Bernie Sanders: 'After a lot of thought, I voted for me'
By Nolan D. McCaskill
Bernie Sanders voted — for himself, of course — on Tuesday in Vermont.
“I will tell you after a lot of thought, I voted for me for president,” the Vermont senator said, smiling at a man he had just taken a selfie with.
“Congratulations, Bernie. Good luck out there,” replied the man, who patted Sanders on the back and laughed.
The Democratic presidential candidate and his wife, Jane Sanders, cast their votes at a polling station in Burlington around 7:30 a.m., according to a pool report.
“Nice warm day,” a woman at the local community center where Sanders voted joked (it was about 12 degrees outside). “Nice Vermont day.”
The couple voted at booths beside each other and took pictures with voters afterward. Sanders briefly spoke to reporters inside the community center, telling the press, “We’re feeling great.”
He is expected to win Vermont handily — recent polls show him with more than 80 percent support. But the state is just one of 11 that are voting in the Democratic primary Tuesday, along with American Samoa.
March 01, 2016
Texas abortion case
High court to hear 'watershed' Texas abortion case
The most significant abortion case to come before the court since 1992, will be argued before 8 justices Wednesday.
By Jennifer Haberkorn
The Supreme Court this week will hear arguments on whether Texas can limit abortions to surgical centers and to doctors affiliated with nearby hospitals — potentially reshaping the national landscape on abortion during a presidential election year.
Eight justices will hear oral arguments Wednesday in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the most significant abortion case to come before the court since 1992, and among the most significant constitutional tests since the court upheld abortion rights in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.
“This is a watershed moment in the battle for reproductive rights,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, the law firm representing the Texas clinics challenging the law.
The ruling is likely in late June — just weeks before the Democratic and Republican conventions in a volatile election year when the court itself has become part of the political narrative since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, a fervent opponent of abortion.
The arguments come against a backdrop of hundreds of state laws that restrict abortion, leaving swathes of the country without clinics. In Texas, more than half the state’s 41 clinics have closed since provisions of the far-reaching law have taken effect. If the remaining contested provisions are upheld, only about 10 would remain, mostly in cities.
The court’s ruling in the case could more clearly define how far states can go to regulate doctors and clinics without creating “an undue burden” on women — a criteria the justices created in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Or if they deadlock 4-4, with Scalia’s seat vacant, an appellate court’s decision upholding of the Texas law would stand and the high court’s decision would apply only in a handful of states, with the possibility of a rehearing when a ninth justice is seated. The court could also hold off issuing any decision this term in anticipation of a full court next year after a new president nominates his or her choice.
Many of the state restrictions already upheld by the court affect pregnant women’s access to abortion, for instance, by imposing mandatory waiting periods or requiring parental notification before underage girls can get the procedure.
But in recent years, states like Texas have directly targeted the clinics and physicians who provide abortions. The result of those laws is some clinics are struggling to remain open.
The law’s defenders say the rules are designed to ensure that abortion clinic standards are up to par and guarantee women’s safety.
But the notion that the rules promote safety is disputed by more than a dozen prominent medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the leading obstetrics and gynecology association. The rules, they say, are about shutting down clinics, not ensuring better care.
Whether the court finds the standards protect health is crucial since the Casey decision defined “unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion” as undue burdens.
Two provisions in the Texas law are at issue in this case. First, Texas would require that physicians do abortions only in ambulatory surgical centers which must meet strict building and regulatory standards. For instance, corridors have to be a certain width and abortions have to be done in surgical suites. If an existing clinic can’t meet these conditions, it must close.
Whole Woman's Health owner Amy Hagstrom Miller said she has sought unsuccessfully to buy or lease existing ambulatory surgical centers to replace the clinics she owns across the state.
Beyond that, the Texas law requires doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital — which can be difficult, if not impossible, to get in communities where anti-abortion sentiment runs high.
Whole Woman’s Health is asking the court to consider the law’s impact on Texas women’s access to abortion. Or, as Northup put it, the plaintiffs want the court to stop “the onslaught of sham laws” that do nothing to promote safety.
“The whole point of Casey is that courts are required to look at how a regulation affects the way that women make a decision and what constitutes an undue burden,” said Kathryn Kolbert, now a Barnard College professor who argued that 1992 case for Planned Parenthood.
In 1992, the Casey decision was considered a huge win for the abortion rights movement because it upheld Roe v. Wade and a women’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But it also opened the door for state regulation of abortion providers and clinics — an opening that has been forced open wider over time. One recent Bloomberg analysis found that since 2011, 58 abortion clinics in the United States have closed, though regulation is only one factor.
Abortion opponents argue the precedent that states can regulate abortion clinics, particularly to ensure safety, is well-established. As proof of the need for tougher regulation, they cite the case of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia doctor who was convicted of killing babies born alive after late-term abortions. The conditions in his clinic were also found to be unsafe and unsanitary.
“The Supreme Court is being given an opportunity to unequivocally affirm that it meant what it said as far back as Roe — that states may regulate abortion to protect maternal health,” said Denise Burke, vice president of legal affairs at Americans United for Life, which helps states craft legislation. “The abortion industry doesn’t have a right to be free from appropriate regulation.”
Twenty-four states have laws that regulate abortion providers beyond what is medically necessary, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. NARAL Pro-Choice America puts the count at 44 states.
If there is a 4-4- deadlock in this case — with perpetual swing vote Anthony Kennedy joining the three conservatives — the Fifth Circuit’s ruling upholding the Texas statute would stand. But it would apply only within the Fifth Circuit and therefore not set a national precedent.
Abortion opponents note that Kennedy tends to defer to state legislatures. He has struck only one abortion restriction that has reached the Supreme Court: the requirement that a woman notify her husband before getting an abortion in the Casey decision.
Even in Casey, Kennedy waffled, according to the papers of Justice Harry Blackmun. He started out wanting to overturn Roe, but ended up crafting the opinion with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter that reaffirmed Roe and created the undue burden test.
In the most recent landmark abortion case, in 2007, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion upholding a federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortion.
Both political parties have made abortion a centerpiece of this year’s campaign, and Senate Republicans’ flat-out refusal to consider a successor to Scalia until President Barack Obama leaves office has further inflamed passions.
On Wednesday, both sides will be rallying outside the court — House Speaker Paul Ryan plans to be there to show his support for Texas. The justices will hear one hour of oral arguments, including from U.S. Solicitor General Don Verrilli, who represents the Obama administration in support of Whole Woman’s Health.
For abortion rights supporters, the Whole Woman’s Health case could allow the court to address the 1973 ruling’s unfinished business.
“Every two years, I see this layer upon layer of barriers [passed by the Texas Legislature] that another group of women can’t overcome,” said Hagstrom Miller. “Even though I have been extremely committed to complying with the regulations [to remain open], we can’t forget to pick up our heads and say, ‘Look what’s happened over time.’”
The most significant abortion case to come before the court since 1992, will be argued before 8 justices Wednesday.
By Jennifer Haberkorn
The Supreme Court this week will hear arguments on whether Texas can limit abortions to surgical centers and to doctors affiliated with nearby hospitals — potentially reshaping the national landscape on abortion during a presidential election year.
Eight justices will hear oral arguments Wednesday in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the most significant abortion case to come before the court since 1992, and among the most significant constitutional tests since the court upheld abortion rights in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.
“This is a watershed moment in the battle for reproductive rights,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, the law firm representing the Texas clinics challenging the law.
The ruling is likely in late June — just weeks before the Democratic and Republican conventions in a volatile election year when the court itself has become part of the political narrative since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, a fervent opponent of abortion.
The arguments come against a backdrop of hundreds of state laws that restrict abortion, leaving swathes of the country without clinics. In Texas, more than half the state’s 41 clinics have closed since provisions of the far-reaching law have taken effect. If the remaining contested provisions are upheld, only about 10 would remain, mostly in cities.
The court’s ruling in the case could more clearly define how far states can go to regulate doctors and clinics without creating “an undue burden” on women — a criteria the justices created in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Or if they deadlock 4-4, with Scalia’s seat vacant, an appellate court’s decision upholding of the Texas law would stand and the high court’s decision would apply only in a handful of states, with the possibility of a rehearing when a ninth justice is seated. The court could also hold off issuing any decision this term in anticipation of a full court next year after a new president nominates his or her choice.
Many of the state restrictions already upheld by the court affect pregnant women’s access to abortion, for instance, by imposing mandatory waiting periods or requiring parental notification before underage girls can get the procedure.
But in recent years, states like Texas have directly targeted the clinics and physicians who provide abortions. The result of those laws is some clinics are struggling to remain open.
The law’s defenders say the rules are designed to ensure that abortion clinic standards are up to par and guarantee women’s safety.
But the notion that the rules promote safety is disputed by more than a dozen prominent medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the leading obstetrics and gynecology association. The rules, they say, are about shutting down clinics, not ensuring better care.
Whether the court finds the standards protect health is crucial since the Casey decision defined “unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion” as undue burdens.
Two provisions in the Texas law are at issue in this case. First, Texas would require that physicians do abortions only in ambulatory surgical centers which must meet strict building and regulatory standards. For instance, corridors have to be a certain width and abortions have to be done in surgical suites. If an existing clinic can’t meet these conditions, it must close.
Whole Woman's Health owner Amy Hagstrom Miller said she has sought unsuccessfully to buy or lease existing ambulatory surgical centers to replace the clinics she owns across the state.
Beyond that, the Texas law requires doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital — which can be difficult, if not impossible, to get in communities where anti-abortion sentiment runs high.
Whole Woman’s Health is asking the court to consider the law’s impact on Texas women’s access to abortion. Or, as Northup put it, the plaintiffs want the court to stop “the onslaught of sham laws” that do nothing to promote safety.
“The whole point of Casey is that courts are required to look at how a regulation affects the way that women make a decision and what constitutes an undue burden,” said Kathryn Kolbert, now a Barnard College professor who argued that 1992 case for Planned Parenthood.
In 1992, the Casey decision was considered a huge win for the abortion rights movement because it upheld Roe v. Wade and a women’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But it also opened the door for state regulation of abortion providers and clinics — an opening that has been forced open wider over time. One recent Bloomberg analysis found that since 2011, 58 abortion clinics in the United States have closed, though regulation is only one factor.
Abortion opponents argue the precedent that states can regulate abortion clinics, particularly to ensure safety, is well-established. As proof of the need for tougher regulation, they cite the case of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia doctor who was convicted of killing babies born alive after late-term abortions. The conditions in his clinic were also found to be unsafe and unsanitary.
“The Supreme Court is being given an opportunity to unequivocally affirm that it meant what it said as far back as Roe — that states may regulate abortion to protect maternal health,” said Denise Burke, vice president of legal affairs at Americans United for Life, which helps states craft legislation. “The abortion industry doesn’t have a right to be free from appropriate regulation.”
Twenty-four states have laws that regulate abortion providers beyond what is medically necessary, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. NARAL Pro-Choice America puts the count at 44 states.
If there is a 4-4- deadlock in this case — with perpetual swing vote Anthony Kennedy joining the three conservatives — the Fifth Circuit’s ruling upholding the Texas statute would stand. But it would apply only within the Fifth Circuit and therefore not set a national precedent.
Abortion opponents note that Kennedy tends to defer to state legislatures. He has struck only one abortion restriction that has reached the Supreme Court: the requirement that a woman notify her husband before getting an abortion in the Casey decision.
Even in Casey, Kennedy waffled, according to the papers of Justice Harry Blackmun. He started out wanting to overturn Roe, but ended up crafting the opinion with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter that reaffirmed Roe and created the undue burden test.
In the most recent landmark abortion case, in 2007, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion upholding a federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortion.
Both political parties have made abortion a centerpiece of this year’s campaign, and Senate Republicans’ flat-out refusal to consider a successor to Scalia until President Barack Obama leaves office has further inflamed passions.
