* Last week a lot of the news about the Democratic presidential primary focused on Bernie Sanders’ interview with the New York Daily News. It is worth noting that Hillary Clinton sat down for an interview with the same publication on Saturday. I doubt hers will get much attention though. Whether you agree or disagree with what she said, she demonstrated a total mastery of the topics explored.

* As I predicted a few weeks ago, the issue of open vs closed primaries is coming up for discussion as we get closer to the New York primary. Alex Seitz-Wald provides an overview that contains this information - which is probably not good news for the Sanders campaign.

Recognizing the danger last summer, pro-Sanders volunteers did an impressive job of organizing registration drives ahead of the October and March deadlines. Team Bernie NY alone says they collected information for 13,000 registrations. Hughes said over 4,600 people used his website to submit registrations.

But while state officials reported an unprecedented surge in new voter filings just ahead of last month’s deadline, overall voter growth was disappointing.

As of April 1, Democrats had added about 14,000 people to their rolls (out of close to 6 million registered voters) since the same day last year, according to Board of Elections data. Republicans added only 12,000 (out of close to 3 million).

* Last week I noted that, not only has Obama preserved more acres of land and water as national monuments than any other president before him, but those designations have been good for local economies. So of course it comes as no surprise that the Center for American Progress has identified an anti-parks caucus in Congress.

Today, Washington’s bipartisan work to protect America’s parks and public lands seems like a distant memory. Since 2010, Congress has been incapable of passing individual parks and wilderness bills, legislators are pressing to sell off tens of millions of acres of publicly owned lands, and laws which help protect at-risk public lands—including the Antiquities Act and the Land and Water Conservation Fund—are under relentless attack. A Center for American Progress analysis found that between January 2013 and March 2016 members of Congress filed at least 44 bills or amendments that attempted to remove or undercut protections for parks and public lands—making the 114th Congress the most anti-conservation Congress in recent history…

Research for this brief found that the breakdown of congressional support for national parks and public lands can be traced to 20 lawmakers—a group of U.S. senators and representatives that CAP has dubbed the anti-parks caucus—whose record on parks-related issues in the last three years sharply diverges from that of their colleagues and the American public.

* Here is some encouraging news about the economy:

Don’t look now, but over the last six months the narrative in the jobs market has changed for the better — for Obama and for ordinary Americans. Encouraged by improving employment prospects, more than two million people have flooded into the work force since September, the biggest six-month gain in records going back to 1990, using data adjusted for changes in population estimates. And unemployment has continued to fall, though admittedly by a smidgen, from 5.1 percent.

* Over the course of this primary (especially on the Democratic side), we’ve heard a lot about rising college tuition and increasing student debt. We’ve heard a lot less about this challenge:

Think college is expensive? Try sending your kid to full-time day care or preschool.

In nearly half the country, it’s now more expensive to educate a 4-year-old in preschool than an 18-year-old in college, a finding that illustrates the rising burden many families face affording care for children.

The annual cost of care for a 4-year old at a full-time day-care center or school is greater than the average cost of in-state tuition at a four-year institution in 23 states, according to new data from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

* Finally, tonight and tomorrow night PBS will air Jackie Robinson, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns & David McMahon. Stephen Colbert talked with Burns about why this documentary is so relevant today.

One of the lesser-discussed controversies about President Obama is whether or not he qualifies as a jock or a nerd. We all know that he loves sports (both as a spectator and participant) and is quite competitive. But I remember that early on in his presidency, the nerds of the world were pretty excited about finally having one of their own in the White House. That was true for a resident blogger right here at Political Animal.

For the record, President Obama has collected Spider-Man comics; he knows the name of Superman’s father; he’s a fan of Star Trek; and can, rather effortlessly, offer a Vulcan salute.

Ezra Klein (noted nerd) was impressed as well.

Obama is by far the most culturally awesome president this country has witnessed. That doesn’t mean his presidency won’t be a catastrophic failure. But, if anything, the press has been much too restrained in their commentary on Obama’s virtues. Forget beers: This is a president I could play Halo 3 with.

But perhaps the greatest disquisition on President Obama’s nerdiness came from John Hodgman’s speech at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondent’s Dinner. It was hilarious with a powerfully serious kicker at the end.

This week, the President sets out to let his nerd flag fly. First of all, he will host the 6th annual White House Science Fair this week. That will, no doubt, lead to more photos like this one from the 2012 event (seriously…only a true geek gets this excited about a marshmallow air canon).

Secondly, comes this:

Having survived his first interview as POTUS on Fox News’ Chris Wallace-hosted Sunday Beltway show, Obama will guest present five segments for the network’s nightly science news coverage, Science Presents DNews, which airs weeknights at 9PM. His updates will cover a wide range of innovations in public health, space, and technology.

