Trouble In Paradise

After her victories on Super Tuesday, it appears that the Hildebeast is well on her way to the democrat nomination. But there are signs that all is not well in lefty land.

Beneath Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday Wins, Signs of Turnout Trouble

Hillary Clinton set out 10 months ago to inspire and energize the Democratic Party, hoping to bring together the rising American electorate of black, brown, young and female voters into a durable presidential coalition. But buried beneath Mrs. Clinton’s wide-ranging and commanding victories on Tuesday night were troubling signs of a party that has not yet rallied to her call.

Democratic turnout has fallen drastically since 2008, the last time the party had a contested primary, with roughly three million fewer Democrats voting in the 15 states that held caucuses or primaries through Tuesday... It declined in almost every state, dropping by roughly 50 percent in Texas and 40 percent in Tennessee. In Arkansas, Alabama, and Georgia, the number of Democrats voting decreased by between a quarter and a third.

The fall-off in Democratic primary turnout — which often reveals whether a candidate is exciting voters and attracting them to the polls — reached deeply into some of the core groups of voters Mrs. Clinton must not only win in November, but turn out in large numbers. It stands in sharp contrast to the flood of energized new voters showing up at the polls to vote for Donald J. Trump in the Republican contest.

Some Democrats now worry that Mrs. Clinton will have difficulty matching the surge in new black, Hispanic, and young voters who came to the polls for President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Even Mrs. Clinton’s strong victory in South Carolina, which was celebrated for her dominance among African-American voters, obscured a big decline in black turnout of about 40 percent. In Iowa, where Mrs. Clinton eked out a narrow win after a hotly fought battle last month with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, exit polls suggested that turnout for voters under the age of 30 dropped by roughly 40 percent from 2008.

The results suggest that Mrs. Clinton, who has outraised every other presidential candidate and has the overwhelming support of her party’s elected leaders, still faces a daunting and difficult road to reassembling the winning Obama coalition.

Some Democrats said they did not believe that turnout in the primaries necessarily foreshadowed problems for the Democratic nominee in the general election... Mrs. Clinton’s supporters insist that many Democrats would become more energized as the general election drew nearer, particularly if Republicans nominated Donald J. Trump as their standard-bearer.

In a general election polarized by Mr. Trump’s appeals to the economic and cultural anxieties of white, working-class voters, those Democrats argued, black and Hispanic voters would turn out strongly to defeat him. (emphasis added)

That's my greatest concern about a Trump candidacy - well, excluding my concerns about Trump himself.

The challenge for Mrs. Clinton is, in a sense, reversed from 2008, when she sought to counter Mr. Obama’s appeal to young, liberal and African-American voters...

This year, she has sought to portray herself as Mr. Obama’s successor...

Oh, great. That's all we need - four (or eight) more years of a female obama.

But it is an open question whether any Democrat can replicate Mr. Obama’s unique relationship with the new voters he galvanized in his two campaigns, particularly black voters. African-Americans turned out widely in 2008 to elect the country’s first black leader and mustered similar strength in 2012 to validate his presidency, angered by what they saw as contempt and disrespect from Republicans.

I have nothing but contempt for that SCOAMF. And I respect him about as much as he respects the Constitution.

Of course, there's still a long way to go. Lots of things could happen between now and the conventions to affect the outcome. Like, perhaps, an indictment ... pretty, pretty please, let Hillary be indicted for her many crimes. Or Donald's unstable personality and tendency to shoot from the hip could come back to bite him.

In any event, faced with the choice between Hillary and Donald ... well, that's not much of a choice.

I know nothing...