On Wednesday, both sides will be rallying outside the court — House Speaker Paul Ryan plans to be there to show his support for Texas. The justices will hear one hour of oral arguments, including from U.S. Solicitor General Don Verrilli, who represents the Obama administration in support of Whole Woman’s Health.
For abortion rights supporters, the Whole Woman’s Health case could allow the court to address the 1973 ruling’s unfinished business.
“Every two years, I see this layer upon layer of barriers [passed by the Texas Legislature] that another group of women can’t overcome,” said Hagstrom Miller. “Even though I have been extremely committed to complying with the regulations [to remain open], we can’t forget to pick up our heads and say, ‘Look what’s happened over time.’”
Rubio to drop out.. Trump wish...
Trump calls on Rubio to drop out
By Nolan D. McCaskill
Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Marco Rubio to drop out of the 2016 presidential race if he doesn’t do well on Super Tuesday.
“I think he has to get out,” Trump told Fox News in a phone interview. “You know, he hasn’t won anything, and Ted Cruz very rightly points out, you know, Marco has not won.”
Trump, Rubio and Cruz are generally seen as the only three candidates with a viable path to the Republican nomination. Trump has steamrolled to double-digit margins of victory in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. And Cruz won the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses and is expected to win Texas, which awards the largest share of delegates on Tuesday, but Rubio has yet to win a state — though he maintains he will win Florida on March 15.
“Little Marco Rubio, let me tell you, he’s been a disaster for Florida,” Trump said. “Doesn’t show up to vote. Never even shows up to vote. He’s got the highest miss record in the, you know, in the United States Senate, so Marco Rubio’s done a horrible job in Florida. That doesn’t come up for two weeks, but, you know, honestly, I don’t think he could be right now elected a dog catcher in Florida, so we’ll see what happens.”
Rubio finally engaged Trump last week in Thursday’s Republican debate. The Florida senator has since ramped up his rhetoric relentlessly attacking the front-runner, even to the point that his voice was noticeably hoarse as he campaigned on Monday.
“It’s not who he is. I didn’t like it,” Trump said of Rubio’s recent efforts to stall his momentum. “I was getting along with him very well, then all of a sudden, you know, he was told to do this by his supporters, I guess. But all of a sudden he became Don Rickles, and he’s not Don Rickles. Not gonna happen.”
By Nolan D. McCaskill
Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Marco Rubio to drop out of the 2016 presidential race if he doesn’t do well on Super Tuesday.
“I think he has to get out,” Trump told Fox News in a phone interview. “You know, he hasn’t won anything, and Ted Cruz very rightly points out, you know, Marco has not won.”
Trump, Rubio and Cruz are generally seen as the only three candidates with a viable path to the Republican nomination. Trump has steamrolled to double-digit margins of victory in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. And Cruz won the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses and is expected to win Texas, which awards the largest share of delegates on Tuesday, but Rubio has yet to win a state — though he maintains he will win Florida on March 15.
“Little Marco Rubio, let me tell you, he’s been a disaster for Florida,” Trump said. “Doesn’t show up to vote. Never even shows up to vote. He’s got the highest miss record in the, you know, in the United States Senate, so Marco Rubio’s done a horrible job in Florida. That doesn’t come up for two weeks, but, you know, honestly, I don’t think he could be right now elected a dog catcher in Florida, so we’ll see what happens.”
Rubio finally engaged Trump last week in Thursday’s Republican debate. The Florida senator has since ramped up his rhetoric relentlessly attacking the front-runner, even to the point that his voice was noticeably hoarse as he campaigned on Monday.
“It’s not who he is. I didn’t like it,” Trump said of Rubio’s recent efforts to stall his momentum. “I was getting along with him very well, then all of a sudden, you know, he was told to do this by his supporters, I guess. But all of a sudden he became Don Rickles, and he’s not Don Rickles. Not gonna happen.”
Father figure?
Nader: Is Trump our father figure?
Simon says: Trump has gotten where he is by embracing racism and bigotry.
By Roger Simon
"The press does not know how to corner Donald Trump,” Ralph Nader is telling me.
“He connects with those people who are sick of politics and those who have never been interested in politics. But these people know they are being shafted and they are impatient with politicians.
“Trump understands that. And he always exceeds expectations.”
Ever hear of the Ku Klux Klan? The KKK? Guys in white sheets? Burns crosses on lawns?
Sure you’ve heard of them. Everybody had heard of them. Except Trump.
Sunday, when CNN’s Jake Tapper asks Trump about the Klan and how former Klan grand wizard David Duke has endorsed Trump, Trump is like, huh? Whuh? The Klan? Never heard of them.
“I have to look at the group. I mean, I don’t know what group you’re talking about,” Trump says. “You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.”
Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president, and he knows “nothing about” the Klan. Trump, as he tells us endlessly, went to these really, really great schools. But he doesn’t know the difference between David Duke and Daisy Duke from “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
Tapper finds this a little odd. “I’m just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here, but … ”
“Honestly, I don’t know David Duke,” Trump says. “I just don’t know anything about him.”
Funny thing is, when Trump was initially asked at a news conference Friday about Duke’s endorsement, he disavowed it. But by Sunday, under Tapper’s questioning, he pleaded ignorance.
The media go crazy about this. Once again, some say Trump is “through.” He is damaged goods heading into Super Tuesday.
But why? If you were a Trump voter before, or even leaning toward Trump, why would Trump’s feigned ignorance about the Klan upset you?
Trump has gotten where he is by embracing racism and bigotry. He got to the top of the Republican polls after he said Mexicans are rapists and Muslims should not be allowed into the United States. So why should an endorsement by a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan hurt him? It will probably gain him 2 or 3 percentage points.
“People are looking for a strong man,” Nader, who knows a thing or two about running for president, is saying. “That’s the sign of the decay of our society. Trump says: ‘Anyone who attacks us, I will blow them out of water.’ People want this reassurance, this father figure.”
Monday, in a speech in Radford, Virginia, Trump laid it out in very simple terms. “We are looking for security. We are looking for safety. We are looking for good homes. We are looking for good health care. We are looking for a strong military that can protect us from evil.”
In eight years, we have gone from a candidate who won the presidency through inspiration and eloquence to one who uses language an eighth-grader could understand.
Don’t knock it.
“His appeal is clarity,” says Nader. “His sentences are very brief: ‘We are being screwed. I will build a wall.’ Put that together with his bluster and his image as a brawler and he gets the attention of those who could never watch debates without falling asleep.
“Wordplay is Trump’s genius.”
And who will stop him? Nobody will stop him. He understands the Republican Party of 2016 because he is the Republican Party of 2016.
“Trump is like climate change,” Bill Maher has said. “We knew it was coming, and now it’s too late.”
Marco Rubio is giving it a college try. Almost literally: Over the weekend, at a university in Virginia, he sounded like a frat boy at his first kegger.
“You know what they say about guys with small hands!” Rubio said about Trump as the crowd roared.
And Trump “doesn’t sweat because his pores are clogged from the spray tan.”
“Donald Trump isn’t gonna make America great,” Rubio said. “He’s gonna make America orange!”
Nader did not find this encouraging. “How demeaning this is to our posterity,” Nader said.
But somebody is going to be the next president. Whom does Nader want?
“I don’t want to choose between cancer and drug-resistant tuberculosis,” Nader said.
The Republican Party may shatter over Trump. Historians will make Trump’s rise to the top look obvious, but it was not. I don’t recall anybody predicting it.
“Man is a strange animal,” Adlai E. Stevenson once said. “He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.”
Simon says: Trump has gotten where he is by embracing racism and bigotry.
By Roger Simon
"The press does not know how to corner Donald Trump,” Ralph Nader is telling me.
“He connects with those people who are sick of politics and those who have never been interested in politics. But these people know they are being shafted and they are impatient with politicians.
“Trump understands that. And he always exceeds expectations.”
Ever hear of the Ku Klux Klan? The KKK? Guys in white sheets? Burns crosses on lawns?
Sure you’ve heard of them. Everybody had heard of them. Except Trump.
Sunday, when CNN’s Jake Tapper asks Trump about the Klan and how former Klan grand wizard David Duke has endorsed Trump, Trump is like, huh? Whuh? The Klan? Never heard of them.
“I have to look at the group. I mean, I don’t know what group you’re talking about,” Trump says. “You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.”
Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president, and he knows “nothing about” the Klan. Trump, as he tells us endlessly, went to these really, really great schools. But he doesn’t know the difference between David Duke and Daisy Duke from “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
Tapper finds this a little odd. “I’m just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here, but … ”
“Honestly, I don’t know David Duke,” Trump says. “I just don’t know anything about him.”
Funny thing is, when Trump was initially asked at a news conference Friday about Duke’s endorsement, he disavowed it. But by Sunday, under Tapper’s questioning, he pleaded ignorance.
The media go crazy about this. Once again, some say Trump is “through.” He is damaged goods heading into Super Tuesday.
But why? If you were a Trump voter before, or even leaning toward Trump, why would Trump’s feigned ignorance about the Klan upset you?
Trump has gotten where he is by embracing racism and bigotry. He got to the top of the Republican polls after he said Mexicans are rapists and Muslims should not be allowed into the United States. So why should an endorsement by a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan hurt him? It will probably gain him 2 or 3 percentage points.
“People are looking for a strong man,” Nader, who knows a thing or two about running for president, is saying. “That’s the sign of the decay of our society. Trump says: ‘Anyone who attacks us, I will blow them out of water.’ People want this reassurance, this father figure.”
Monday, in a speech in Radford, Virginia, Trump laid it out in very simple terms. “We are looking for security. We are looking for safety. We are looking for good homes. We are looking for good health care. We are looking for a strong military that can protect us from evil.”
In eight years, we have gone from a candidate who won the presidency through inspiration and eloquence to one who uses language an eighth-grader could understand.
Don’t knock it.
“His appeal is clarity,” says Nader. “His sentences are very brief: ‘We are being screwed. I will build a wall.’ Put that together with his bluster and his image as a brawler and he gets the attention of those who could never watch debates without falling asleep.
“Wordplay is Trump’s genius.”
And who will stop him? Nobody will stop him. He understands the Republican Party of 2016 because he is the Republican Party of 2016.
“Trump is like climate change,” Bill Maher has said. “We knew it was coming, and now it’s too late.”
Marco Rubio is giving it a college try. Almost literally: Over the weekend, at a university in Virginia, he sounded like a frat boy at his first kegger.
“You know what they say about guys with small hands!” Rubio said about Trump as the crowd roared.
And Trump “doesn’t sweat because his pores are clogged from the spray tan.”
“Donald Trump isn’t gonna make America great,” Rubio said. “He’s gonna make America orange!”
Nader did not find this encouraging. “How demeaning this is to our posterity,” Nader said.
But somebody is going to be the next president. Whom does Nader want?
“I don’t want to choose between cancer and drug-resistant tuberculosis,” Nader said.
The Republican Party may shatter over Trump. Historians will make Trump’s rise to the top look obvious, but it was not. I don’t recall anybody predicting it.
“Man is a strange animal,” Adlai E. Stevenson once said. “He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.”
Wild Ride
Inside Bernie’s Wild Ride
How Sanders went from socialist also-ran to nearly overthrowing the Democratic Party.
By Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti
The biggest argument was over running as a Democrat. Over and over, Bernie Sanders said he didn’t want to. He’d spent his whole life purposefully outside the Democratic Party. He treasured his status as the longest-serving independent in Congress. Running as a Democrat wasn’t who he was. He didn’t want to do it that way.
His longtime consultant Tad Devine and the rest of the group came down hard: this is never going to have a chance of working unless you get over it. Suck it up, they told him.
They were sitting around two years ago on couches and armchairs in liberal radio host Bill Press’s rowhouse near Eastern Market in Washington, picking at dinner. Sanders, his wife Jane, and all of his top people were there, except for campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who wouldn’t be hired for a year.
Sanders had asked Press to pull in a few others, too, including then-American Bridge president Brad Woodhouse, former Harry Reid chief of staff Susan McCue, Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). They spitballed and listened as the Vermont senator laid out what he wanted to do, talked about what a race would really entail, how tough running against Hillary Clinton would be. Jane Sanders gave off the distinct impression she was collecting information she hoped to use to talk him out of it.