On a more serious note, President Obama has done a lot to promote science during his administration - particularly when it comes to encouraging the next generation of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and innovators. He has even gone so far as to suggest that they deserve as much attention as our famed jocks.

“As a society, we have to celebrate outstanding work by young people in science at least as much as we do Super Bowl winners. Because superstar biologists and engineers and rocket scientists and robot-builders… they’re what’s going to transform our society. They’re the folks who are going to come up with cures for diseases and new sources of energy, and help us build healthier, more successful societies.” -President Obama

The Republican National Convention in Cleveland is going to be a hot mess no matter what happens. In a way, the cleanest outcome would be if Trump just waltzed in there with the requisite delegates to accept his coronation. Except, even that would be the most awkward coronation since 11 Frimaire, Year XIII, when, with Pope Pius VII presiding, Napoleon placed the “crown of Charlemagne” on his own head.

More likely, as Byron York points out, no one will win on the first ballot in Cleveland. And there’s a possibility that the eventual nominee will neither have won the most delegates during the primaries and caucuses, nor received the most popular votes.

Mr. York sees this as significantly more problematic than the situation in 2000 when George W. Bush “won” the presidency despite losing the popular vote. The reason that 2000 wasn’t so bad?

The 2000 winner of the popular vote, Al Gore, lost the presidency because of the constitutional structure under which electors, not popular vote totals, determine who enters the White House. Seeing the popular-vote loser, George W. Bush, win the election was unfortunate — it hadn’t happened since the 19th Century — but it was specifically provided for in the Constitution. Democrats unhappily accepted the result because they accepted the Constitution as the bedrock of our system of government.

Yes, we all remember Bush v. Gore, but it’s true that Democrats accepted that it was legitimate to have the Electoral College victor become the president even if they received fewer overall votes. The contention was that Gore was the rightful winner of both.

For York, the Republicans will never see the same kind of legitimacy in their nominee because the rules aren’t based on the Constitution:

In an intra-party Republican fight, on the other hand, the winner of the 2016 nomination could be determined not by the Constitution but by rules written by party activists and insiders the week before the GOP convention. If those rules can be reasonably viewed as unfair, they won’t command the fundamental respect and consensus of a constitutional provision. And the resulting nominee won’t command that respect, either.

Maybe I am alone, but I see this is as an overblown concern for two reasons. One is substantive and the other is purely political.

The substantive reason this isn’t that big of a deal is that the popular vote is not a good measure of support. People note that Bernie Sanders does disproportionately well in low-turnout caucuses, but one downside to that is that he doesn’t get many popular votes out of states that he’s carried easily. In most of these states, Sanders would have won a higher-turnout primary, too, just by smaller margins. You can’t just add up the popular vote and say it means anything when one candidate excels in a region of the country that favors caucuses and another runs strongest in regions that have primaries.

The political reason it’s not that big of a deal is that the whole point of denying Trump (and presumably Cruz) the nomination is to get a more electable candidate. If the new nominee is vastly more electable, that will more than make up for being contentious within the Republican Party. I don’t think more than a handful of people will still be nursing their butthurt from July 21st when November 8th rolls around.

During primary season, it seems like countless voters will stay home if they don’t like or approve of their choice in November, but this has never been true. What’s true is that Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan would run stronger than Donald Trump and probably stronger than Ted Cruz, too. That doesn’t mean that they’d win, but they’ve already shown that they can be at least a little bit competitive.

When people have a choice between two tickets, they generally focus on that choice, and not on what happened months earlier.

What Mr. York should worry about is Trump providing people (in at least some key states) with a third ticket.

The unexpected increase in premature deaths in the white community over the last couple of decades is an increasingly hot topic, and every time it comes up, people note that white people (even working class rural white Americans) still live longer than blacks. Why should people focus so much energy on a segment of the population that is still comparatively privileged?

Well, I’ll give you a few reasons for that.

Number one, and it’s not just women:

Among African Americans, Hispanics and even the oldest white Americans, death rates have continued to fall. But for white women in what should be the prime of their lives, death rates have spiked upward. In one of the hardest-hit groups — rural white women in their late 40s — the death rate has risen by 30 percent.

The issue here isn’t overall rates of life expectancy but the fact that whites alone are moving in the wrong direction.

Number two, the numbers are staggering:

Compared with a scenario in which mortality rates for whites continued to fall steadily after 1998, roughly 650,000 people have died prematurely since 1999 — around 450,000 men and nearly 200,000 women.

That number nearly equals the death toll of the American Civil War.

That’s remarkable, don’t you think? It’s almost as if we had a Civil War and no one noticed until some academics began digging into the cross tabs of the CDC’s 2014 annual report on American health.

Number three, overall, the victims are not from some privileged background:

Some regions are hit especially hard, such as the belt of poverty and pain that runs across the northern tier of the South, incorporating much of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. But significant increases in white mortality also showed up in the small-town and rural Midwest — such as Johnson County, Iowa, home of the University of Iowa — and in parts of the American West, such as Nye County, Nev., and Siskiyou County, Calif…

…[Princeton University economist Anne] Case said that the whites who are dying are not America’s elites.

