Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
For the first time, I am writing a column which is designed to be updated, perhaps later tonight or perhaps even tomorrow. Because today is the end of the primary road for 2016, so while I'd like to take a nostalgic look back at the entire primary season, I'm also going to eventually update my stats to provide the final 2016 numbers on how well I picked all the primary races.
Welcome back to my final 2016 round of "call the primaries." Although tomorrow night won't actually be the last primary day (Washington D.C. votes next week), it will be the last day where both parties' nominees are not known. So it'll be the last time the game will even be worth playing.
As always, before I get to tomorrow night's predictions, I've got to update the running totals. Oh, and my apologies to Democrats in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico (who both voted over the weekend), as I neglected to make calls in their races.
Three weeks ago, I predicted Bernie Sanders would win both Kentucky and Oregon. While Bernie did clean up in Oregon, the Kentucky race was one of the closest of the entire season for Democrats. The state wasn't called until very late in the night, and in the end Hillary Clinton won it by less than 2,000 votes (out of over 400,000 votes cast). So while it was one of the closest races yet, Hillary chalked it up as a win -- meaning I now have to chalk it up as a loss.
Here are my running totals for how I've done throughout the primary season. I should note that the Republican numbers are final, since Donald Trump has wrapped up the nomination (I don't make predictions after that point, because it'd be unfairly running up my own score).
Total correct 2016 Democratic picks: 35 for 46 -- 76%
Total correct 2016 Republican picks: 37 for 47 -- 79%
Total overall correct picks: 72 for 93 -- 77%.
I'm still doing better than 3-for-4 in all categories, but just barely for Democrats. Which brings us to the final six predictions of the 2016 primary season. I'm going to present these in reverse-alphabetical order, just because.
Once again, we've got a rather long end section today, so we're going to present our wrap-up of the week's news in rather abbreviated fashion. This is because we are finally (only a few weeks late!) unveiling the finalists in our "come up with a playground taunt for Trump" contest (which initially ran back in FTP [391]), so there's that to look forward to, down in the talking points section.
So, quickly and to the point: Donald Trump all but declared war (once again) on the media this week, after they actually did their jobs and investigated whether Trump had made good on his claims of donating millions to veterans' charities. Turns out, he hadn't (at least, not fully). When he was forced to quickly start writing checks by investigative journalists, he (of course) flipped his lid. He held a press conference where he exhibited (once again) his sneering disdain for the media, and for anyone who ever questions anything he says. Perhaps this will fully open the eyes of the media who still refuse to call Trump on the carpet for some of his bigger whoppers? One would like to think so, at any rate.
The "Never Trump" movement has now entered the embalming phase, as Bill Kristol announced he had finally found someone to mount a third-party conservative run for the White House (maybe). He is a guy almost nobody has ever heard of, who is still not even fully committed to running. That whimpering sound you hear is the "Never Trump" movement's death rattle, folks.
A Remarkably Stable Month
Barack Obama's job approval polling in May stayed remarkably stable. His job approval rating improved slightly, and his job disapproval rating very slightly got worse. In other words, he stayed almost exactly where he was in April. Though boring (nothing is more boring on a graph than a flat line), this was important because it reinforced and solidified the large gains Obama made since the start of the year. His improvement was no blip, in other words. Take a look at the new chart to see this.
[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]
May, 2016
I can now say I have felt the Bern, from beginning to end. I am able to make this statement since I attended my second Bernie Sanders rally yesterday, in Santa Cruz, California. I attended my first Bernie rally all the way back in July of last year, in Phoenix, Arizona (held right after the Netroots Nation blogger conference). So I have seen how the Bernie revolution began and I have also seen it entering the homestretch of campaigning during the primary season, one short week before California and a few other states become the last to vote.
It would be hard to do a straight comparison between the two rallies, so I'm not going to attempt to do so. The Phoenix rally was massive, with over 11,000 people attending. The Santa Cruz rally was smaller, but there were a few mitigating factors (which is why a comparison of just crowd size isn't valid). Bernie announced his rally in Santa Cruz roughly 24 hours before it was held. The auditorium was much smaller (Santa Cruz doesn't really have a 10,000-plus-sized auditorium available), because Santa Cruz itself is much smaller than Phoenix. Even so (according to the fire marshal I talked to) there were 3,425 people allowed in before they shut the doors, which left at least a couple of thousand outside the arena who didn't get in. More on them in a moment. Here was the line which greeted me as I arrived at the arena, hours before the rally was set to begin. It's hard to see, but the line extends far over that bridge in the background.