Devine spoke toward the end. Reading notes off a yellow legal pad that he’d brought, he went deep in the mechanics—the pointlessness of running as a message candidate, the calendar, the states they’d need to win, the $40-50 million they figured they’d need to raise by Iowa—a number that sounded high at the time.
“Tad was super f--king organized,” said one person who attended. “There had been a ton of thought that had gone into this.”
The Sanders campaign is unquestionably a movement: even the smartest planners couldn't have come up with a plan to pull 10,000 or 20,000 people at a time to show up for Sanders’ grumpy grandpa socialist revival. But to write it all off as a fluke or a couple of media-fueled strokes of good luck misses the deliberation, drama and dysfunction that's defined the campaign since its earliest days. From those very first meetings, according to the accounts of two dozen people in and close to the campaign, Sanders and his staff have been more organized than the unfettered image they convey. But they've also been more haphazard and accidental than a presidential campaign should be. It’s a campaign where aides are grateful for the Secret Service protection that kicked in after Iowa, because that’s the only thing that forced Sanders to agree to travel plans more than two days in advance.
“Particularly for a long-shot candidate, it’s important that you have a real plan,” Devine said. “However: you need to be opportunistic, you need to deal with changing circumstances, and you need to realize that much of the ground that you cover is new ground. You have to do things that no one’s done before.”
The mission required it: they were trying to convince Democrats to toss aside a revered candidate and heavy frontrunner after Sanders himself had spent his career rejecting the Democratic Party. It may have been a ceiling they could never breach—after a landslide defeat in South Carolina, Sanders is making what looks like his final stand on Super Tuesday.
After that first meeting at Press’ house came another there in November, when Sanders himself invited Alyssa Mastromonaco, President Barack Obama’s former deputy chief of staff and one of his old college interns.
She cautioned them about how hard a race would be, noting that Obama already had a fundraising email list of 20,000 people for his leadership PAC when they were still working off folding tables in Chicago. The Sanders staffers proudly point out their email list was already 400,000—though that’s a list owned by his government office that he uses to send weekly newsletters that have a huge following, but which couldn’t be used for fundraising.
Sanders went around the room at the end, asking for gut checks.
In a story that’s become legend on the campaign, Devine’s business partner Mark Longabaugh, who ran New Hampshire for Dick Gephardt in 1988 and Bill Bradley in 2000 went last.
“I think you’re going to win New Hampshire,” Longabaugh said.
They thought he was crazy. He was counting on Sanders doing well with independents and an electorate changed by people moving in and out of the state. What he wasn’t counting on--what nobody was imagining at the time—was that Sanders would become a hipster icon.
“They’re killing me!” Sanders would complain to his staffers in the final crunch weeks before Iowa, as the Clinton campaign turned up the temperature.
Sanders was angry at Bill Clinton. Months of reporters digging through his past writing and personal life had gotten under his skin—“is this legitimate?” he’d ask, pushing back on responding—and what he felt were personal attacks from the former president were pushing him over the edge. He wanted his staff hitting back harder.
Devine, who urged Sanders not to fire back against people so popular in the Democratic Party, had worried how he’d handle this kind of stress. The second weekend in April 2015, Devine flew to Burlington for the final check-in. Over lunch and dinner with Bernie and Jane Sanders, he laid out what would be the case against running: the process was exhausting and invasive, he wouldn’t be home or with his grandchildren, doing well would mean learning to live with Secret Service protection. And yeah, they were going to attack him.
The campaign had not started smoothly. Sanders’ "yes" had leaked out before they were ready. The plan to do a launch web video fell apart. The website that they’d revamped in preparation for a run needed to be rebuilt again in a rush of through-the-night coding.
He raised $1.5 million off of a quickly scrambled press conference that looked like he’d stumbled into it on his way out of the Senate to get a sandwich. They were originally going to do it in the Senate, before someone realized that would be illegal.
He’d been traveling around the country for a year. Coming out of the Press dinners, his Senate chief of staff Michaeleen Crowell—who would later serve as Clinton stand-in during debate prep—pushed him to South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. His Senate staff moonlighted doing logistics and local press outreach, while outgoing Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen set them up in union halls or filling the rooms with CWA members. They were shocked back then when 300 people showed, bowled over by 600.
“Now I would say it was about running,” said Cohen, who’s since retired from CWA and become a senior adviser for the campaign. “But I wouldn’t have said that then.”
It took until October 2014 for Sanders to call New Hampshire Democratic chair Raymond Buckley to ask how he could get involved in the final few weeks of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s tight re-election race. Buckley suggested going to college campuses. Sanders did—still not planning for the kind of response he’s been generating among students and young voters since.
If there was a turning point in Sanders' transformation, it came in Madison, Wis., just before Independence Day last year. Short on advance staff, Sanders’ digital team was doing double duty booking venues, then rebooking bigger ones after the RSVPs poured in. Michael Whitney, his digital fundraising manager, googled “big venue Madison.”
When Sanders heard they were headed to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, he panicked. On the phone with digital director Kenneth Pennington, he insisted they downsize, worried that a big crowd of a few thousand would be undercut by shots of empty seats.
He walked out to 10,000 people, screaming.
Sanders is a micromanager. For most of the campaign, there wasn’t an email, mailer or anything bigger than a tweet that went out without his sign-off. He writes his own speeches, rarely paying much attention to what aides give him as suggestions. With his wife and his communications director, he approved all the jokes for his February “Saturday Night Live” cameo. (Sanders, a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fan for years, didn’t change much of Larry David’s script.)
Coming out of Madison, he pushed the staff to get him in front of more people—first, they came up with a house party simulcast at the end of July that drew 105,000 people in one night—then more, on a Seattle-Portland-Los Angeles swing in early August that ended with 27,500 people cheering for him at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.
They’re up to 1.5 million donors and a half-million registered volunteers, according to a member of the campaign. And that initial $40-50 million campaign? They're closer to $100 million -- and on Monday night, the campaign announced it had hit $40 million for February alone.
The biggest transformation for the campaign started out as a kind of nightmare. Everything changed when staffers woke up the Friday before Christmas to stories about the Democratic National Committee shutting them out of the party voter file after a Sanders staffer had used an opening in the system to swipe piles of Clinton campaign information.
The 8 A.M. campaign call started confused and frightened, but Devine and Longabaugh cut everyone off. What they should do, they said, was fight. They wanted to sue. In a smaller follow-up call—Devine and Longabaugh sitting next to each other on a plane about to leave Reagan National for Burlington, Weaver in the campaign office, Sanders and his wife at their home—they agreed.
While Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and press secretary Brian Fallon were agitating about their claims of deeply damaging high crimes out of Vermont in a call with reporters, with Sanders’ state staffers nervously listening in, the lawyers from the campaigns and the DNC were on the phone with the judge. The judge left Sanders’ team with the distinct impression that she was going to rule for them, and within hours, the Clinton campaign sent a turnaround statement urging the DNC to back down. The DNC reversed itself and let the Sanders campaign back into the database late that night.
That was the moment the political world received its biggest introduction to Weaver, the combative former Sanders aide who’d come back from semi-retirement running a Falls Church, Va., comic book store to be his campaign manager. Devine and Longabaugh wrote his prepared statement. Standing outside the Capitol Hill headquarters, in front of dozens of reporters and cameras, Weaver teed off for the next 10 minutes, going to war with the DNC, and showing off the temper and dismissiveness that people inside the campaign have come to know too well.
They liked the feeling of fighting with the Clinton campaign. They liked the feeling of fighting the Democratic establishment head-on, not just battling them over ideas. The Thursday before the Iowa caucuses, Devine was eating lunch by himself at his hotel. He got a call that the Clinton campaign had just added $89,000 on TV for the final weekend, the third additional buy of the week. He and Weaver decided to triple their buy. They were aiming for intimidation.
“If they wanted to play this game with us: ante up, ante up, then we were going to show them that this was going to be a costly endeavor,” Devine said.
Their final internal Iowa poll was spot on, showing them in an unexpected dead heat if the turnout was at 171,000 (the turnout was 170,000) but at the time even top aides weren't sure if they could believe it. Most of the staffers were left frantically checking their phones for updates or guidance about to say or do about the results before, during and after their middle-of-the night flight to Manchester after the caucuses.
Sanders lay on the bed in his hotel suite in Des Moines that evening, trying to figure out what to say. Call it a tie, said his long time consultant and original architect of the campaign Tad Devine, pacing around on the side of the room. Sanders wrote that on his yellow legal pad.
He added "virtual."
Sanders staffers are convinced that he really did win Iowa, if not for some coin tosses and Iowa Democratic shenanigans. And just wait, they say, until the county conventions March 12, when they think they'll pull ahead of Hillary Clinton in state delegates.
Within days of Iowa, Sanders staffers were betting each other bottles of wine over whether the margin in New Hampshire was going to be under or over 20 points.
Sanders watched the networks call it for him as soon as the polls closed. He looked, according to people in the room, like he was starting to believe this was happening.
That hadn’t always been so clear. Sanders refused Secret Service protection when the first threats against him started to come in, as he rose in the polls. His wife was worried, but he said he wasn’t. Some top aides think he was just determined not to give up his routine going to the supermarket, or walking to the dry cleaners. Some saw a candidate who wasn’t ready to treat his campaign like it was for real, like he was actually mounting a serious run to be president of the United States. (Eventually, Sanders agreed to the Secret Service after threats started coming in to a former address of his where some of his grandchildren now live—but only after he asked the campaign to see if the Capitol Police could handle it instead.)
Sanders himself never got to the point of thinking he was actually going to beat Clinton, according to people in his inner circle. But he was getting closer to thinking it after New Hampshire, more of a blowout than he or any of his aides were prepared for. Even then, though, they couldn’t bring themselves to say he’d win—they’d fudge with lines like, “we’re winning the argument.”
He was still getting used to the idea that his cell phone would ring on the Amtrak to New York and it would be Larry David on the other end, checking in after doing his Sanders impression in the cold open on “Saturday Night Live” the weekend before. Off-the-charts fundraising was another measure of his unexpected success. Pennington, the digital director, stopped Sanders on his way out to give his New Hampshire victory speech. Don’t just tell them to go to the website. Tell them to donate, he said.
Pennington stood in the back while Sanders was speaking, with communications director Michael Briggs, rapid response director Mike Casca, New Hampshire director Julia Barnes and state communications director Karthik Ganapathy gathered around his phone, shocked: 51,000 people were on the website all at once. 750,000 were on over the course of the night. They raised $6 million in 24 hours, and attribute $9 million total to that win.
They walked away convinced that New Hampshire wouldn’t be the high point in the campaign.
In Iowa, the internal goal was to outperform the final famed Des Moines Register poll by 1 point. But they knew that to make winning the nomination more than a long shot, they needed to beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa, win big in New Hampshire, come close in Nevada and have the momentum of a ‘she's losing’ narrative—plus what they figured would be some scrambling Clinton staff shakeups--to come into March as strong as they wanted.
Before he was running, Sanders would turn down frequent flier upgrades, consciously refuse to sit toward the front on unassigned seating Southwest flights because he thought that felt like first class. These days, his campaign staffers are fighting over who gets the special Secret Service all-access pins, complaining about no wi-fi on their Eastern Airlines charter plane. Now Sanders sits all the way up front. Sometimes, he'll catch the eye of one of the aides who's been with him for years, flash a “can you believe this?” look.
Sanders isn't doing as well as he is because he's such a dynamic presence on the stump, or because he does anything to tailor his 90-minute rant to any crowd, or any moment. For all the mockery Sen. Marco Rubio has gotten for repeating the same lines over and over, watch Sanders just a few times and you'll almost be able to recite it yourself. The big crowds often do, turning their favorite parts into sing-a-longs. “Let me tell you a story,” he’ll often say, though usually what follows is less a story than a transition to yet another statistic he cites at every stop.