“They may be privileged by the color of their skin,” she said, “but that is the only way in their lives they’ve ever been privileged.”

And, number four, this phenomenon probably goes a long way towards describing the crackup of the Republican Party, and so it has major political ramifications. For one thing, areas with the highest die-off of whites correlate with areas where Donald Trump has done well in the primaries.

Predominantly white, working-class areas with high death rates have proved to be fertile ground for Trump. Political observers speculate that the voter anger driving his campaign emerges from the many distresses felt in these economically challenged — and increasingly morbid — places.

The wave of lethal agents rolling across the country is broad in its effects, but it appears to be cresting in places that are particularly vulnerable — such as a town where the trains no longer stop, or a small city that saw its biggest manufacturer move overseas, or in a household broken by divorce or substance abuse or tragedy.

Or in the mind and body of someone who is doing poorly, and just barely hanging on.

It’s easy to see the correlation between areas that vote Republican and areas where whites are dying in droves. The orange areas are where mortality is increasing and the blue areas are where it is decreasing.

Republicans don’t need to look much further to get a clue as to why their base of supporters is in full revolt against their party’s Establishment elites. The GOP has been oblivious as their base’s communities have been decimated by an opioid epidemic, rising levels of alcoholism and suicide, and a loss of life comparable to the deadliest war in our nation’s history. Fighting Obamacare (which has done wonders for the treatment of mental illness and addiction) is doing nothing for these communities. Tax cuts for the rich and deregulatory schemes for Wall Street won’t help them one iota. Unisex bathrooms and gay marriage aren’t what’s ailing them.

Democrats get frustrated that these folks keep turning to the GOP for help when it should be manifestly obvious by now that the Republicans have nothing to offer them. There ought to be a political opportunity now to step in with sensible plans to make a real difference in their lives, but it’s really up to the people who represent these communities to come to the Democrats in the spirit of cooperation. They ought to know their constituents and their needs better than anyone, but it’s difficult to force politicians to take help that they won’t even request.

There are a lot of progressive solutions that could be pursued. Democrats have already been leading the way on efforts at smoking cessation. The First Lady has tried to lead people into healthier eating habits, including efforts to give people access to better quality food. The Senate just passed a bill to help address the enormous needs we have to get treatment for opioid-dependent people, but the Republicans refuse to add any meaningful funding to it. I already mentioned how Obamacare makes it easier to get addiction treatment. The president has done a lot in consumer protection, including major credit card reform, vastly increased scrutiny of predatory lenders, and a much-needed overhaul of the college lending system. Bernie Sanders is pushing for free tuition at college universities.

These are starting points, but there are limits to how much a party can do to help the opposing party’s base of supporters if they can’t get any cooperation. A president is a representative of all the people, though, even when they are a Democrat. If, as expected, the next president is a Democrat, it’d be nice if some Republican lawmakers were willing to work with them to find solutions that can reverse this troubling trend.

Because the fascism of Trump is a much less appealing alternative, for all of us.

Throughout this Republican presidential primary, I’ve been keeping my eye on Ted Cruz. It’s not that he is any less toxic than Donald Trump. But while the reality TV star has depended on his celebrity and willingness to say outrageous things to garner attention, Cruz has been strategic. The results started to show this weekend.

Donald Trump’s effort to reset his campaign following defeat in Wisconsin showed no signs of paying off this weekend, as a series of technical failures by his campaign set his hopes back even further.

From Thursday to Saturday, Trump suffered setbacks in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, South Carolina and Indiana that raise new doubts about his campaign’s preparedness for the long slog of delegate hunting as the GOP race approaches a possible contested convention. He lost the battle on two fronts. Cruz picked up 28 pledged delegates in Colorado. In the other states, rival campaigns were able to place dozens of their own loyalists in delegate spots pledged to Trump on the first ballot. This will matter if Trump fails to win a majority of delegates on the first ballot in Cleveland, as his delegates defect once party rules allow them to choose the candidate they want to nominate.

While the media is right to point out the poor performance of the Trump campaign in these instances. It is important to also recognize that Cruz is exploiting every possibility to gain the advantage. Calling what he is doing “Gestapo tactics” - as Trump’s newly hired delegate manager did yesterday - is, of course, over the top. But I have no doubt that Cruz is willing to use every trick in the book, whether they’re clean or dirty.

I will remind you that Ted Cruz was the first one to suggest the possibility of a “brokered convention.” He did so back in June of last year.

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz called a brokered GOP convention “a possibility” that “could happen” given the wide range of candidates running for the Republican nomination…

“Historically, what has happened is that the first three states, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina had a disproportionate impact,” he said. “And they certainly have a big impact on momentum. And so what we’re doing is we’re planning for both contingencies.