All photographs © Chris Weigant 2016
Bernie also gave a second speech that day, an hour down the coast in Monterey, which was attended by an estimated 8,000 people. So even though it's kind of apples and oranges, he spoke to the same total crowd in one day as he did in Phoenix, at the very least.
There will be no column today, sorry. But the good news is that hopefully tomorrow's column will make up for it. I spent the day "on location" (with a press pass and everything) at a Bernie Sanders rally. It was too convenient to ignore, since it was only a couple of miles from where I live. But it was a long day, and I am (pardon the pun) "Bernt" out, for now. So much so that I can't even summon the energy to run a previous column. I will provide this link to the column I would have re-run, mostly because I'll be referencing it tomorrow. I can now say I saw the very beginning of Bernie's campaign as well as the very end. In any case, you'll have to wait for tomorrow's column to hear all about it, and for that, my apologies. Until then....
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
Being in the midst of history sometimes mean events are not seen in the "big picture" view that historians often later take, when looking back at the period. Case in point: what will America's ongoing war eventually be known as? To date, we've been at war since October 2001, or a mind-boggling period of 15 years. This war was initially called "The Global War On Terror" by the Bush administration, which lumped in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq with all the skirmishes in various other North African and Middle East countries. The Obama administration has dropped the term, but they've never really replaced it with anything else. But what I wonder this Memorial Day is what it will be called in the future. Right now, it'd be the "Fifteen Years' War" -- but few expect all conflicts will end by the time the next president is sworn in, so eventually that number will likely be higher.
Has Paul Ryan become so disaffected with Donald Trump that he quietly changed political parties, when no one was looking? The Washington Post, in an unrelated story, ran a photo of Orrin Hatch standing next to Ryan with the caption (emphasis added):
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT), (L), is flanked by House Speaker Ryan (D-WI), (R), while signing the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act of 2016, on Capitol Hill May 18, 2016 in Washington, DC
Note that "(D-WI)" in there [the "(R)" which follows it stands for "right," and not "Republican," we should add]. The truly odd thing is that this page hasn't been corrected yet (as of this writing), and it's been up for over a full day.
So when did Paul Ryan secretly become a Democrat? Heh. OK, we know it was just a typo, but still, it's fun to think about, right?
Donald Trump just secured his 1,237th delegate to the Republican National Convention. He will thus be the party's nominee -- no ifs, ands, or buts. No pipe dream of a floor fight is going to save the party from nominating Trump. It's official.
A year ago, that would have been an extraordinarily fantastical paragraph to type. Six months ago, it still would have been considered outrageously improbable by most inside-the-Beltway pundits (from left or right). A month ago, the mainstream media was still howling with disbelief (and laughter) when a Trump spokesman predicted he'd get 1,400 delegates to the convention -- a figure that now looks downright possible. Now, Donald Trump is unquestionably the leader of the Republican Party. At this point, Trump securing the nomination is even kind of a footnote, since after Ted Cruz and John Kasich dropped out, Trump has been the only GOP candidate even left running. He'd already locked up the title of "presumptive nominee," so today's announcement is little more than confirmation of what has been obvious for weeks now.
No matter the outcome in November, the 2016 presidential election is already one for the history books. Students of political science will doubtlessly be examining this campaign under a microscope for decades to come. Every so often a political figure comes along who completely rewrites the rules, and for this generation it certainly looks like Donald Trump will be remembered for doing so (even if he loses the general election).
Is Senator Elizabeth Warren actively auditioning for the role of Hillary Clinton's vice presidential pick? At this point, it's rather hard to come to any other conclusion, since Warren has been so outspoken of late on the subject of how horrible Donald Trump would be as president.
The traditional role for the vice presidential candidate is, of course, to be just such an attack dog. The presidential candidate is supposed to have self-imposed limits on what they can say about their opponent, but the veep candidate isn't as constrained by appearing "presidential" and is thus able to unleash stinging attacks against the other party's candidate. This year, however, the Republican candidate is not exactly traditional in this regard (or any other, for that matter), since it would be so hard to imagine any other Republican outdoing Donald Trump in the "attack dog" category.
But the Democrats are on the brink of nominating a much more conventional presidential candidate, so they'll also likely be looking for a more conventional role for the vice presidential candidate as well. And Elizabeth Warren seems to be putting herself front and center for this consideration. Other Democrats have taken political shots at Donald Trump over the past few weeks, but Warren is definitely the most prominent and the most fervent of all the Trump critics. Who else has gotten into an open Twitter war with Trump, after all?
