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-- Chris Weigant
Newt Gingrich is a smart guy, Washington insiders will tell you. He's certainly smarter than Donald Trump, based on nothing more than vocabulary and the complexity of ideas he is able to comprehend. Newt is currently on Trump's vice-presidential shortlist, which makes sense if you believe what Trump's been saying about his veep pick for months now -- he wants someone with experience dealing with Congress. Newt, being a former Speaker of the House, certainly fits that bill better than most.
But Newt Gingrich's supposed smartness is rather indiscriminate, when examined closely. Newt has what he considers ten or twelve brilliant ideas each day, which he is in the habit of just tossing out for discussion. These ideas are presented in scattershot fashion, and most of them never go anywhere (even Newt admits this, when he's being honest with himself). However, every once in a while Newt will follow through on one of his proposals, so you can't just discount everything that comes out of his mouth.
Whither the fabled "Party of Lincoln"? That was the question on the minds of many Republicans this week, at least based on how often they used the phrase. Now, we're used to scathing attacks on character being hurled in the frenzy of a presidential campaign. Indeed, it's woven into the fabric of American politics. It's just that in normal years, these attacks are flung across the aisle, at the other party's nominee. It is extraordinary that all of the vicious attacks we're going to feature in our talking points section this week came from Republicans, all aimed squarely at their own party's presidential nominee. Seriously, when in the past have you ever heard the term "unendorse" used? We haven't checked, but we believe it just got coined and added to the political lexicon. It hasn't existed before because the concept hasn't ever existed before (again, in our own memory, at the very least). But we're going to get to all this in great detail later, so let's just move along for now.
California's relatively new primary system is unfair and needs to change back to the way it used to be. I say this not out of partisanship -- quite the opposite, in fact. The benefits of California's so-called "jungle primary" have all gone to the Democratic side, but basic fairness demands I stand up for the rights of California Republicans, third-party voters, and independents, because theirs are the rights which are being abridged.
Six years ago, California voters passed two major adjustments to our voting system. The first I applauded (and still do), because Proposition 20 guaranteed that the politicians would be completely excluded from the process of redrawing district lines after every U.S. Census. Redistricting is perhaps the wonkiest of all political fights, but it is the process where gerrymandering takes place, so it is an important one. California voters decided they had had enough, and put a non-partisan citizens' commission in charge of redrawing the lines -- a valuable change and one that stands up for the concept of fairness.
However, in the same year, California voters also passed Proposition 14, which gave us our jungle primary. What this did was essentially shift the general election lineup to the primary, and turn the general election into nothing more than a runoff between the top two primary vote-winners. If this doesn't sound so bad, consider that Californian Republicans will have no candidate from their party to vote for in November for a (very rare) open U.S. Senate race. That is simply unfair, and if I were a Republican, I'd be hopping mad about it.
Senator Bernie Sanders, barring extraordinary unforeseen circumstances, is not going to be president. He has fallen short of his goal of winning the nomination of the Democratic Party. No tricky delegate math is going to save him now. His campaign is now over, whether he wants to admit it or not quite yet. But I for one am thankful he ran, and thankful for what he did manage to accomplish. Because though his campaign is done, his political revolution should continue.
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.