What we witnessed this weekend is the Cruz campaign putting that plan into play. If Trump hasn’t won enough delegates to secure the nomination on the first round of voting in Cleveland, all hell breaks lose and Cruz is positioning himself as a player if that happens.

It is well above my pay grade to make projections about how all of this will play out. But I’m going to continue to keep an eye on Ted Cruz. He just schooled Trump on the “art of the delegate deal.”

Over the last few years there has been a lot of discussion about the Rising American Electorate (unmarried women, millennials and people of color) that Barack Obama tapped into in order to win two presidential elections. Back in November, Stan Greenberg cautioned that these voters weren’t being engaged in the 2016 election. But in a more recent poll, he found that things had changed.

The disengagement pall has been lifted. Our focus groups with white unmarried women, millennials and African Americans showed a new consciousness about the stakes in November. In this poll, the percentage of Democrats giving the highest level of engagement has increased 10 points.

The result is that the country might be heading for an earthquake election in November.

Rather than embrace the recommendations of the RNC autopsy report following the 2012 presidential election, the response of Republicans has typically been to drill down on the idea that there are millions of white voters they can tap into who didn’t show up to vote for Mitt Romney. But even Sean Trende, whose original article spurred that discussion, says that there aren’t enough missing white voters available to swing an election.

Into this breach comes Grover Norquist with…what can I say…a “creative” solution. He has identified six new voting blocs that have developed over the last 30 years that won’t want Hillary Clinton in the White House. Between the lines, his contention is that she is just so out of touch with what is happening in the world that she’s missed them.

Either this revelation is so ground-breaking that no one in the political world is as in-touch as Norquist, or it’s a load of huey put out by someone who is desperately grasping at straws rather than face the fact that his predictions about a “permanent Republican majority” are drowning in a bathtub.

Here are Norquist’s six voting blocks that will challenge the Rising American Electorate:

1. Home schoolers
2. Charter school supporters
3. Concealed-carry permit holders
4. Fracking workers
5. Users of e-cigarettes and vapor products
6. Uber drivers

I kid you not! Those are the voting blocs Grover Norquist said the Republicans can tap into in order to stop Clinton in November. We could spend some time deconstructing each one. But that would give this nonsense from Norquist more attention than it deserves. I merely point this out in order to show how vacuous Republican attempts are these days to deal with the fact that they are in the midst of alienating large swaths of the American electorate. If the best they’ve got to combat that reality is mobilizing people like e-cigarrette users, you know they’re in big trouble.

The negative reviews of and cascading events from Bernie Sanders’ less-than-deft Q&A; with the New York Daily News last week continue. But there is one additional passage from that interview that deserves, but has largely escaped, notice (emphasis mine):

Alright, I believe that in the midst of the kinds of crises that we face with a disappearing middle class and massive levels of income and wealth inequality, the only major country on earth not guarantee to healthcare to all people, only major country not to provide paid family and medical leave, it is time to get beyond establishment politics. So to put your question in maybe a simpler way, is she a candidate of the establishment? The answer is, of course she is.

This is an astonishing thing for Sanders to say for a couple of reasons. First because, as he surely knows, it was the “establishment” Bill Clinton who, as one of his first acts as president in 1993, signed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) after it had twice been vetoed by his predecessor. Second (and maybe Sanders doesn’t know this; few do), having signed the FMLA providing up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to workers to care for a newborn or a sick family member, Clinton, with the active help of his wife, became the first president to use federal power to provide paid leave to American workers.

I know this because I wrote the speech in which he unveiled the policies. It was a commencement address delivered on May 23, 1999 at Grambling State University, an historically black college in norther Louisiana that boasts, among other things, one of the best marching bands in the country. In the speech, Clinton announce two executive actions. First, federal workers would be allowed to use the sick leave they’d earned to take time off to care for other sick family members. Second, and potentially more important, states would be allowed to let public and private sector workers who have paid into the state’s federally regulated unemployment insurance systems to collect payments from those systems while they’re on leave caring for a newborn or a newly adopted child. Having attended the meetings where these policies were hashed out, I can assure you that they were a joint East Wing/West Wing initiative. The main person behind them was Nicole Rabner, who was the First Lady’s senior domestic policy adviser as well as a special assistant to the president.

The first policy (paid leave for federal workers) is still in place today. The second (allowing states to tap their unemployment insurance systems for paid leave) was overturned by George W. Bush, who deemed it a harmful imposition on businesses. But four states (California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Washington) that have separate Temporary Disability Systems, which are not federally regulated, used those systems to create basically the same voluntary family leave programs the Clintons were trying to incentivize. A major study of California’s, the largest and longest running paid leave program, found that it improved children’s health outcomes without measurably harming business productivity.