One of the few things the staff has actually been able to train him on is remembering to look at the people asking him questions in TV town halls, remember to say their names.
Driving around Minneapolis and St. Paul the Friday after New Hampshire, he told the staff that he needed to stop for a sandwich.
“Is he going to interact with people?” asked one reporter, worried about missing a good moment with a voter.
“Does he ever interact with people?” Briggs asked.
Sanders doesn’t nurture relationships with reporters either—there are no off the record meals or drinks with the senator on the campaign, no visits to the back of the plane during the hours flying around the country. (“Here’s the scoop: it’s tuna fish, lettuce and tomato, on rye,” he told reporters at the diner in a statement that was half mocking joke, half leave me alone with my wife to eat).
Briggs, a former newspaper reporter and John Edwards aide who shifted over from the Senate payroll, oversees the press operation. He’s the staffer who’s physically with Sanders more than anyone other than his wife and one of the few people who can write words that Sanders will sign off on as his own.
He’s also the one other top staffers grumble about most. He’s often out of sync with the rapid demands of the news cycle and trapped in the day-to-day messaging rather than long-term planning, they say, jealously guarding his closeness to Sanders, perpetually overwhelmed but refusing to delegate. The press shop has come together slowly, and not quite up-to-date with a 2016 campaign: the political staffers still get just one daily news round-up, by subscribing to the Senate clips service out of Sanders’ office.
After over a week’s worth of attempts to contact him via phone, email and text, Briggs declined comment late Monday.
Among the junior staff, there’s now a Briggs axis and a Weaver axis. They only talk when they need to. Senior staffers, meanwhile, are angling for credit, dismissing each other as inexperienced and oblivious, making dumb and ego driven mistakes, grabbing for attention – like any establishment campaign.
More than a few grumble about Devine trying to box them into decisions that he wants to happen—a speech on socialism (which happened), speeches on foreign and economic policy in January (which never did), Sanders doing retail stops in Iowa and New Hampshire (which Sanders refused)—by talking to reporters and saying the decisions are already made. The New Hampshire staff was furious when he told a reporter the day before they had to win by more than 10, though the polls were showing that to be easy. The line they’d all been sticking to was “win by one vote.”
Nevada really threw them.
They were hoping to lose by 2, 2.5 points. Top aides blame Clinton beating him by 5 on bumbled expectations messaging out of headquarters and an overconfident operation on the ground.
But from the moment the Sanders campaign got serious, March 15 has been the reality check date—after Super Tuesday, after the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses, after labor-heavy Michigan. Sitting around a table in the Capitol Hill row house campaign headquarters last April, a year after the first dinner at Press’s house, planning his first trip to Iowa, Longabaugh pushed for a stop in Minnesota, another caucus state with a similar population and history of progressivism.
More than 3,000 people showed.
Now, “It’ll be an uphill fight” is as optimistic as they get.
If Sanders doesn’t win the nomination, that’ll be it. That’s what they decided at Bill Press’s house two years ago, and they’re sticking to it.
“My first question was, 'Is he running as a Democrat?'” said Ben Tulchin, the pollster that Sanders resisted hiring until Devine forced a meeting on him last fall, when Sanders was traveling through San Francisco.
“Tad said, 'Absolutely. We're not going to be Nader.’”
They’re already prepping the fallback plan: 10 areas, including killing Obama’s trade deals and changing the super-delegate process that they’re going to organize around and try forcing into the Democratic platform.
“Worst case, we’re going to Philadelphia with 1,500 delegates. Best case, we’re going to win,” Cohen said. “Either way, we’re going to change things.”
How Sanders went from socialist also-ran to nearly overthrowing the Democratic Party.
By Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti
The biggest argument was over running as a Democrat. Over and over, Bernie Sanders said he didn’t want to. He’d spent his whole life purposefully outside the Democratic Party. He treasured his status as the longest-serving independent in Congress. Running as a Democrat wasn’t who he was. He didn’t want to do it that way.
His longtime consultant Tad Devine and the rest of the group came down hard: this is never going to have a chance of working unless you get over it. Suck it up, they told him.
They were sitting around two years ago on couches and armchairs in liberal radio host Bill Press’s rowhouse near Eastern Market in Washington, picking at dinner. Sanders, his wife Jane, and all of his top people were there, except for campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who wouldn’t be hired for a year.
Sanders had asked Press to pull in a few others, too, including then-American Bridge president Brad Woodhouse, former Harry Reid chief of staff Susan McCue, Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). They spitballed and listened as the Vermont senator laid out what he wanted to do, talked about what a race would really entail, how tough running against Hillary Clinton would be. Jane Sanders gave off the distinct impression she was collecting information she hoped to use to talk him out of it.
Devine spoke toward the end. Reading notes off a yellow legal pad that he’d brought, he went deep in the mechanics—the pointlessness of running as a message candidate, the calendar, the states they’d need to win, the $40-50 million they figured they’d need to raise by Iowa—a number that sounded high at the time.
“Tad was super f--king organized,” said one person who attended. “There had been a ton of thought that had gone into this.”
The Sanders campaign is unquestionably a movement: even the smartest planners couldn't have come up with a plan to pull 10,000 or 20,000 people at a time to show up for Sanders’ grumpy grandpa socialist revival. But to write it all off as a fluke or a couple of media-fueled strokes of good luck misses the deliberation, drama and dysfunction that's defined the campaign since its earliest days. From those very first meetings, according to the accounts of two dozen people in and close to the campaign, Sanders and his staff have been more organized than the unfettered image they convey. But they've also been more haphazard and accidental than a presidential campaign should be. It’s a campaign where aides are grateful for the Secret Service protection that kicked in after Iowa, because that’s the only thing that forced Sanders to agree to travel plans more than two days in advance.
“Particularly for a long-shot candidate, it’s important that you have a real plan,” Devine said. “However: you need to be opportunistic, you need to deal with changing circumstances, and you need to realize that much of the ground that you cover is new ground. You have to do things that no one’s done before.”
The mission required it: they were trying to convince Democrats to toss aside a revered candidate and heavy frontrunner after Sanders himself had spent his career rejecting the Democratic Party. It may have been a ceiling they could never breach—after a landslide defeat in South Carolina, Sanders is making what looks like his final stand on Super Tuesday.
After that first meeting at Press’ house came another there in November, when Sanders himself invited Alyssa Mastromonaco, President Barack Obama’s former deputy chief of staff and one of his old college interns.
She cautioned them about how hard a race would be, noting that Obama already had a fundraising email list of 20,000 people for his leadership PAC when they were still working off folding tables in Chicago. The Sanders staffers proudly point out their email list was already 400,000—though that’s a list owned by his government office that he uses to send weekly newsletters that have a huge following, but which couldn’t be used for fundraising.
Sanders went around the room at the end, asking for gut checks.
In a story that’s become legend on the campaign, Devine’s business partner Mark Longabaugh, who ran New Hampshire for Dick Gephardt in 1988 and Bill Bradley in 2000 went last.
“I think you’re going to win New Hampshire,” Longabaugh said.
They thought he was crazy. He was counting on Sanders doing well with independents and an electorate changed by people moving in and out of the state. What he wasn’t counting on--what nobody was imagining at the time—was that Sanders would become a hipster icon.
“They’re killing me!” Sanders would complain to his staffers in the final crunch weeks before Iowa, as the Clinton campaign turned up the temperature.
Sanders was angry at Bill Clinton. Months of reporters digging through his past writing and personal life had gotten under his skin—“is this legitimate?” he’d ask, pushing back on responding—and what he felt were personal attacks from the former president were pushing him over the edge. He wanted his staff hitting back harder.
Devine, who urged Sanders not to fire back against people so popular in the Democratic Party, had worried how he’d handle this kind of stress. The second weekend in April 2015, Devine flew to Burlington for the final check-in. Over lunch and dinner with Bernie and Jane Sanders, he laid out what would be the case against running: the process was exhausting and invasive, he wouldn’t be home or with his grandchildren, doing well would mean learning to live with Secret Service protection. And yeah, they were going to attack him.
The campaign had not started smoothly. Sanders’ "yes" had leaked out before they were ready. The plan to do a launch web video fell apart. The website that they’d revamped in preparation for a run needed to be rebuilt again in a rush of through-the-night coding.
He raised $1.5 million off of a quickly scrambled press conference that looked like he’d stumbled into it on his way out of the Senate to get a sandwich. They were originally going to do it in the Senate, before someone realized that would be illegal.
He’d been traveling around the country for a year. Coming out of the Press dinners, his Senate chief of staff Michaeleen Crowell—who would later serve as Clinton stand-in during debate prep—pushed him to South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. His Senate staff moonlighted doing logistics and local press outreach, while outgoing Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen set them up in union halls or filling the rooms with CWA members. They were shocked back then when 300 people showed, bowled over by 600.
“Now I would say it was about running,” said Cohen, who’s since retired from CWA and become a senior adviser for the campaign. “But I wouldn’t have said that then.”
It took until October 2014 for Sanders to call New Hampshire Democratic chair Raymond Buckley to ask how he could get involved in the final few weeks of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s tight re-election race. Buckley suggested going to college campuses. Sanders did—still not planning for the kind of response he’s been generating among students and young voters since.
If there was a turning point in Sanders' transformation, it came in Madison, Wis., just before Independence Day last year. Short on advance staff, Sanders’ digital team was doing double duty booking venues, then rebooking bigger ones after the RSVPs poured in. Michael Whitney, his digital fundraising manager, googled “big venue Madison.”
When Sanders heard they were headed to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, he panicked. On the phone with digital director Kenneth Pennington, he insisted they downsize, worried that a big crowd of a few thousand would be undercut by shots of empty seats.
He walked out to 10,000 people, screaming.
Sanders is a micromanager. For most of the campaign, there wasn’t an email, mailer or anything bigger than a tweet that went out without his sign-off. He writes his own speeches, rarely paying much attention to what aides give him as suggestions. With his wife and his communications director, he approved all the jokes for his February “Saturday Night Live” cameo. (Sanders, a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fan for years, didn’t change much of Larry David’s script.)
Coming out of Madison, he pushed the staff to get him in front of more people—first, they came up with a house party simulcast at the end of July that drew 105,000 people in one night—then more, on a Seattle-Portland-Los Angeles swing in early August that ended with 27,500 people cheering for him at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.
They’re up to 1.5 million donors and a half-million registered volunteers, according to a member of the campaign. And that initial $40-50 million campaign? They're closer to $100 million -- and on Monday night, the campaign announced it had hit $40 million for February alone.
The biggest transformation for the campaign started out as a kind of nightmare. Everything changed when staffers woke up the Friday before Christmas to stories about the Democratic National Committee shutting them out of the party voter file after a Sanders staffer had used an opening in the system to swipe piles of Clinton campaign information.
The 8 A.M. campaign call started confused and frightened, but Devine and Longabaugh cut everyone off. What they should do, they said, was fight. They wanted to sue. In a smaller follow-up call—Devine and Longabaugh sitting next to each other on a plane about to leave Reagan National for Burlington, Weaver in the campaign office, Sanders and his wife at their home—they agreed.
While Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and press secretary Brian Fallon were agitating about their claims of deeply damaging high crimes out of Vermont in a call with reporters, with Sanders’ state staffers nervously listening in, the lawyers from the campaigns and the DNC were on the phone with the judge. The judge left Sanders’ team with the distinct impression that she was going to rule for them, and within hours, the Clinton campaign sent a turnaround statement urging the DNC to back down. The DNC reversed itself and let the Sanders campaign back into the database late that night.
That was the moment the political world received its biggest introduction to Weaver, the combative former Sanders aide who’d come back from semi-retirement running a Falls Church, Va., comic book store to be his campaign manager. Devine and Longabaugh wrote his prepared statement. Standing outside the Capitol Hill headquarters, in front of dozens of reporters and cameras, Weaver teed off for the next 10 minutes, going to war with the DNC, and showing off the temper and dismissiveness that people inside the campaign have come to know too well.
