By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--May 24, 2016
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I really don't even know why the Democratic Party spends a dime on communication staff. Why not just hand out copies of the New York Times to everyone? It would accomplish the same purpose, and most of the time they're all on social media posting links to the Times anyway. No matter what happens, the Times is there and ready to spin it to put the story in the best - or least bad - light for the Democrats.
Those polls you've heard about in recent weeks that show Trump either pulling into the lead or quickly closing the gap? There's really no way to call that happy news for Democrats, but leave it to Timesman Nate Cohn to find a silver lining:The prospect of another fairly close general election is not what Democrats were hoping for against Mr. Trump, but Mrs. Clinton will have a chance to widen the gap by winning over supporters of Mr. Sanders. Mr. Trump, despite his gains, now finds himself at around 42 or 43 percent in national polls. He still trails Mrs. Clinton in the balance of recent surveys, even though she is facing a divided Democratic Party. She is in the lead, in no small part, because there are simply more Democratic-leaning voters than Republican-leaning voters in the country. All but one of the most recent surveys show that there are more Democrats than Republicans. But Mrs. Clinton nonetheless struggles because of her inability to consolidate the independent-leaning, young, liberal supporters of Mr. Sanders. The most recent wave of national surveys shows Mrs. Clinton winning just 55 to 72 percent of Sanders’s supporters. She’s faring far worse among young and liberal voters than one would expect. The good news for Mrs. Clinton is that there’s a lot of room for improvement. She could make gains after winning the nomination, much as Mr. Trump already has. That could leave her with a considerable advantage.
Mr. Obama’s gains in June 2008 are probably the clearest precedent: He led by a wide margin until Mr. McCain won the nomination; he regained the lead after he was the Democratic Party’s choice.So Cohn's theory is that Trump is now enjoying a just-won-the-nomination bounce, and once Hillary has done the same, she'll get one too. Presumably these would also be followed by post-convention bounces for both candidates. And hey, for Hillary, there's lots of room for improvement! A few problems with that theory. First, by what measure has Hillary not already won the Democrat nomination? Granted, Bernie Sanders hasn't given up and he keeps winning most of the primaries, but what difference does it make? Everyone knows the nomination is Hillary's regardless of what happens in the primaries because the superdelegates are going to save her. Up until Trump won Indiana, there was still some thought that Ted Cruz might at least be able to keep Trump under 1,237 heading into the RNC, so it really meant something when Indiana went for Trump, and Cruz dropped out. In Hillary's case, any official "clinching" of the nomination will be a mere formality, and it won't be the result of some grand primary triumph. It will be because the whole thing has been engineered so she can't lose. She's going to get a poll bounce from that?
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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