion, fear. Pro-lifers, foreign-policy hawks, the Club for Growth, libertarians — nobody thinks Trump is really on their side. And yet he’s winning anyway. 

Or at least he’s winning a plurality. So perhaps Trumpism can be understood as a coup by the G.O.P.’s ideologically flexible minority against the conservative movement’s litmus tests; indeed to some extent that’s clearly what’s been happening.

It is true that Trump, almost uniquely for a Republican candidate, does not portray his political goals as derived from an abstract commitment to small-government principles or constitutional values. His is a much more colloquial style anchored less in hostility to federal power than in two other strains of conservatism—nationalism and racial resentment—that also have a long pedigree on the American right but have historically been less central to the intellectual foundations of the modern conservative movement or the practice of Republican Party politics. He has demonstrated that many Republican voters are not sufficiently alienated by such heterodoxies as support for current levels of entitlement spending, skepticism about free-trade agreements, and criticism of the Iraq War to turn away from a candidate whom they find otherwise appealing.

Yet it's difficult to conclude that Trump single-handedly disproves the existence of fundamental asymmetries between the parties. If Trump is not a doctrinaire conservative, neither is he a conciliatory moderate, and he is not running on a laundry list of detailed policy initiatives directed toward individual social groups, as is common practice among Democrats. (Indeed, Trump could hardly constitute better evidence in favor of our conclusion that many Republican supporters are motivated by broad rhetorical themes, not policy specifics.)

When Douthat writes that "nobody thinks Trump is really on their side," he's referring to a set of organizations and activists that have traditionally served as the leadership of the American conservative movement. It appears, however, that Republican voters look more and more to the most popular personalities in the conservative media universe (whose increasing and unparalleled influence is a major theme of our forthcoming book) for political guidance. If Trump is really a phony conservative, they reason, wouldn't Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity let us know?

Finally, while one might personally agree with Douthat's characterization of Trump as a "transparently cynical" candidate who "doesn't really believe in or understand" his own purported views, it is clear that Trump has managed to convince many Republican voters of the opposite: that he is a uniquely bold teller of truths who is courageously taking on a timid and corrupt Republican "establishment." It is perhaps appropriate for many conservatives who cheered on the Tea Party movement but are now aghast at Trump's success to consider the extent to which they themselves have contributed to the destruction of the national Republican leadership's popular credibility among the party's own primary electorate. Frequent depictions of figures like John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell as sell-outs and secret liberals have created a power vacuum that both Trump and Ted Cruz have filled, and have removed what would otherwise be a potentially powerful mechanism with which to fight them.

All in all, Trump is indeed an imperfect fit for a Republican Party that has traditionally conceived of itself as dedicated to the cause of limited government. But observers who are now proclaiming the Age of Trump should risk extrapolating too much from a single data point (some of us are old enough to recall when Ross Perot supposedly represented the future of American politics). If Trump, who lacks a loyal faction within the party's elected officeholders, loses the election, the Republican Party will retreat and regroup to consider its future and the lessons of the campaign—and many of the loudest voices within the party will unite in declaring that Trump was indeed a deeply flawed nominee.

Next time, they'll say, let's nominate someone different—a true conservative.

Northeast Tuesday: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. You can't beat somebody with nobody, and Donald Trump is running against a couple of nobodies in the Republican presidential primaries—at least as far as East Coast voters are concerned. Ted Cruz's brand of southern conservatism just doesn't play well among the Republicans of the eastern seaboard, and John Kasich is barely running a campaign at all (he has won fewer delegates than Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the race six full weeks ago after a series of humiliating defeats). Trump racked up landslide margins in all five states voting last night, giving him enough delegates that he remains in sight of gaining an overall majority by the end of the primary season.

2. There may be less "momentum" than usual this year, defined as shifts in voter support from one candidate to another based on the results of the sequential primaries. However, any organized effort to block a Trump nomination depends on a perceived possibility of success, and Trump's five-state sweep last night is a body blow to the morale of the "Never Trump" movement. If he manages to win Indiana next week, he may even attain the status of "presumptive nominee."