So the “establishment” politician Hillary Clinton can rightly claim a share of the credit for the paid leave programs that exist in the United States. They’re far from universal, but they’re real, up-and-running programs that seem to be working as advertised. And the reason they’re not more wide spread is not “establishment politics”—they are in fact the result of establishment politics—but Republican resistance.

Both Clinton and Sanders sponsored bills in the Senate to expand family leave that didn’t pass, and each has put forward plans to do so if they’re elected president (though the plans differ in how they’re financed). So both are, for progressives, on the “right side” of the issue. But only one of them has actually accomplished anything on this, and it isn’t Bernie Sanders.

Google has unveiled its newest robot, and…well, see for yourself.

This is early stages yet, but there’s little reason to believe that within a few decades we won’t be seeing machines incorporating this technology to take over a lot of manual labor and personal assistant jobs moving forward. Meanwhile, car manufacturers are moving at full speed to make mass-produced autonomous cars a reality, which will ultimately have dramatic impacts across the economy. Keep in mind that there are approximately 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States alone and almost a quarter million cab drivers, and while not all those jobs will disappear in an instant, they will certainly be hugely impacted.

Restaurants are also being increasingly automated both in the kitchen and with digital displays increasingly taking the place of servers. These trends are multiplying across almost every sector of the economy, to say nothing of the generally disruptive impact of the internet and big data on previously stable industries from bookselling to research.

There is some question as to whether there will ultimately emerge enough STEM and tech-based jobs to replace all the ones being lost, but there is no certainly no guarantee of it. We are told that there is a skills shortage in which America needs a dramatic increase of engineers for tech jobs, but as Paul Krugman explains, that’s not really true:

Kudos to Adam Davidson for some much-needed mythbusting about the supposed skills shortage holding the US economy back. Whenever you see some business person quoted complaining about how he or she can’t find workers with the necessary skills, ask what wage they’re offering. Almost always, it turns out that what said business person really wants is highly (and expensively) educated workers at a manual-labor wage. No wonder they come up short.

And this dovetails perfectly with one of the key arguments against the claim that much of our unemployment is “structural”, due to a mismatch between skills and labor demand. If that were true, you should see soaring wages for those workers who do have the right skills; in fact, with rare exceptions you don’t.

Ultimately, even many of these tech and engineering jobs will be replaced by programs that teach themselves. Even the vaunted financial sector is becoming increasingly automated as programs learn to trade stocks more efficiently than most fund managers.

Whether all of this will actually lead to an employment crisis is the subject of hot debate among economists, with some insisting that automation always leads to more and better jobs, and others insisting we’re headed to a crisis. But there’s little doubt that in combination with offshoring and globalization, the American worker feels more precarious than ever. Long gone are the days when someone could assume that they could stay with the same company for a lifetime; now, it’s not even certain that your job will exist in 20 years. That’s a difficult thing for people to deal with, and all the entrepreneur-speak about dynamism and flexibility won’t substitute for people’s desires to know what they can count on to build lives, families and futures.

Dave Dayen recently noted the other way these trends impact society and politics in creating a “1099” economy of unstable gig workers who must constantly sing for their supper and cannot count on defined pensions, healthcare or reliable income. These folks tend to be especially subject to populist economic appeals from right and left, and for good reason.

Ultimately, policymakers who celebrate the modern economy for its innovation and dynamism will also have to deal with human needs for economic security and stability beyond only taking care of those who fall deepest through the cracks. That much ultimately mean a series of universal guarantees: retirement and healthcare among them, of course, but also education and even ultimately a universal basic income or guaranteed work program.

We’re not quite to the point where this issue is on the front burner. But we’re starting to see it move there at increasing speed, and the underlying issues are part of the reason for populist politics here and around the globe. We’ll likely have to confront some major adaptations to the economy and our conception of the social safety net sooner rather than later.

It’s often easy to become discouraged at the state of national politics. Given Republican control of the House, there’s very little chance of either Clinton’s or Sanders’ policy priorities going anywhere. But that doesn’t mean that progress isn’t happening in blue states around the country.

Consider again the example of California, where rules finally went into effect allowing women to get birth control without a prescription:

Women in California of any age can now obtain birth control without a doctor’s prescription from any pharmacy in the state. Under the new rules finally in effect, any woman merely has to fill out a questionnaire at the pharmacy to get access to a variety of contraceptive measures, according to KABC. Though the new rules were technically passed by the state legislature in 2013, the law was tied up in regulatory discussions until Friday. Under the law, any woman can get self-administered hormonal birth control.

California is not the first to put this into place; Washington and Oregon already have similar laws.

This also, of course, comes on the heels of $15 minimum wages being passed in California and New York as well. California alone has a wide bevy of new progressive laws ranging from automatic voter registration to air quality standards, wage theft, sexual consent and much else. Blue states continue to be the successful laboratories of democracy where Republicans in Congress are failing to act, even as the red state economic model is being proven a failure in places like Kansas and Louisiana.