They liked the feeling of fighting with the Clinton campaign. They liked the feeling of fighting the Democratic establishment head-on, not just battling them over ideas. The Thursday before the Iowa caucuses, Devine was eating lunch by himself at his hotel. He got a call that the Clinton campaign had just added $89,000 on TV for the final weekend, the third additional buy of the week. He and Weaver decided to triple their buy. They were aiming for intimidation.
“If they wanted to play this game with us: ante up, ante up, then we were going to show them that this was going to be a costly endeavor,” Devine said.
Their final internal Iowa poll was spot on, showing them in an unexpected dead heat if the turnout was at 171,000 (the turnout was 170,000) but at the time even top aides weren't sure if they could believe it. Most of the staffers were left frantically checking their phones for updates or guidance about to say or do about the results before, during and after their middle-of-the night flight to Manchester after the caucuses.
Sanders lay on the bed in his hotel suite in Des Moines that evening, trying to figure out what to say. Call it a tie, said his long time consultant and original architect of the campaign Tad Devine, pacing around on the side of the room. Sanders wrote that on his yellow legal pad.
He added "virtual."
Sanders staffers are convinced that he really did win Iowa, if not for some coin tosses and Iowa Democratic shenanigans. And just wait, they say, until the county conventions March 12, when they think they'll pull ahead of Hillary Clinton in state delegates.
Within days of Iowa, Sanders staffers were betting each other bottles of wine over whether the margin in New Hampshire was going to be under or over 20 points.
Sanders watched the networks call it for him as soon as the polls closed. He looked, according to people in the room, like he was starting to believe this was happening.
That hadn’t always been so clear. Sanders refused Secret Service protection when the first threats against him started to come in, as he rose in the polls. His wife was worried, but he said he wasn’t. Some top aides think he was just determined not to give up his routine going to the supermarket, or walking to the dry cleaners. Some saw a candidate who wasn’t ready to treat his campaign like it was for real, like he was actually mounting a serious run to be president of the United States. (Eventually, Sanders agreed to the Secret Service after threats started coming in to a former address of his where some of his grandchildren now live—but only after he asked the campaign to see if the Capitol Police could handle it instead.)
Sanders himself never got to the point of thinking he was actually going to beat Clinton, according to people in his inner circle. But he was getting closer to thinking it after New Hampshire, more of a blowout than he or any of his aides were prepared for. Even then, though, they couldn’t bring themselves to say he’d win—they’d fudge with lines like, “we’re winning the argument.”
He was still getting used to the idea that his cell phone would ring on the Amtrak to New York and it would be Larry David on the other end, checking in after doing his Sanders impression in the cold open on “Saturday Night Live” the weekend before. Off-the-charts fundraising was another measure of his unexpected success. Pennington, the digital director, stopped Sanders on his way out to give his New Hampshire victory speech. Don’t just tell them to go to the website. Tell them to donate, he said.
Pennington stood in the back while Sanders was speaking, with communications director Michael Briggs, rapid response director Mike Casca, New Hampshire director Julia Barnes and state communications director Karthik Ganapathy gathered around his phone, shocked: 51,000 people were on the website all at once. 750,000 were on over the course of the night. They raised $6 million in 24 hours, and attribute $9 million total to that win.
They walked away convinced that New Hampshire wouldn’t be the high point in the campaign.
In Iowa, the internal goal was to outperform the final famed Des Moines Register poll by 1 point. But they knew that to make winning the nomination more than a long shot, they needed to beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa, win big in New Hampshire, come close in Nevada and have the momentum of a ‘she's losing’ narrative—plus what they figured would be some scrambling Clinton staff shakeups--to come into March as strong as they wanted.
Before he was running, Sanders would turn down frequent flier upgrades, consciously refuse to sit toward the front on unassigned seating Southwest flights because he thought that felt like first class. These days, his campaign staffers are fighting over who gets the special Secret Service all-access pins, complaining about no wi-fi on their Eastern Airlines charter plane. Now Sanders sits all the way up front. Sometimes, he'll catch the eye of one of the aides who's been with him for years, flash a “can you believe this?” look.
Sanders isn't doing as well as he is because he's such a dynamic presence on the stump, or because he does anything to tailor his 90-minute rant to any crowd, or any moment. For all the mockery Sen. Marco Rubio has gotten for repeating the same lines over and over, watch Sanders just a few times and you'll almost be able to recite it yourself. The big crowds often do, turning their favorite parts into sing-a-longs. “Let me tell you a story,” he’ll often say, though usually what follows is less a story than a transition to yet another statistic he cites at every stop.
One of the few things the staff has actually been able to train him on is remembering to look at the people asking him questions in TV town halls, remember to say their names.
Driving around Minneapolis and St. Paul the Friday after New Hampshire, he told the staff that he needed to stop for a sandwich.
“Is he going to interact with people?” asked one reporter, worried about missing a good moment with a voter.
“Does he ever interact with people?” Briggs asked.
Sanders doesn’t nurture relationships with reporters either—there are no off the record meals or drinks with the senator on the campaign, no visits to the back of the plane during the hours flying around the country. (“Here’s the scoop: it’s tuna fish, lettuce and tomato, on rye,” he told reporters at the diner in a statement that was half mocking joke, half leave me alone with my wife to eat).
Briggs, a former newspaper reporter and John Edwards aide who shifted over from the Senate payroll, oversees the press operation. He’s the staffer who’s physically with Sanders more than anyone other than his wife and one of the few people who can write words that Sanders will sign off on as his own.
He’s also the one other top staffers grumble about most. He’s often out of sync with the rapid demands of the news cycle and trapped in the day-to-day messaging rather than long-term planning, they say, jealously guarding his closeness to Sanders, perpetually overwhelmed but refusing to delegate. The press shop has come together slowly, and not quite up-to-date with a 2016 campaign: the political staffers still get just one daily news round-up, by subscribing to the Senate clips service out of Sanders’ office.
After over a week’s worth of attempts to contact him via phone, email and text, Briggs declined comment late Monday.
Among the junior staff, there’s now a Briggs axis and a Weaver axis. They only talk when they need to. Senior staffers, meanwhile, are angling for credit, dismissing each other as inexperienced and oblivious, making dumb and ego driven mistakes, grabbing for attention – like any establishment campaign.
More than a few grumble about Devine trying to box them into decisions that he wants to happen—a speech on socialism (which happened), speeches on foreign and economic policy in January (which never did), Sanders doing retail stops in Iowa and New Hampshire (which Sanders refused)—by talking to reporters and saying the decisions are already made. The New Hampshire staff was furious when he told a reporter the day before they had to win by more than 10, though the polls were showing that to be easy. The line they’d all been sticking to was “win by one vote.”
Nevada really threw them.
They were hoping to lose by 2, 2.5 points. Top aides blame Clinton beating him by 5 on bumbled expectations messaging out of headquarters and an overconfident operation on the ground.
But from the moment the Sanders campaign got serious, March 15 has been the reality check date—after Super Tuesday, after the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses, after labor-heavy Michigan. Sitting around a table in the Capitol Hill row house campaign headquarters last April, a year after the first dinner at Press’s house, planning his first trip to Iowa, Longabaugh pushed for a stop in Minnesota, another caucus state with a similar population and history of progressivism.
More than 3,000 people showed.
Now, “It’ll be an uphill fight” is as optimistic as they get.
If Sanders doesn’t win the nomination, that’ll be it. That’s what they decided at Bill Press’s house two years ago, and they’re sticking to it.
“My first question was, 'Is he running as a Democrat?'” said Ben Tulchin, the pollster that Sanders resisted hiring until Devine forced a meeting on him last fall, when Sanders was traveling through San Francisco.
“Tad said, 'Absolutely. We're not going to be Nader.’”
They’re already prepping the fallback plan: 10 areas, including killing Obama’s trade deals and changing the super-delegate process that they’re going to organize around and try forcing into the Democratic platform.
“Worst case, we’re going to Philadelphia with 1,500 delegates. Best case, we’re going to win,” Cohen said. “Either way, we’re going to change things.”
Super Tuesday romp
Trump closes in on Super Tuesday romp
As a stunning victory looms, top Republicans are split between those ready to accommodate and others starting to panic.
By Alex Isenstadt
Donald Trump is poised for sweeping nationwide wins on Super Tuesday, solidifying his position as the Republican front-runner and intensifying the pressure on his struggling primary rivals to find a way forward.
Top Republicans — including governors who convened an emergency conference call on Monday on which Trump was Topic A — expect the real estate mogul to carry as many as 10 states on Tuesday night, an outcome that would deal a body blow to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has staked his campaign heavily on the Southern states holding nominating contests, and to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has yet to win a primary and isn’t expected to do so on Tuesday.
“If Trump wins 8 or more states on Tuesday, it would take a massive collapse on his and/or his campaign’s part for him not to be the nominee,” said Tony Fabrizio, a longtime GOP pollster and strategist who advised Rand Paul.
Trump’s march to the nomination has set off a wave of anxiety across the Republican Party establishment as top officials weigh whether to endorse him — or denounce him as anathema to the party's values. Reflecting that angst, on Monday morning, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the heads of the Republican Governors Association, convened fellow governors for an unusual conference call to discuss how the primary was unfolding — and Trump was a central topic of conversation.
At one point during Monday’s call, which lasted around 30 minutes, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin asked New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to discuss last week’s bombshell decision to back Trump. According to two sources familiar with the call, Christie mounted a detailed defense of his endorsement, explaining that he’d known the real estate executive for over a decade and had grown confident in his ability to lead the country.
The stakes on Tuesday are perhaps highest for Cruz, who had once hoped to establish a stranglehold on Super Tuesday, carefully tailoring his evangelical image to the conservative states that are voting that day and campaigning heavily in towns throughout Tennessee and Oklahoma. He has described March 1 as the most important day of the Republican primary calendar.
Yet, with Trump rampaging throughout the South, it’s now possible that Cruz will only emerge with a win in his home state of Texas, a contest the senator has begun likening to the Alamo. Trump has made deep inroads into Cruz’s evangelical base, portraying himself as a steadfast Christian while casting Cruz as “the single biggest liar I’ve ever seen.” Jerry Falwell Jr., an influential evangelical leader and Trump supporter, has recorded a robo-call for the Trump campaign which is being sent to households throughout Virginia. In the call, Falwell, the president of Liberty University, tears into Cruz and accuses him – four times – of using “dirty tricks.”
“Politicians can’t wait to tell us about their values, but I care more about the choices they make when no one is looking,” Falwell says in the call. “Ambition must never be a substitute for character. Please vote for Donald Trump.”
The Cruz campaign has not yet released its post-Super Tuesday schedule. But in the immediate days ahead, Cruz is likely to campaign heavily in a trio of deeply conservative states – Idaho, Louisiana, and Kansas – that hold their nominating contests over the next week.
Rubio, meanwhile, will immediately pivot to his home state of Florida, where he will spend much of his time ahead of the do-or-die March 15 primary. With polls showing him badly trailing Trump, Rubio is expected to launch an all-out effort to win the state, where a defeat could be fatal. His top aides have vowed in unequivocal terms that they will not lose Florida, which awards its 99 delegates on a winner-take-all basis.
Rubio’s planning for the Florida primary has been long in the works. He recently dispatched Clint Reed, a former Republican National Committee political director, to Florida help guide his efforts to secure his home state, according to two sources familiar with the move. Reed also played key roles for Rubio in Iowa and South Carolina.
Rubio’s aides are convening top donors to a national finance meeting to coincide with the March 9 debate in Miami. On March 10 and March 11, he will embark on a fundraising tour that will take him to Palm Beach, Naples, and Ocean Reef. One of the events will be held at the home of Gerald and Darlene Jordan, prominent South Florida socialites who were major benefactors to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.
No matter what happens on Tuesday, Cruz and Rubio’s allies point out, Trump will be nowhere close to securing the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination. The 595 delegates up for grabs will be distributed proportionately, meaning that Cruz and Rubio are expected to rack up a substantial number even if they do not succeed in winning many states. Going into Super Tuesday, Trump has won 82 of the 133 delegates that have been awarded so far.