3. It's likely that the less frenzied election schedule in the back half of the primary calendar has helped Trump on balance. The shock of his early success has worn off, and with no debates and fewer incidents of physical violence at his campaign rallies over the last few weeks, he has succeeded in entrenching himself as the familiar front-runner while Cruz and Kasich have struggled for attention. Trump might not have reached such a secure position in the race if prominent conservatives had used the last month-and-a-half to build a public case against him. But with DC favorite Marco Rubio out of the race after March 15, the only serious remaining alternative to Trump in the race was Cruz, and it's clear that few influential Republicans were interested in risking their own standing within the party only to benefit the junior senator from Texas.

4. Pennsylvania is worth keeping an eye on when calculating the overall Republican delegate count. Under state party rules, most of the state's delegates are officially unbound to any candidate. It appears, however, that the Trump campaign succeeded in electing many of its supporters to delegate slots, while a number of other delegates have promised to vote for the winner of the state or congressional district (which would also be Trump, who carried every district in Pennsylvania). Trump's numerical path to an overall majority is much easier if he can count on another 30 to 40 delegates beyond his official pledged delegate haul from the ranks of the Pennsylvania delegation.

5. Who was the last non-incumbent presidential candidate who easily captured the nomination of a major party and began the general election as the overwhelming favorite to win the White House? I'm not sure of the answer (even Franklin D. Roosevelt, though the clear front-runner in 1932, needed four ballots to be nominated due to the two-thirds vote required by the Democratic convention at the time), but both of these criteria surely apply this year to Hillary Clinton now that it is likely that she will face Trump in November. To hear much of the press tell it, though, she is in big trouble. Channel-flipping last night brought me to a panel of MSNBC reporters moderated by Chuck Todd who went on and on about Clinton's political weaknesses and the prospect of Bernie Sanders-supporting millennials deserting her in favor of Trump in the general election. One does not need to be a Clinton admirer to admit that, by all objective evidence, she is at this moment far and away the most likely person to become the 45th president of the United States next January, yet much of the news media is completely unable to acknowledge her good fortune—much less give her any credit for bringing it on herself with the application of political skill.

We are headed into a general election in which one nominee may have a steady and significant lead for the entire length of the campaign even as the press constantly warns that she is susceptible to defeat by the other party (which is, incidentally, busy tearing itself apart as it nominates a highly flawed candidate). Nothing is guaranteed in electoral politics, but a congenitally Trump-hyping media universe has not yet come to terms with his unprecedented weaknesses in appealing to a broader electorate outside the Republican primaries, and a press corps that has long been suspicious of Hillary Clinton is routinely inclined to overstate her political vulnerabilities.

Trump Can't Transform the GOP By Himself

One of the most common responses to the question What Does Trump Mean? seems to consist of speculation that Trump is poised to provoke a wholesale redefinition of the policy agenda and popular base of the Republican Party, threatening both its national electoral fortunes and its status as the political home of the American conservative movement for years or even decades to come. A newly-published article from the Washington Examiner does a good job of summarizing this point of view, though it has emerged repeatedly over the past several months.

It's easy to understand the palpable despair dripping off of both the conservative intelligentsia and the Republican consultant community at the prospect of a Trump nomination. Yet the future long-term effects of Trump's rise are difficult to predict, and there are many more reasons to doubt that his current success presages a large-scale realignment than there are reasons to believe it.

The potential for Trump to remake the GOP is obviously much greater if he were to be elected president. But even victorious presidential candidates do not receive automatic deference from the House members and senators of their party. Because there is little reason to believe that a President Trump would establish a particularly good working relationship with Congress even if it remains under Republican control, the likelihood of Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell collaborating to marginalize the conservative movement and lead the GOP in a new, more dangerous direction seems much lower than the Trump administration's agenda becoming hopelessly bogged down in the legislative branch due to bipartisan opposition.

If Trump loses the general election, and loses it badly—surely a much more probable outcome, from today's vantage point—his ability to exert enduring influence over Republican politics is even less clear. Trump leads no definable faction within the party. He has few acolytes among the ranks of Republican officeholders, activists, and interest group leaders who would be left to pick up the pieces after a defeated Trump returns to his eponymous Manhattan tower. Other Republican candidates in the future will adopt his positions and style in an attempt to replicate his success in the nomination process, but may well find that his celebrity status and unique persona were a necessary component of his popular appeal.