Until the 2020 census makes it easier to change control of Congress, it will remain the case that state legislatures are the primary vehicles for real progressive action. One can only hope that those seeking a political revolution will remain engaged regardless of the result of the Democratic primary, and get involved in making their states as progressive as possible until the demographic tide makes a national change in direction inevitable.

It’s occasionally important to remember that as we write about the twists and turns of presidential campaign politics, we are in fact talking about the process that selects the person who will have control of the nuclear launch codes and veto power over our country’s legislative system.

In that context, watching the near-craziness of the electoral process within either party is maddening. On the Republican side is the prospect of a brokered convention, and a process in which local backroom deal-making can theoretically make or break whether men as different and crazy as Ted Cruz and Donald Trump become the GOP nominee. Wheeling and dealing in Michigan apparently gave Trump and Kasich key control of power players in Michigan, even as Cruz used local insider power plays to win every delegate in Colorado. The battle between Cruz and Trump will likely come down not to the will of the voters, but an insiders’ backroom brawl.

On the Democratic side two consecutive non-incumbent presidential battles will have in theory been decided again not necessarily by the will of the voters, but by the will of a few hundred high-level party insiders. While it is true that in 2008 superdelegates bowed to the will of the voters in selecting Barack Obama, it was no sure thing. Nor is it at all certain that were Bernie Sanders to receive a sudden wave of support and win a majority of votes or pledged delegates nationwide, that the superdelegates would actually fall in line. Meanwhile, delegates in yet another state (Wyoming) were just decided by an intrinsically exclusionary and painful caucus process that saw Sanders take 56% of the few votes cast—but due to the quirks of proportional allocation, the end delegate result is a 7-7 tie.

This is no way to elect the leader of the free world.

America’s winner-take-all electoral system inherently leads to a two-party duopoly, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. But if our governmental fates are going to be decided by the election systems of two political parties, it’s crucial that those parties and systems be as transparent and democratic as possible. That is far from the case today.

The very first step should be to convert caucuses to elections, and to either eliminate the superdelegates or simply make them bound to that state’s winner. These changes would be zero sum to the establishment and to populist outsiders: outsiders tend to do well in caucuses, while insiders love the superdelegate system. Both should be eliminated.

Meanwhile, party bylaws should prevent the gamesmanship of delegate selection by candidates, ensuring that if a candidate actually wins a state’s delegates, that candidate is guaranteed to actually receive those delegates.

If we must have delegates and proportional seating, proportional delegate allocation should actually be truly proportional. To wit, if a candidate wins an election by even 2 percentage points, that victory should be reflected in the actual delegate count. If that means a process with many more delegates voting, then so be it. Logistical inconvenience at a convention hall shouldn’t trump the basics of democracy.

Finally, there should be some thought given to how situations are handled in which no candidate receives an absolute majority of delegates. While it makes sense from various perspectives that a second ballot could dethrone a frontrunner with 49% of the delegate count in favor of someone with 25% of the count or even someone who hadn’t run for election at all, it’s a deeply uncomfortable prospect.

It should be beyond clear at this point that both of our political parties’ presidential election systems are broken (to say nothing of the electoral college itself.) It’s long past time to make them more transparent and accountable.

After all the sturm und drang of the Republican contests it appears to come to this: all signs point to a brokered GOP convention, as it’s unlikely that Donald Trump will reach the absolute majority of delegates required to take the nomination outright. If current electoral patterns hold, Trump will likely fall just short of the magic number required to win on the first ballot. Though I wouldn’t normally link to anything out of Breitbart, their delegate predictions showing Trump falling short by 50 to 100 delegates for the upcoming GOP contests seem sober and likely accurate barring unforeseen events.

If no candidate reaches a majority on the first ballot, the race moves to a second ballot in which the delegates are (mostly) free to vote for whomever they please. And that person will almost certainly not be Donald Trump. Whether it’s in Colorado where the Cruz campaign outworked Donald Trump to win all 21 delegates, or in Indiana where state and county party officials are so hostile to Trump that nearly every delegate will bolt from him after the first ballot, the table is set to prevent the clear winner of the majority of votes in the GOP primary from getting the nomination.

The beneficiary of the second-ballot vote will almost certainly be Ted Cruz. As Nate Silver notes, the possibility of Paul Ryan or another white-horse knight being nominated at the convention is fairly low, the actual human delegates making the decisions are mostly conservative activists from suburbs and rural areas all across the nation much likely to back a more legitimate hardliner like Cruz than the handpicked choice of the beltway and Charles Koch.