That means the primary race could well go on for weeks or months longer without any candidate meeting the threshold for securing the nomination.
“Donald Trump is the clear front-runner, and he’s in a very strong position,” said Steve Munisteri, a former Texas Republican chairman who has closely studied the delegate allocation process. “But it’s not over.”
Yet there’s little question that the structural dynamics of the primary favor Trump. Assuming he wins most of the states voting on Super Tuesday and his rivals choose to stay in the contest, Trump will be the beneficiary of two major advantages: a lead in the delegate count, and a splintered Republican field.
With Rubio likely to be blown out on Tuesday, his allies are latching on to the notion that he could still keep Trump from amassing a majority of delegates and then win over party insiders at the convention in Cleveland, securing the nomination at the 11th hour.
“There is a very narrow way forward,” conceded Mel Martinez, a former Republican National Committee chairman and past Florida senator who endorsed Rubio on Monday.
But, Martinez said, there was hope. A majority of the party, he argued, found Trump “increasingly unpalatable,” and they would resist him.
“How that manifests itself I don’t know, but I believe there is a sense by many, myself included, that he just cannot be the nominee,” he said. “So a convention scenario could begin to develop.”
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Cruz ridiculed the idea. “All these crazy voters go one way, we’ll step in with all of our money and anoint our white knight to ride in and save the day … That’s not going to happen.”
The growing ranks of forces looking for ways to stop Trump insist they haven’t lost hope. Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump super PAC being overseen by former Mitt Romney aide Katie Packer, has launched an aggressive fundraising campaign and is eyeing the possibility of launching ad campaigns against him in four delegate-rich states voting in March: Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, and Florida.
The group, which has tapped veteran Republican strategist Ed Goeas to conduct polling, has secured donations by a number of prominent Republican Party contributors, including Marlene Ricketts, part of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs, and Stan Hubbard, a broadcasting executive.
“I don’t think the opposition to Trump is going quietly into the night anytime soon,” said Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “The vast majority of Republicans are horribly dissatisfied with the current state of affairs and there is no sign whatsoever that fundraising or energy is dissipating for an alternative.”
Some in Rubio’s campaign have privately expressed their frustration that prominent members of the party establishment have yet to gravitate to him. While Romney and Jeb Bush have been loud critics of Trump, neither has endorsed the Florida senator – nods that would open up veins of fundraising dollars and help Rubio consolidate the party around him.
While many of Bush’s backers have announced their support for Rubio since the former Florida governor dropped out of the race, others have remained on the sidelines.
One top Bush donor — Mel Sembler, a Florida real estate developer and former ambassador to Italy – declined in an email exchange to say whether he’d support Rubio. He said he was focused on defeating a medical marijuana initiative and “recovering from Jeb’s withdrawal.”
A few Bush backers are throwing their support elsewhere. In a telephone interview on Monday, Doug Ose, a wealthy former Republican member of Congress who fundraised for Bush, said he was endorsing Trump. Ose, who represented California’s Central Valley for three terms and hails from the mainstream wing of the GOP, said he viewed Trump as a problem solver and that he’d been turned off by what he described as the increasingly negative tone of Rubio’s campaign.
“I actually think Senator Rubio 10 years from now is going to be our guy,” the former congressman said. “I hope he doesn’t do damage to himself.”
As a stunning victory looms, top Republicans are split between those ready to accommodate and others starting to panic.
By Alex Isenstadt
Donald Trump is poised for sweeping nationwide wins on Super Tuesday, solidifying his position as the Republican front-runner and intensifying the pressure on his struggling primary rivals to find a way forward.
Top Republicans — including governors who convened an emergency conference call on Monday on which Trump was Topic A — expect the real estate mogul to carry as many as 10 states on Tuesday night, an outcome that would deal a body blow to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has staked his campaign heavily on the Southern states holding nominating contests, and to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has yet to win a primary and isn’t expected to do so on Tuesday.
“If Trump wins 8 or more states on Tuesday, it would take a massive collapse on his and/or his campaign’s part for him not to be the nominee,” said Tony Fabrizio, a longtime GOP pollster and strategist who advised Rand Paul.
Trump’s march to the nomination has set off a wave of anxiety across the Republican Party establishment as top officials weigh whether to endorse him — or denounce him as anathema to the party's values. Reflecting that angst, on Monday morning, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the heads of the Republican Governors Association, convened fellow governors for an unusual conference call to discuss how the primary was unfolding — and Trump was a central topic of conversation.
At one point during Monday’s call, which lasted around 30 minutes, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin asked New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to discuss last week’s bombshell decision to back Trump. According to two sources familiar with the call, Christie mounted a detailed defense of his endorsement, explaining that he’d known the real estate executive for over a decade and had grown confident in his ability to lead the country.
The stakes on Tuesday are perhaps highest for Cruz, who had once hoped to establish a stranglehold on Super Tuesday, carefully tailoring his evangelical image to the conservative states that are voting that day and campaigning heavily in towns throughout Tennessee and Oklahoma. He has described March 1 as the most important day of the Republican primary calendar.
Yet, with Trump rampaging throughout the South, it’s now possible that Cruz will only emerge with a win in his home state of Texas, a contest the senator has begun likening to the Alamo. Trump has made deep inroads into Cruz’s evangelical base, portraying himself as a steadfast Christian while casting Cruz as “the single biggest liar I’ve ever seen.” Jerry Falwell Jr., an influential evangelical leader and Trump supporter, has recorded a robo-call for the Trump campaign which is being sent to households throughout Virginia. In the call, Falwell, the president of Liberty University, tears into Cruz and accuses him – four times – of using “dirty tricks.”
“Politicians can’t wait to tell us about their values, but I care more about the choices they make when no one is looking,” Falwell says in the call. “Ambition must never be a substitute for character. Please vote for Donald Trump.”
The Cruz campaign has not yet released its post-Super Tuesday schedule. But in the immediate days ahead, Cruz is likely to campaign heavily in a trio of deeply conservative states – Idaho, Louisiana, and Kansas – that hold their nominating contests over the next week.
Rubio, meanwhile, will immediately pivot to his home state of Florida, where he will spend much of his time ahead of the do-or-die March 15 primary. With polls showing him badly trailing Trump, Rubio is expected to launch an all-out effort to win the state, where a defeat could be fatal. His top aides have vowed in unequivocal terms that they will not lose Florida, which awards its 99 delegates on a winner-take-all basis.
Rubio’s planning for the Florida primary has been long in the works. He recently dispatched Clint Reed, a former Republican National Committee political director, to Florida help guide his efforts to secure his home state, according to two sources familiar with the move. Reed also played key roles for Rubio in Iowa and South Carolina.
Rubio’s aides are convening top donors to a national finance meeting to coincide with the March 9 debate in Miami. On March 10 and March 11, he will embark on a fundraising tour that will take him to Palm Beach, Naples, and Ocean Reef. One of the events will be held at the home of Gerald and Darlene Jordan, prominent South Florida socialites who were major benefactors to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.
No matter what happens on Tuesday, Cruz and Rubio’s allies point out, Trump will be nowhere close to securing the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination. The 595 delegates up for grabs will be distributed proportionately, meaning that Cruz and Rubio are expected to rack up a substantial number even if they do not succeed in winning many states. Going into Super Tuesday, Trump has won 82 of the 133 delegates that have been awarded so far.
That means the primary race could well go on for weeks or months longer without any candidate meeting the threshold for securing the nomination.
“Donald Trump is the clear front-runner, and he’s in a very strong position,” said Steve Munisteri, a former Texas Republican chairman who has closely studied the delegate allocation process. “But it’s not over.”
Yet there’s little question that the structural dynamics of the primary favor Trump. Assuming he wins most of the states voting on Super Tuesday and his rivals choose to stay in the contest, Trump will be the beneficiary of two major advantages: a lead in the delegate count, and a splintered Republican field.
With Rubio likely to be blown out on Tuesday, his allies are latching on to the notion that he could still keep Trump from amassing a majority of delegates and then win over party insiders at the convention in Cleveland, securing the nomination at the 11th hour.
“There is a very narrow way forward,” conceded Mel Martinez, a former Republican National Committee chairman and past Florida senator who endorsed Rubio on Monday.
But, Martinez said, there was hope. A majority of the party, he argued, found Trump “increasingly unpalatable,” and they would resist him.
“How that manifests itself I don’t know, but I believe there is a sense by many, myself included, that he just cannot be the nominee,” he said. “So a convention scenario could begin to develop.”
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Cruz ridiculed the idea. “All these crazy voters go one way, we’ll step in with all of our money and anoint our white knight to ride in and save the day … That’s not going to happen.”
The growing ranks of forces looking for ways to stop Trump insist they haven’t lost hope. Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump super PAC being overseen by former Mitt Romney aide Katie Packer, has launched an aggressive fundraising campaign and is eyeing the possibility of launching ad campaigns against him in four delegate-rich states voting in March: Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, and Florida.
The group, which has tapped veteran Republican strategist Ed Goeas to conduct polling, has secured donations by a number of prominent Republican Party contributors, including Marlene Ricketts, part of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs, and Stan Hubbard, a broadcasting executive.
“I don’t think the opposition to Trump is going quietly into the night anytime soon,” said Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “The vast majority of Republicans are horribly dissatisfied with the current state of affairs and there is no sign whatsoever that fundraising or energy is dissipating for an alternative.”
Some in Rubio’s campaign have privately expressed their frustration that prominent members of the party establishment have yet to gravitate to him. While Romney and Jeb Bush have been loud critics of Trump, neither has endorsed the Florida senator – nods that would open up veins of fundraising dollars and help Rubio consolidate the party around him.
While many of Bush’s backers have announced their support for Rubio since the former Florida governor dropped out of the race, others have remained on the sidelines.
One top Bush donor — Mel Sembler, a Florida real estate developer and former ambassador to Italy – declined in an email exchange to say whether he’d support Rubio. He said he was focused on defeating a medical marijuana initiative and “recovering from Jeb’s withdrawal.”
A few Bush backers are throwing their support elsewhere. In a telephone interview on Monday, Doug Ose, a wealthy former Republican member of Congress who fundraised for Bush, said he was endorsing Trump. Ose, who represented California’s Central Valley for three terms and hails from the mainstream wing of the GOP, said he viewed Trump as a problem solver and that he’d been turned off by what he described as the increasingly negative tone of Rubio’s campaign.
“I actually think Senator Rubio 10 years from now is going to be our guy,” the former congressman said. “I hope he doesn’t do damage to himself.”
Odd....
Louis Farrakhan praises Donald Trump
By Nolan D. McCaskill
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan praised Republican front-runner Donald Trump for refusing donations from Jewish groups.
Trump “is the only member who has stood in front of the Jewish community and said 'I don’t want your money,'” Farrakhan said in a sermon he delivered this week. “Any time a man can say to those who control the politics of America, ‘I don’t want your money,’ that means you can’t control me. And they can’t afford to give up control of the presidents of the United States.”
Despite his commendation for the billionaire businessman, Farrakhan did not endorse him. “Not that I’m for Mr. Trump,” he added, “but I like what I’m looking at.”
Farrakhan also called Jews the "Synagogue of Satan," according to the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors anti-Semitic statements.
In December, Trump appeared before a crowd of leading Jewish Republicans and told them, “You’re not going to support me even though I’ll be the best guy for Israel."
“I’m a negotiator like you folks," he also said. “Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t negotiate deals? ... Probably more than any room I’ve ever spoken.”
By Nolan D. McCaskill
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan praised Republican front-runner Donald Trump for refusing donations from Jewish groups.
Trump “is the only member who has stood in front of the Jewish community and said 'I don’t want your money,'” Farrakhan said in a sermon he delivered this week. “Any time a man can say to those who control the politics of America, ‘I don’t want your money,’ that means you can’t control me. And they can’t afford to give up control of the presidents of the United States.”