Trump may well cause Republicans some problems that persist past this November. He may tarnish the party's reputation more enduringly among young voters and Latinos, for example. But parties are resilient things, electorally speaking. Note how far the political landscape shifted between 1992 and 1994, or between 2004 and 2006, or between 2008 and 2010. Observers who bet on "permanent" majorities (or minorities) are routinely—and often rapidly—disproven. Trump may well be a nightmare for the GOP, but not one from which it is unlikely to awaken.

Don't Like the Presidential Nomination Process? Save Some Blame For the States!

When presidential nomination contests are not wrapped up quickly in the first few weeks of voting, the slower pace of the primary calendar thereafter produces fertile ground for widespread gripes about the nomination process itself. The daily thrills and plot twists of February and March give way to the more tedious week-to-week slog of April and May, leaving more time and energy for broader evaluations of the nomination system. Supporters of candidates who are still actively campaigning but face diminishing odds of success can easily direct their frustration toward the rules and norms that seem to be responsible for preventing their desired outcome, even as backers of the front-runner express annoyance that their own favorite is still forced to withstand fire from also-rans within the party.

This year, the various procedural quirks of the process have received more than the usual amount of scrutiny—perhaps because both parties' races are still nominally unresolved as of late April (for the first time since 1980), because the insurgent Trump and Sanders candidacies are particularly sensitive to any apparent evidence that the deck has been stacked against them by the dreaded party "establishment," and/or because the internet has a way of amplifying dissatisfaction of every sort.

Everyone, it seems, has a list of grievances. The Trump campaign is suspicious that delegates are being unjustly denied them by state party conventions in Colorado and elsewhere. Anti-Trump Republicans lament delegate allocation rules that have disproportionately favored Trump and prevented non-Trump sentiment from coalescing behind a single rival candidate. Bernie Sanders supporters decry the existence of closed primary rules in some states; Hillary Clinton supporters decry the existence of caucuses in others. Behind many of these complaints is the assumption that one or both national parties wish things to be as they now are, presumably for some nefarious reason or reasons, and not only allow but encourage various infringements on democratic principles in order to serve other, less high-minded purposes.

Other political scientists have defended the parties and their role in structuring the nomination process. I wish to make a slightly different point, which is that the national party committees, though nominally in control of presidential nominations, face significant practical constraints in imposing their will upon the state parties and state governments that actually operate elections. Many of the specific aspects of the process that provoke popular disdain—the disproportionate influence of Iowa and New Hampshire, the inconsistency in delegate allocation formulas and voter eligibility requirements from state to state, the inept organization of many state caucuses—are, in truth, merely tolerated by the national parties. It is the states that insist upon them, and the states that therefore bear most of the responsibility for these departures from "pure" democratic equality.

Of course, the national parties could in theory attempt to impose stringent requirements on the states to smooth out these various inconsistencies, but practical complications are likely to ensue. If a national party were to mandate that all delegates be selected via primary elections, for example, but some states refused to authorize the public funds to hold them, what then? Would those states go wholly unrepresented at the national conventions—and, if so, would this be a more "democratic" outcome than the current system, which allows voters to attend party caucuses instead? Could the national parties insist on closed primaries nationwide, even though about half of American states do not have official party registration? Could they likewise require open primaries, even though some presidential primaries are held concurrently with primaries for down-ballot offices that might be influenced by the participation of voters from outside the party?

The imposition of strict national rules on the states and state parties is further impeded by the fact that the national parties, like the national government, are federal systems. National committees are comprised of representatives from the state parties, who select the national party chair and vote on internal party rules. A promise to crack down on the freedom of the states to run their primaries and caucuses as they prefer is unlikely to be a popular sentiment within any internal party committee or a winning platform for any candidate for national party chair. If anything, the state parties would prefer even more autonomy. Howard Dean ran successfully for chairman of the Democratic National Committee after the 2004 election by promising to direct more party money and resources to the state Democratic organizations, which turned out to be a very popular position among the ranks of the state party chairs who held seats on the national committee.

