Where We're At in the Democratic Primary

A few days ago, FiveThirtyEight published a very useful piece that essentially laid out the landscape for the 2016 Democratic primary. They used some polling data, fundraising, demographics, and Facebook popularity to figure out how we can expect each state to vote if Hillary is leading by twelve points, and alternately how we would expect them to vote if she's fallen into a tie with Bernie--i.e., the first projection shifted over by twelve points, plus or minus rounding errors. And what this lets us do is convert individual state results into an estimate of how the race stands nationally, both with actual results and with polls.

So, for example, they show Nevada as a pro-Hillary state, one that should go to her by about 3 points even if the race is tied. If in fact Nevada ends up as basically a tie tomorrow (and we have very little idea what will happen there; there have only been three polls, all low-quality ones, in recent weeks), that's a fantastic result for Bernie. Even if it comes out as Hillary +6%, the most pro-Hillary of the three recent polls, that's a very good result for him. Conversely, Hillary's got something like a 25-point lead in the South Carolina polling average, which would be even better than the +23% win they project for her with a national 12-point lead. It's to be expected that different states will give different signals, because these projections are by no means perfect. (It's like extrapolating election night results on the assumption of uniform swing: it's a good approximation but never quite holds.) Indeed it kind of looks like a decent guess for Nevada is the national-tie scenario, while a decent guess for South Carolina is the Clinton lead scenario.

One interesting thing, though, is that the two states that have voted so far both say the same thing about the race. Iowa was a tie, falling almost precisely between the two projections (+7% for Hillary if she's up big, +6% for Bernie if it's a tie). Meanwhile, though Sanders won big in New Hampshire, by 22%, he didn't win as big as he should have if the race is a tie, which would've been 29%. Both states, therefore, imply a Clinton lead of roughly 6 or 7 points nationwide. Which confirms my feeling that those results were decent for Clinton, even though they looked pretty lousy. To be sure it's remarkably that Sanders is within 6 or 7 points nationally, but that's still a pace that has Hillary winning. If that pace holds, we should see Hillary winning by nearly 10 points in Nevada and by 16 or 17 in South Carolina; more likely we'll see a similar average result between those two states but highly disparate individual signals.

In any case, it's just something to keep an eye on, as a guide to interpreting each state's results.

That Confederate Flag at the South Carolina Capitol is Unconstitutional

And all the streets named for Confederate generals, too.

Unconstitutional, you say? Surely not; how does a state flying some ol' flag violate anyone's constitutional rights? The answer is simple: it's about what it expresses, namely white supremacy. (People try to deny that. They have about the same success as people who try to deny global warming, evolution, or that the earth is round.) So now let's ask: are state governments allowed to express white supremacy? No! That's an easy one. Imagine if the South Carolina state legislature passed a resolution declaring the white race superior to the Negro race (and all the other ones), and that society ought to be run as a racial caste system with whites at the top and Negroes at the bottom. This wouldn't deprive any black people of any material goods or tangible rights, and yet I don't think it's all that radical to say that this would be unconstitutional. Or maybe it is, I don't know. But it seems obvious to me. I think the Fourteenth Amendment requires all states not merely to treat all of their citizens as equals but to believe that all of their citizens are equals. In practice this means they're not allowed to do anything that signifies or evinces a belief in the inferiority of some citizens, even if that thing has no tangible, non-expressive effects. And, y'know, I think it's about as safe to say that flying the Confederate flag in front of your state capitol expresses a belief in the inferiority of African-Americans as it is to say that imposing a scheme of comprehensive racial segregation expresses that belief. Hence the unconstitutionality thing. If someone wanted to sue South Carolina in federal court seeking an injunction ordering them to take the flag down, I would say without much doubt that the injunction should issue.

And the same is true in principle of all the Confederate-named streets. The only tricky part is that it's not as clear, like, at what point the street names become an endorsement of white supremacy. Calling U.S. Route 1 the "Jefferson Davis Highway" throughout much of the South is a pretty clear violation, but surely any ol' Davis St. or whatever isn't. And is the rule that there can never be any streets clearly named for prominent Confederate figures, or just that there shouldn't be too many of them? I dunno, and trying to adjudicate these sorts of claims might be a morass into which the courts would be wise not to venture, given the minimal tangible stakes. But the principle of the thing is the same. Any state "celebration" of its white supremacist history, and especially of its Confederate history, that does not in any way acknowledge and repudiate the deep evil of the Confederacy and of the ideology to which it was dedicated is itself a tacit expression of white supremacy and is hence unconstitutional.