Despite his commendation for the billionaire businessman, Farrakhan did not endorse him. “Not that I’m for Mr. Trump,” he added, “but I like what I’m looking at.”
Farrakhan also called Jews the "Synagogue of Satan," according to the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors anti-Semitic statements.
In December, Trump appeared before a crowd of leading Jewish Republicans and told them, “You’re not going to support me even though I’ll be the best guy for Israel."
“I’m a negotiator like you folks," he also said. “Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t negotiate deals? ... Probably more than any room I’ve ever spoken.”
Were we wrong.....
Newspaper that endorsed Christie: 'Boy, were we wrong'
By Nolan D. McCaskill
The New Hampshire Union Leader backed the wrong presidential candidate, the paper said in an editorial posted online Monday evening.
The influential newspaper endorsed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie last November, but his endorsement of Donald Trump is apparently a bridge too far.
“Despite his baggage, we thought that as a Republican governor in a Democratic-leading state he had the skills and experience the presidency needs (and hasn’t had of late),” publisher Joseph McQuaid wrote. “We also thought he had the best chance to take on and face down Donald Trump.”
“Boy, were we wrong,” McQuaid added.
McQuaid accused Christie, who shocked the political world when he endorsed Trump at a press conference last Friday, of kissing Trump’s ring.
“Rather than standing up to the bully, Christie bent his knee,” he wrote. “In doing so, he rejected the very principles of his campaign that attracted our support.”
Despite the Union Leader endorsement, Christie finished sixth in the first-in-the-nation primary last month, with 7 percent support, and suspended his campaign the next day.
McQuaid told POLITICO last week that Christie had assured him he would “never” support Trump. But he did, hailing the Republican front-runner as “the best choice” in the race.
“If nothing else, that might wake up some Trump fans,” McQuaid said of Christie’s Trump endorsement. “We will look for that, just as soon as we get the egg off our face.”
By Nolan D. McCaskill
The New Hampshire Union Leader backed the wrong presidential candidate, the paper said in an editorial posted online Monday evening.
The influential newspaper endorsed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie last November, but his endorsement of Donald Trump is apparently a bridge too far.
“Despite his baggage, we thought that as a Republican governor in a Democratic-leading state he had the skills and experience the presidency needs (and hasn’t had of late),” publisher Joseph McQuaid wrote. “We also thought he had the best chance to take on and face down Donald Trump.”
“Boy, were we wrong,” McQuaid added.
McQuaid accused Christie, who shocked the political world when he endorsed Trump at a press conference last Friday, of kissing Trump’s ring.
“Rather than standing up to the bully, Christie bent his knee,” he wrote. “In doing so, he rejected the very principles of his campaign that attracted our support.”
Despite the Union Leader endorsement, Christie finished sixth in the first-in-the-nation primary last month, with 7 percent support, and suspended his campaign the next day.
McQuaid told POLITICO last week that Christie had assured him he would “never” support Trump. But he did, hailing the Republican front-runner as “the best choice” in the race.
“If nothing else, that might wake up some Trump fans,” McQuaid said of Christie’s Trump endorsement. “We will look for that, just as soon as we get the egg off our face.”
Cruz’s Judgment
Ted Cruz’s Judgment
He built his campaign around March 1, but he never anticipated Donald Trump.
By Katie Glueck
It was July, only four months into the campaign, and Ted Cruz’s Iowa chairman was nervous.
Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee were practically living in Iowa, but Cruz was all over the map: On a book tour in Georgia, visiting Oklahoma, rolling out a leadership team in Tennessee. Matt Schultz got on a plane and flew to Houston, planning to tell Cruz’s senior staff that their candidate risked becoming an afterthought in the most important state for a conservative, evangelical Republican.
When he got to the Chick-fil-A-fueled confab, planned as a strategy session for early-state leaders, Schultz confronted the team: Cruz needs to get back to Iowa and show some real commitment to the state, said Schultz, who didn’t understand the attention showered on the South, when much of it wouldn’t vote until March. If he doesn’t, Schultz warned, Cruz would be overshadowed on winnable turf.
Campaign manager Jeff Roe heard him out. The campaign wouldn’t ignore Iowa, he promised. But the South, Roe said, isn’t a distraction—it’s the big prize.
Since the very beginning, the Cruz campaign has seen a strong Super Tuesday—when 595 delegates will be awarded—as the critical, defining moment in the effort to emerge as the consensus conservative choice. It’s the day Cruz has said will be an “amazing” one for his team, the day his campaign has described to potential donors as the one that will demonstrate this campaign, unlike every other conservative insurgent campaign in recent memory, is built to last in a long nomination fight.
But Cruz walks into March 1 on his heels. He failed spectacularly in South Carolina, the first test of his appeal in the South, and is now on the defensive even in his home state of Texas. And if polls are to be believed, he could lose it all on Tuesday to Donald Trump—a man his political and personal opposite in almost every relevant way, yet one who has still managed to commandeer a significant slice of the anti-Washington conservative base Cruz long banked on.
“He’s gained our voters, there’s no two ways around that,” said one of Cruz’s senior advisers. “Yeah, we’re getting beat because he is getting some of our votes. He’s not getting all of our votes, but he’s getting some of our votes, there’s no working around that.”
For Ted Cruz, Super Tuesday has become Judgment Day.
When Cruz officially launched in March 2015, his team began building voter models in states with March 2016 primaries — the initial models were based off profiles of Cruz’s Texas supporters—and using analytics to identify possible county chairs and supportive local leaders. The numbers told them Cruz had strong potential in states that looked most like Texas—Oklahoma and Georgia, for example.
By mid-summer, the campaign was ready to introduce Cruz to the region—a place where he was already well-known in conservative activist circles as a tea party hero but not as a like-minded evangelical. To that end, Roe conjured up the idea of a bus tour through the region, designed to show Southern voters that they could identify with Cruz.
“What do we share with the culture? It’s food, it’s football,” Roe said as he opened another July discussion at the Houston headquarters, recalled a source familiar with the planning of the bus tour.
The room full of the strategists with ties to the South and the rural Midwest lit up in conversation about barbecue and Friday night football games. “We were joking about things we remember growing up doing, joking about, ‘Should we have Cruz throw hay in the back of a pick-up truck?’” recalled another Cruz source in the room, who like many people interviewed for this story was not authorized to speak on the record.
At that meeting, the Cruz operatives decided that instead of the usual campaign stops, Cruz would instead host events with a distinctly Southern flavor: a biscuits and gravy breakfast in Chattanooga, for example, or a stop for barbecue in Newnan, Georgia.
It was a branding decision designed to signal to Southern voters, “He shares our values,” said the source familiar with the bus tour planning.
“The idea was that, Ted is the candidate for this area,” this person said. “We thought at the time, you want to be the conservative, evangelical, tea party candidate—a big part of that is the South. Knowing the math lined up like it did, what’s a really good way to show you’re a candidate that most identifies with those people? Culture is a very uniting factor.”
A few weeks later, it wasn’t culture on Cruz’s mind as he rolled through rural Georgia on the second day of his bus tour; it was raw politics.
Several state lawmakers, newly minted co-chairs of his Georgia efforts, climbed aboard Cruz’s bus. The senator wanted to hear about his chances in their state, which offered the second-biggest delegate bounty on Super Tuesday. So over soft drinks and coffees, Cruz peppered them with questions: Who were the influential conservatives he needed to meet in the state? What were the key issues at hand in the Georgia General Assembly?
And he shared his own strategic vision, saying that laying the groundwork in Georgia and other Southern states in the summer would help ensure that he would still be standing, and in a good position to benefit, should rivals such as Ben Carson and Rick Perry stumble, according to state Sen. Marty Harbin, one of lawmakers aboard the bus.
Off the bus, Cruz’s first major foray into the South was going well too.
He met large and adoring crowds everywhere he went, finding that the message that works in Texas—heavy on faith, the Constitution and supporting the military—was playing equally well across the South. And as he traveled, Cruz’s team saw evidence that the theories suggested by the campaign’s data modeling, and their assumptions about the South, aligned with the reception he was receiving on the ground.
It was encouraging enough, in fact, that Cruz began talking up the stakes of Super Tuesday to reporters, framing it as a day when his campaign would—and must—do well.
“It was a critical moment for the campaign to engage outside the first four states,” the Cruz adviser said. “It got us a leg up, it built out the narrative that we’re not just a one-and-done candidate, it’s not a one-state strategy.”
As summer turned to fall and Scott Walker and Perry dropped out of the race, Cruz’s team took its emphasis on the SEC into endorsement meetings in Iowa and ritzy donor gatherings in Utah. The aim was to help influential conservatives understand that Cruz was no Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum—past Iowa winners with no real path to the nomination.
“When we got into the fall and it was apparent we had put together a team in all of these other states, then we were able to start looking Iowans in the eye and saying, unlike the last two cycles, when you cast your vote in the caucus for Ted Cruz, he’s also got the capacity to take that momentum and go on to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and beyond,” said Bryan English, Cruz’s Iowa state director.
Roe, the chief architect of the Southern strategy, was also its best messenger. After working for the Huckabee campaign in 2008 and watching the former Arkansas governor sputter out due in part to lack of organization and money in later-voting states, he ensured that the Cruz campaign was built to protect against exactly that. The South, he told donors and state leaders on his own team, would play a critical role in helping them do so. It was a message that ultimately resonated with Schultz, a 2012 Santorum backer, in that July meeting. And it impressed donors to hear the long-game strategy spelled out.
“If you looked at the calendar of the whole primary, but especially March 1, you couldn’t ask for a better calendar if you were Ted Cruz,” said one Cruz donor, describing messages delivered by Roe and Cruz chief strategist Jason Johnson during a donor retreat at the St. Regis in Park City, Utah, last October, as Cruz looked on from the audience.
By December, Cruz was increasingly, and confidently, making that pitch himself, raising the stakes as he talked up his advantage and drawing the public’s attention to his Southern organization as Donald Trump and Marco Rubio were only beginning to get serious about organizing in the March states. A narrative emerged: Cruz was the best-organized candidate in the region at a time when it was not at all clear that Trump’s high polling numbers would be matched by high turnout.
As 2015 came to a close, Cruz returned to the South with huge fanfare, jetting from stop to stop across Alabama, Tennessee and other states with a flashiness that invited comparisons to Trump.
But Ted Cruz is no Donald Trump. And in the final days before the SEC primary, Cruz supporters have begun to doubt his ability to overcome Trump’s momentum, fueled by three straight wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.
After notching the Iowa victory that Schultz fretted about six months beforehand and locking down a stronger-than-expected third-place finish in New Hampshire, Cruz strode into deeply conservative and religious South Carolina, a state that should have been friendly territory. Everything fell apart.
Battered daily by Trump and by Rubio, and dogged by accusations of running a campaign uniquely full of “dirty tricks,” Cruz came in third, double-digits behind Trump. Most devastating to Cruz backers, Trump swept up the evangelical vote.
“South Carolina, for me, was the linchpin, where I realized, ‘OK, we won Iowa and that was sweet, we kicked [Trump’s] ass, now the air of inevitability, take that off,’” said the donor who heard the Cruz team’s pitch in Park City and bought into it. “South Carolina was the first test, and it didn’t go well. I mean, it went about as badly as you could have imagined.”
The Cruz campaign has taken Trump seriously for months now. It took note over the summer of the thousands and thousands of people attending his events, and Cruz spent the entire fall assiduously avoiding offending Trump, in the hopes that some of his backers would eventually come over to Cruz. When he did unload, the campaign put thousands of dollars behind negative ads.
But when it hatched its Southern strategy a year ago, no one predicted that there would be another candidate who would better tap into the fierce anti-Washington sentiment that Cruz spent his first years in the Senate owning.
“At the time when we constructed this nearly a year ago, we were not going to be opposite of Donald Trump, it was going to be opposite the establishment candidate,” the Cruz adviser said. “None of us ever thought, with one quarter of the delegates cast, there would be a nominee. What we believed this night would be was us versus the establishment candidate, the establishment field would narrow, we would have narrowed the conservative field.”