It is easy to look at the current complex and disjointed nomination system and call for large-scale reforms. Indeed, some reforms would be undoubtedly well-advised. But let's remember that others have come before us, with similar plans for changes to the process in the name of equality and fairness—and that their ambitions were foiled by the enduring ability of the states to defend their own turf against the attempted interference of the national parties. If you're looking to cast blame for what you don't like about the current nomination system, don't forget that the states deserve their fair share.

New York: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. Donald Trump won the New York primary in a landslide, receiving about 60 percent of the popular vote and about 90 of the state's 95 Republican delegates. Trump undoubtedly benefited from a home-state advantage, but his performance bodes well for his chances in the five other northeastern states voting next Tuesday. Trump remains on track to flirt with an overall delegate majority by the end of the primary season in June.

2. Beyond the topline results, two additional developments represent good news for Trump. The first is Ted Cruz's poor performance. Cruz's brand of politics is not a natural fit for the Northeast, even among Republican voters, and he probably suffered from making a derogatory remark about "New York values" earlier in the race (perhaps not thinking ahead at the time). But the outcome in New York suggests that Cruz has not emerged as the main rival to Trump everywhere in the nation, and the fact that most of the remaining states on the calendar are located on the East and West coasts suggests that his campaign will face a serious challenge in consolidating the non-Trump vote and demonstrating positive "momentum" that might potentially impress Republican delegates weighing whether to throw the nomination to him over Trump.

3. Perhaps more importantly, Trump's victory speech departed from his signature cutting and bombastic style, lacking his usual tossed-off remarks belittling his Republican opponents. Some analysts have suggested that this new approach reflects a recent campaign shakeup in which nominal campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was unofficially supplanted by the more experienced Republican operative Paul Manafort. Trump's path to the nomination, still numerically unassured and perhaps hinging on the behavior of a pivotal bloc of unpledged delegates, will be smoothed considerably if he reduces the cloud of controversy surrounding his candidacy and signals a willingness to take advice from experienced campaign professionals.

In the past, the apparent emergence of a "kinder, gentler" Trump has been quickly reversed by a new eruption of slash-and-burn politics, so it is too soon to conclude that his speech marks a new strategic direction. Yet it is worth keeping an eye on his behavior in the coming weeks. At the very least, a more conciliatory Trump will dampen the energy within the party to organize a stop-Trump effort after the end of the primary season, which may allow him to claim the nomination even if he falls just short of a majority in pledged delegates. If a new, nicer style makes Trump's nomination more likely, however, it may not be in the interest of the Republican Party as a whole.

4. The Democratic race remains where it was before, with future nominee Hillary Clinton fending off a spirited but unsuccessful challenge from Bernie Sanders in New York, as she has done in the contest at large. Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver attracted some attention last night by suggesting on MSNBC that Sanders will remain as an active candidate all the way to the July convention, pressuring superdelegates along the way to deliver him the nomination even though he will fail to receive a majority of pledged delegates. I wouldn't make too much of this, though. All political campaigns insist that a path to victory remains in sight, no matter how long the odds, right up until the moment of concession. Ultimately, the decision about what to do after the primaries are over will rest with Sanders himself, and there is no reason to believe that he will necessarily continue to contest the race once the voting ends. Some Democrats are worried about lasting divisions in the party if Sanders does not immediately rally around Clinton, but experience demonstrates that wounds incurred during the nomination season will be a distant memory by the time that the November election occurs.

Bernie Sanders and the Search for a Liberal Party

Jamelle Bouie of Slate has published a well-argued and beautifully-written piece placing the Bernie Sanders campaign in the larger context of Democratic Party politics past and present. While the headline ("There Is No Bernie Sanders Movement") will undoubtedly provoke complaints among some Sanders fans, the article itself is complimentary of Sanders, who has exceeded most expectations and demonstrated that a campaign devoted to purist liberalism can attract significant popular support. At the same time, the delegate arithmetic is clear: Sanders will not win the Democratic presidential nomination, and it is worth considering why his political message ultimately found a limited appeal even among the Democratic primary electorate.