In either case, though, there’s the problem of what to do about Donald Trump and his voters. He (like the other candidates still in the race) has already rescinded his pledge to back the eventual nominee. If he is denied the nomination despite earning a clear plurality of actual votes, there’s no telling what he might do, but it would almost certainly be very ugly for the GOP. While the chances of an independent candidacy are next to nil, he would likely spend the entire rest of the election season creating headlines by sabotaging the eventual nominee and directing his voters to stay home and/or decline to vote for him. If even 10% of Trump’s voters chose to stay home, that in turn would have disastrous consequences for the GOP ticket both at the top and downballot.

One might say that a Trump nomination would be so toxic to the GOP brand that party officials will be inclined to take their chances on that scenario. There’s certainly plenty of data to show that while Trump’s voters might stay home from the polls in a huff, a large number of less populist GOP voters would refuse to vote for him in the fall. But it’s not entirely clear that Ted Cruz is any more likable or appealing to the general electorate—and Cruz’ actual policy positions on everything but immigration are significantly more extreme than Trump’s. So in essence Republican officials might end up infuriating the most dedicated and motivated plurality of their voting base for not that much advantage.

Would they really make such a move to protect social conservatism and Reaganomics from even the slightest challenge of Trumpist heresy? It seems increasingly likely, but it would be a shortsighted move.

At the heart of much of the debate between the Clinton and Sanders camps is the role of asset wealth in a democracy: can it be used for good in a way that allows a rising tide to theoretically lift all boats even if wages stagnate, or is the mere fact that so much wealth is sloshing around in the hands of so few an intrinsic threat to democracy? Much of “neoliberal” Democratic centrism is built around the idea that one can use market forces to achieve fundamentally progressive aims without upsetting the corporate apple cart: if wages are stagnant, boost home prices to create wealth; if people can’t make ends meet from month to month, democratize debt through credit cards; if schools are underfunded, privatize them; if healthcare is unaffordable, compel Americans into private insurance through a mix of subsidy and regulation.

It’s not so much that these solutions don’t appear to work in the short term, or that they’re not in some ways better than the previous status quo: they do and they are, at least for a while. The problem is that they sort of sweep the problem under the rug, substituting a bigger problem down the road for the one they’re trying to solve. You can’t lower the price of foreign goods via trade deals enough to make up for the jobs lost. You can’t goose home prices beyond the ability of people to afford them without creating an economy-destroying bubble. You can’t quell desperation by providing credit, without ending up with a society in which the majority are in debt and few have the money to retire over time. And so on.

This fact has become increasingly clear to Americans of all stripes, but especially to 1) downwardly mobile blue-collar whites who used to think that they prospered over minorities by dint of their hard work and industriousness, and now flock to Trump in reaction to their betrayal by Reaganomics; and 2) younger Americans who realize that the deck is entirely stacked against them due to outrageous student loans, low-paying or contract-labor jobs, unaffordable housing costs, etc. Older, more established white collar types don’t tend to feel the bite of the broken economy in the same way, and therefore find themselves more attracted to incremental tweaks to the system.

The release of the Panama Papers is likely to add fuel to the argument that concentrated asset wealth is itself the problem. Even if no American names are found in the documents (because the firm didn’t want them and because it’s so easy to set up domestic ones), it’s more than obvious that not only is there too much sitting wealth in too few hands, those hands use legal loopholes or outright illegal behavior to hide their wealth from partial redistribution to those who actually make the economy work.

There aren’t incremental tweaks to address this problem: either tax havens will be eliminated or they won’t be. Either inequality will be reduced or it won’t. Politicians could make tax haven nations international pariahs and use trade agreements to punish them, but they choose not to because the international finance system is set up mostly to benefit the wealthy. Either the giant finance companies that enable and profit from this system are shrunk down to size, or the system will continue to operate the way it does.

Regardless of whether Sanders or Clinton prevails in the nomination contest (and Clinton almost certainly will), people in American and around the world have lost faith in philanthrocapitalism, the power of asset wealth to trickle down to the wage earners, and the benevolence of economic elites and the institutions that serve them. The Panama Papers will only hasten that trend and radicalize the public further toward disempowering the politicians and institutions that have served the comfortable asset classes so well at the expense of everyone else.

That’s the key difference between today and the 1990s. Back in the 1990s, it was credible to imagine that one could hand the keys of the economy over to the financial sector, and that everyone would grow richer together even if the rich grew fantastically wealthy and inequality increased. That argument was untrue then, of course, but at least it had not yet so obviously failed the test of trial and error. People know better now, which is why Reaganomics has run its course even in the Republican Party, and why an undisciplined septuagenarian socialist from Vermont will end up nearly tied in delegates with the most formidable, polished non-incumbent presidential frontrunner in modern American history. With the Panama Papers and related documents, the evidence continues to grow that bigger changes to the economic system are necessary than those on offer from the post-1980s center left.

It would appear that the gloves are indeed off in the Democratic primary. As so often happens when candidates start to sharpen their knives, the surrogates are the first to test various lines of attack. Sanders surrogates have foolishly brought up the Clinton email brouhaha, for instance, and now it appears that at least one Clinton surrogate is now red-baiting Sanders.