“This happened,” the source continued. “Plus Donald Trump.”
In the final hours before Super Tuesday, Cruz found himself playing defense in his home state, aware that a loss in Texas would signal, to many, the end of his campaign.
“It would be his Waterloo if not,” acknowledged Mica Mosbacher, a Cruz fundraiser who stressed she believes he will win Texas.
Cruz’s adviser said that in their team’s view, Cruz is better-positioned than Rubio to pick up delegates Tuesday, assuming that they win Texas—which the campaign expects to do. From there, the adviser said, Cruz will have plenty of rationale to move on to other states, looking to run up a bigger delegate lead in places such as Louisiana and Kansas ahead of the winner-take-all contests that hit March 15. They start advertising in Maine on Tuesday ahead of the March 5 caucuses there. They are skeptical that Rubio will win Florida, and hopeful that if they can take on Trump in a head-to-head, they will still have a path to victory. A decent March 1 showing still puts them within “spitting distance” of Trump’s delegate count, the adviser said.
“All of us are hurt by what Trump will do tomorrow night,” the adviser said on the eve of Super Tuesday. “For some, it will be lethal. For others, it will be impactful.”
“It’s going to impact us for sure.”
He built his campaign around March 1, but he never anticipated Donald Trump.
By Katie Glueck
It was July, only four months into the campaign, and Ted Cruz’s Iowa chairman was nervous.
Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee were practically living in Iowa, but Cruz was all over the map: On a book tour in Georgia, visiting Oklahoma, rolling out a leadership team in Tennessee. Matt Schultz got on a plane and flew to Houston, planning to tell Cruz’s senior staff that their candidate risked becoming an afterthought in the most important state for a conservative, evangelical Republican.
When he got to the Chick-fil-A-fueled confab, planned as a strategy session for early-state leaders, Schultz confronted the team: Cruz needs to get back to Iowa and show some real commitment to the state, said Schultz, who didn’t understand the attention showered on the South, when much of it wouldn’t vote until March. If he doesn’t, Schultz warned, Cruz would be overshadowed on winnable turf.
Campaign manager Jeff Roe heard him out. The campaign wouldn’t ignore Iowa, he promised. But the South, Roe said, isn’t a distraction—it’s the big prize.
Since the very beginning, the Cruz campaign has seen a strong Super Tuesday—when 595 delegates will be awarded—as the critical, defining moment in the effort to emerge as the consensus conservative choice. It’s the day Cruz has said will be an “amazing” one for his team, the day his campaign has described to potential donors as the one that will demonstrate this campaign, unlike every other conservative insurgent campaign in recent memory, is built to last in a long nomination fight.
But Cruz walks into March 1 on his heels. He failed spectacularly in South Carolina, the first test of his appeal in the South, and is now on the defensive even in his home state of Texas. And if polls are to be believed, he could lose it all on Tuesday to Donald Trump—a man his political and personal opposite in almost every relevant way, yet one who has still managed to commandeer a significant slice of the anti-Washington conservative base Cruz long banked on.
“He’s gained our voters, there’s no two ways around that,” said one of Cruz’s senior advisers. “Yeah, we’re getting beat because he is getting some of our votes. He’s not getting all of our votes, but he’s getting some of our votes, there’s no working around that.”
For Ted Cruz, Super Tuesday has become Judgment Day.
When Cruz officially launched in March 2015, his team began building voter models in states with March 2016 primaries — the initial models were based off profiles of Cruz’s Texas supporters—and using analytics to identify possible county chairs and supportive local leaders. The numbers told them Cruz had strong potential in states that looked most like Texas—Oklahoma and Georgia, for example.
By mid-summer, the campaign was ready to introduce Cruz to the region—a place where he was already well-known in conservative activist circles as a tea party hero but not as a like-minded evangelical. To that end, Roe conjured up the idea of a bus tour through the region, designed to show Southern voters that they could identify with Cruz.
“What do we share with the culture? It’s food, it’s football,” Roe said as he opened another July discussion at the Houston headquarters, recalled a source familiar with the planning of the bus tour.
The room full of the strategists with ties to the South and the rural Midwest lit up in conversation about barbecue and Friday night football games. “We were joking about things we remember growing up doing, joking about, ‘Should we have Cruz throw hay in the back of a pick-up truck?’” recalled another Cruz source in the room, who like many people interviewed for this story was not authorized to speak on the record.
At that meeting, the Cruz operatives decided that instead of the usual campaign stops, Cruz would instead host events with a distinctly Southern flavor: a biscuits and gravy breakfast in Chattanooga, for example, or a stop for barbecue in Newnan, Georgia.
It was a branding decision designed to signal to Southern voters, “He shares our values,” said the source familiar with the bus tour planning.
“The idea was that, Ted is the candidate for this area,” this person said. “We thought at the time, you want to be the conservative, evangelical, tea party candidate—a big part of that is the South. Knowing the math lined up like it did, what’s a really good way to show you’re a candidate that most identifies with those people? Culture is a very uniting factor.”
A few weeks later, it wasn’t culture on Cruz’s mind as he rolled through rural Georgia on the second day of his bus tour; it was raw politics.
Several state lawmakers, newly minted co-chairs of his Georgia efforts, climbed aboard Cruz’s bus. The senator wanted to hear about his chances in their state, which offered the second-biggest delegate bounty on Super Tuesday. So over soft drinks and coffees, Cruz peppered them with questions: Who were the influential conservatives he needed to meet in the state? What were the key issues at hand in the Georgia General Assembly?
And he shared his own strategic vision, saying that laying the groundwork in Georgia and other Southern states in the summer would help ensure that he would still be standing, and in a good position to benefit, should rivals such as Ben Carson and Rick Perry stumble, according to state Sen. Marty Harbin, one of lawmakers aboard the bus.
Off the bus, Cruz’s first major foray into the South was going well too.
He met large and adoring crowds everywhere he went, finding that the message that works in Texas—heavy on faith, the Constitution and supporting the military—was playing equally well across the South. And as he traveled, Cruz’s team saw evidence that the theories suggested by the campaign’s data modeling, and their assumptions about the South, aligned with the reception he was receiving on the ground.
It was encouraging enough, in fact, that Cruz began talking up the stakes of Super Tuesday to reporters, framing it as a day when his campaign would—and must—do well.
“It was a critical moment for the campaign to engage outside the first four states,” the Cruz adviser said. “It got us a leg up, it built out the narrative that we’re not just a one-and-done candidate, it’s not a one-state strategy.”
As summer turned to fall and Scott Walker and Perry dropped out of the race, Cruz’s team took its emphasis on the SEC into endorsement meetings in Iowa and ritzy donor gatherings in Utah. The aim was to help influential conservatives understand that Cruz was no Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum—past Iowa winners with no real path to the nomination.
“When we got into the fall and it was apparent we had put together a team in all of these other states, then we were able to start looking Iowans in the eye and saying, unlike the last two cycles, when you cast your vote in the caucus for Ted Cruz, he’s also got the capacity to take that momentum and go on to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and beyond,” said Bryan English, Cruz’s Iowa state director.
Roe, the chief architect of the Southern strategy, was also its best messenger. After working for the Huckabee campaign in 2008 and watching the former Arkansas governor sputter out due in part to lack of organization and money in later-voting states, he ensured that the Cruz campaign was built to protect against exactly that. The South, he told donors and state leaders on his own team, would play a critical role in helping them do so. It was a message that ultimately resonated with Schultz, a 2012 Santorum backer, in that July meeting. And it impressed donors to hear the long-game strategy spelled out.
“If you looked at the calendar of the whole primary, but especially March 1, you couldn’t ask for a better calendar if you were Ted Cruz,” said one Cruz donor, describing messages delivered by Roe and Cruz chief strategist Jason Johnson during a donor retreat at the St. Regis in Park City, Utah, last October, as Cruz looked on from the audience.
By December, Cruz was increasingly, and confidently, making that pitch himself, raising the stakes as he talked up his advantage and drawing the public’s attention to his Southern organization as Donald Trump and Marco Rubio were only beginning to get serious about organizing in the March states. A narrative emerged: Cruz was the best-organized candidate in the region at a time when it was not at all clear that Trump’s high polling numbers would be matched by high turnout.
As 2015 came to a close, Cruz returned to the South with huge fanfare, jetting from stop to stop across Alabama, Tennessee and other states with a flashiness that invited comparisons to Trump.
But Ted Cruz is no Donald Trump. And in the final days before the SEC primary, Cruz supporters have begun to doubt his ability to overcome Trump’s momentum, fueled by three straight wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.
After notching the Iowa victory that Schultz fretted about six months beforehand and locking down a stronger-than-expected third-place finish in New Hampshire, Cruz strode into deeply conservative and religious South Carolina, a state that should have been friendly territory. Everything fell apart.
Battered daily by Trump and by Rubio, and dogged by accusations of running a campaign uniquely full of “dirty tricks,” Cruz came in third, double-digits behind Trump. Most devastating to Cruz backers, Trump swept up the evangelical vote.
“South Carolina, for me, was the linchpin, where I realized, ‘OK, we won Iowa and that was sweet, we kicked [Trump’s] ass, now the air of inevitability, take that off,’” said the donor who heard the Cruz team’s pitch in Park City and bought into it. “South Carolina was the first test, and it didn’t go well. I mean, it went about as badly as you could have imagined.”
The Cruz campaign has taken Trump seriously for months now. It took note over the summer of the thousands and thousands of people attending his events, and Cruz spent the entire fall assiduously avoiding offending Trump, in the hopes that some of his backers would eventually come over to Cruz. When he did unload, the campaign put thousands of dollars behind negative ads.
But when it hatched its Southern strategy a year ago, no one predicted that there would be another candidate who would better tap into the fierce anti-Washington sentiment that Cruz spent his first years in the Senate owning.
“At the time when we constructed this nearly a year ago, we were not going to be opposite of Donald Trump, it was going to be opposite the establishment candidate,” the Cruz adviser said. “None of us ever thought, with one quarter of the delegates cast, there would be a nominee. What we believed this night would be was us versus the establishment candidate, the establishment field would narrow, we would have narrowed the conservative field.”
“This happened,” the source continued. “Plus Donald Trump.”
In the final hours before Super Tuesday, Cruz found himself playing defense in his home state, aware that a loss in Texas would signal, to many, the end of his campaign.
“It would be his Waterloo if not,” acknowledged Mica Mosbacher, a Cruz fundraiser who stressed she believes he will win Texas.
Cruz’s adviser said that in their team’s view, Cruz is better-positioned than Rubio to pick up delegates Tuesday, assuming that they win Texas—which the campaign expects to do. From there, the adviser said, Cruz will have plenty of rationale to move on to other states, looking to run up a bigger delegate lead in places such as Louisiana and Kansas ahead of the winner-take-all contests that hit March 15. They start advertising in Maine on Tuesday ahead of the March 5 caucuses there. They are skeptical that Rubio will win Florida, and hopeful that if they can take on Trump in a head-to-head, they will still have a path to victory. A decent March 1 showing still puts them within “spitting distance” of Trump’s delegate count, the adviser said.
“All of us are hurt by what Trump will do tomorrow night,” the adviser said on the eve of Super Tuesday. “For some, it will be lethal. For others, it will be impactful.”
“It’s going to impact us for sure.”
Starburst
The party is still going on in spiral galaxy NGC 3310. Roughly 100 million years ago, NGC 3310 likely collided with a smaller galaxy causing the large spiral galaxy to light up with a tremendous burst of star formation. The changing gravity during the collision created density waves that compressed existing clouds of gas and triggered the star-forming party. The featured image from the Gemini North Telescope shows the galaxy in great detail, color-coded so that pink highlights gas while white and blue highlight stars. Some of the star clusters in the galaxy are quite young, indicating that starburst galaxies may remain in star-burst mode for quite some time. NGC 3310 spans about 50,000 light years, lies about 50 million light years away, and is visible with a small telescope towards the constellation of Ursa Major.
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