Bouie's main conclusion, with which I concur unreservedly, is that committed liberals remain a minority within the Democratic Party. "The broad point," he writes, "is that a 'political revolution' can’t rest on a call for clean government and ideological rigor—the crux of Sanders’ general argument. The Democratic Party isn’t yet an ideological party, and many of its voters don’t put ideology or good-government reform at the top of their lists." From the standpoint of accumulating delegates, Sanders's fate was sealed by his inability to convince a greater share of African-Americans and other racial minorities that he would better represent their views and interests than would Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party is a group coalition, and Sanders was unable to build a broad enough alliance of groups within the party to overtake Clinton in the national delegate count.

The pattern of a liberal insurgent losing a Democratic nomination race to a more moderate, transactional rival is a common one; Sanders's counterparts in previous years include Howard Dean (2004), Bill Bradley (2000), and Jerry Brown (1992). Because Sanders outperformed these predecessors, Bouie suggests that his campaign could serve as the foundation for the rise of a new liberal movement that might succeed down the road in capturing control of the Democratic Party, just as the modern conservative movement identified with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan became the dominant faction of the Republican Party by the 1980s. In my view, however, this remains an unlikely development. Among the reasons why:

1. It's unclear how much of Sanders's electoral success is a product of Hillary Clinton's specific weaknesses. In particular, his overwhelming margins among young voters might have been attenuated had he been facing a more conventional Democratic opponent, or opponents, who could also claim to be a fresh political face and who remained free of the baggage left by the Clintonist compromises of the 1990s and early 2000s. If Sanders were running against some combination of Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, and Amy Klobuchar, would voters under the age of 35 appear equally enthusiastic about the prospect of implementing socialism as the defining creed of the Democratic Party?

2. Because Sanders is not himself a Democrat, he is not in a position after the election to lead an internal faction of Democratic politicians and activists dedicated to remaking the party as a vehicle of the liberal cause—and it is unclear who else within the party has the national standing and influence to do so on his behalf. Elizabeth Warren is the most likely figure, although it is unclear whether she wishes to play such a role. Sanders disproportionately receives support from voters who are not themselves Democratic identifiers; why would we expect these voters not only to join the Democratic Party but also to become active within its ranks if their political hero has never done the same?

3. The American left, such as it is, has long had an ambivalent relationship with electoral politics in general and Democratic Party politics in particular. While the conservative movement threw itself into gaining root-and-branch control of the Republican organizational apparatus and using it to persuade and mobilize voters on behalf of conservative candidates, there has been no sustained counterpart to these efforts on the left; leftists often prefer other forms of protest such as marches, occupations, boycotts, and internet activism. (To take a recent example, compare the Tea Party movement to the Occupy movement. One side emphasized engagement in partisan politics and electoral participation on behalf of a policy agenda, the other did not. Which approach was more successful?) The current activity on behalf of the Sanders campaign will not be sustained past the end of his candidacy if his supporters view his defeat as signaling the futility of electoral mobilization rather than as a promising start upon which to build a sustainable movement.

4. The final triumph of the conservative movement within the Republican Party did not occur until Ronald Reagan demonstrated that a conservative candidate could win a national election, thus removing the strongest remaining justification for the existence of moderate Republicanism. It is unclear at best whether a Sanders-style liberal is electable; Bouie notes that left-wing Democrats are rarely elected statewide even at the sub-presidential level outside of the Northeast and coastal West. 

Even if a future Sandersesque candidate manages to win the Democratic nomination, a general-election defeat would only reinforce the instincts of many party actors that purist liberalism is, regardless of its other merits, ballot-box poison in the United States. As a result, non-purist Democrats would gain substantial justification for their efforts to swing the party back toward the center (as previously occurred in the mid-1970s and early 1990s).

5. Finally, it is unclear whether Sanders-style liberalism would be successful as a governing strategy even if granted officeholding power by the American electorate. Sanders is less interested than most Democrats in conceding ground to expert-dominated technocracy or the constraints of political pragmatism, which allows him to propose a bold legislative agenda and make campaign promises that remain appealingly unrestrained by the disappointing limitations of practicality. Once the election is over, however, the concrete demands of Democratic constituencies will not be satisfied by mere symbolic measures. Sanders's single-payer health care plan, for example, may be more ideologically pure than Obama's comparatively kludgy Affordable Care Act, but if he can't get it passed—or if it is enacted but fails to provide the benefits that it promises—than many Democratic supporters will judge his approach wanting, and look around for an alternative strategy that doesn't make the perfect the enemy of the good. 