In the middle of an intensifying fight with Hillary Clinton over the Vermont senator and native Brooklynite’s suggestion that she is unqualified to be president, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn congressman and Clinton supporter, released a statement on Thursday calling Mr. Sanders a “gun-loving socialist with zero foreign policy experience.”

The problem here is that the voters who hate socialism are the ones who are already in Clinton’s corner. The ones she will need to win over to quell Sanders’ momentum or whose support she will need to secure after winning the nomination don’t necessarily find the word “socialist” to be much of an insult. In fact, a majority of Democrats say that socialism has been benign force:

Nearly six-in-ten Democratic primary voters believe socialism has a ‘positive impact on society,’ according to polling conducted this month for the right-leaning issue advocacy group American Action Network and provided to POLITICO.

Perhaps more importantly, socialism is very popular among Democratic voters under 45:

And among people 45 and under — a group that has helped power Sanders’ primary performances — the ideology is preferred to capitalism by a margin of 46 percent to 19 percent.

Nor is that the first poll to show the positive view of the word socialism. a YouGov poll posted similar results. Some of this is directly due to the embrace of the term by the Sanders campaign, but in fact 18-29 year old voters have been shown to favor socialism even going back to 2011.

As to the charge that Sanders is a “new Democrat,” that line may have some effect on the long-time Democratic rank-and-file. But again, older registered Democrats are largely in the Clinton camp already. Younger voters of all political stripes have a low regard for registering to vote with political parties, and often consider themselves independents even if their actual voting habits are highly partisan. And the charge that Sanders is a recent Democrat will obviously fall flat with actual independents of all ages, who have also swung heavily to Sanders even as Clinton has dominated among registered Dems.

Beyond the direct electoral impact of these charges, they are also bad for the long-term health of the Democratic Party. The nominal frontrunner should not be pivoting to center by insulting the dearly-held ideology of much of the party’s base and the very voters it will need at the margins to come to the polls in November. Nor should it under any circumstance be insulting newcomers to the party from the left who might have felt the Democratic Party was too corporate or centrist before, but with Sanders’ campaign now feel they might have a legitimate ideological home as a Democrat.

It might be that the Clinton camp is turning to these attacks out of frustration, or it might be just an undisciplined surrogate spouting off. The most troubling implication would be that Clinton might be losing hold of some of her core Democratic supporters and looking to bring them back into the fold.

In any case, Clinton can easily win the nomination without resorting to red-baiting. It’s unnecessary and counterproductive both to her own campaign, and to the party’s long-term interests.

* A couple of weeks ago I suggested that, as we headed into a group of “closed” primaries, we would add a discussion about open vs closed primaries to the ones already underway about superdelegates and caucuses. We’re especially likely to hear about that from Sanders supporters because it is their candidate who will be impacted the most. Emily Atkin is the first I’ve seen to weigh in with an article titled: New York’s Upcoming Primary Is ‘Closed Shut’ To Certain Voters.

More than 3 million people — about 27 percent of the state’s voters — were registered outside the Republican and Democratic parties as of April. In a presidential campaign marked by popular non-establishment candidates and high independent voter turnout, those voters could swing the primary results significantly.

* I’m not sure this qualifies as a “fun” fact, but it sure is one worth pointing out.

FUN FACT: Americans United for Life have named Louisiana the most pro-life state for 6 years. It has the 3rd highest infant mortality rate.

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) April 7, 2016

* Senator Elizabeth Warren has been busy lately. As Martin pointed out earlier today, she wrote a blistering editorial in the Boston Globe about Senate Republicans obstructing President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. But in a fascinating pairing, she co-authored an article in Huffington Post with Sen. Cory Booker lauding the Obama administration’s new rule that raises the standards for investment advisors. The article itself didn’t break much new ground. But this photo of the two senators with Labor Secretary Tom Perez packs quite the political punch.

* I’m assuming that this is exactly the kind of thing Vice President Joe Biden was talking about when he said that Obamacare was a BFD.

* Finally, the folks of Greensboro, NC are the latest to feel the effects of Republicans in their state passing a law about “bathroom and shower management.” Here is a statement released today by Bruce Springsteen.

As you, my fans, know I’m scheduled to play in Greensboro, North Carolina this Sunday. As we also know, North Carolina has just passed HB2, which the media are referring to as the “bathroom” law. HB2 — known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act — dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use. Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden. To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress. Right now, there are many groups, businesses, and individuals in North Carolina working to oppose and overcome these negative developments. Taking all of this into account, I feel that this is a time for me and the band to show solidarity for those freedom fighters. As a result, and with deepest apologies to our dedicated fans in Greensboro, we have canceled our show scheduled for Sunday, April 10th. Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them. It is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.

As The Boss says, “We Take Care of Our Own.”