The current "impure" nature of the Democratic Party does not reflect the triumph of corrupt corporate sellouts over innocent idealists, but instead represents the hard-won experience of most core groups within the party coalition that incrementalism and ideological flexibility are the best way to realize their political goals. If Sanders, or a future Sanders type, wishes to convince Democrats to dispense with that assumption, he or she would need to demonstrate that a more dogged adherence to ideological doctrine is equally if not more successful in addressing the specific social problems that Democratic constituencies seek to solve. Until then, the Democratic Party will remain a party on the left, but not truly of the left.

Debate Recap: More of the Same

Despite some sparks of mutual personal irritation, Thursday night's debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders reflected the stasis that the Democratic race has acquired. Clinton is still the pragmatist with a safe lead, Sanders is still the purist with a devoted base of support. Clinton feels vulnerable enough to Sanders's attacks to insist that he is denying the degree of their actual agreement over issues such as a $15 minimum wage and reforms of the Social Security tax, but not vulnerable enough to actually move her positions on other issues where the two candidates clearly differ (such as foreign policy, free college, and single-payer health care) further to the ideological left.

Any possibility that either Clinton or Sanders might say something particularly new or interesting was snuffed out by the CNN moderators, who were especially fond of cutting the candidates off in mid-sentence just as they were engaging with each other or moving past the two-minute responses that they had already given in previous debates. All in all, it was not a newsworthy event.

The news media face an incentive to hype the race to keep readers and viewers engaged. But assuming that the polls are right and Clinton gains a solid victory in the New York primary on Tuesday, the state of the delegate arithmetic will then become too clear-cut for anyone but the most committed Sanders supporters to ignore. While the final set of primaries will take another six weeks to play out, the final chapter of this contest is now coming into view.

How Many Sanders Voters Want Hillary to Win?

Ex-New Republic journalist John Judis has a piece on Talking Points Memo today in which he explains that his intention to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Maryland primary on April 26—he has even planted a Sanders lawn sign in front of his house, pictured in the article—should not be taken as evidence that he actually wants Sanders to be the Democratic nominee. In fact, says Judis, his and his wife's support for Sanders is "on the condition that we don't think he will get the nomination."

For Judis, supporting Sanders is a strategic act—to express approval for some of the issues that the Sanders campaign has raised, to push Hillary Clinton further to the ideological left, to lay the groundwork for a more ambitious national Democratic policy agenda in the future. But if Sanders were actually nominated in 2016, Judis worries that his favored candidate would have a difficult time winning a general election, and he is also "not sure whether [Sanders] is really ready for the job of president."

My anecdotal experience suggests that Judis is not alone. Sanders is winning some votes from Democrats who don't necessarily think that he would be the best nominee for the party, or even the most effective president, but are supporting him in the primaries because they wish to express their endorsement of his views and/or send a message to Hillary Clinton to pay more attention to the party's left wing.

It's hard to know exactly how large the contingent of "Vote Bernie, Hope Hillary" voters is, and doubtless they are outnumbered many times over by Sanders supporters who sincerely prefer him to be the Democratic nominee. But this phenomenon might account for part of the seesaw pattern of primary outcomes that we've seen this year on the Democratic side: a Clinton victory in Iowa was followed by a Sanders landslide in New Hampshire, which in turn was followed by Clinton wins in Nevada, South Carolina, and most of the Super Tuesday states—which then led to a Sanders upset in Michigan before Clinton swept on March 15, after which Sanders won 7 of 8 states leading into next week's New York primary.

As long as Clinton appears to have a lock on the nomination, Judis-style voters are free to indulge their symbolic support for Sanders. But if Clinton seems even slightly vulnerable—as after well-publicized Sanders victories—these voters might be less likely to depart from their sincere preference that she win the nomination, instead rallying behind her in the next round of voting. Of course, much of the apparent momentum shifts in the Democratic contest reflect differences from state to state in demographics and electoral rules, not changes in the actual dynamics of the race. But there may be an element of voter strategy at work here too.