[Politics] Has AZ always had these voting issues? Yikes!

About Hillary Clinton winning Arizona: she certainly did. She won early voting, which started weeks before Election Day — well before Sanders had started advertising or campaigning in the state — by 61.5% to 36.1%.

That’s awesome.

So what actually happened on Election Day? She lost the live voting 52% to 48%, with thousands of provisional ballots yet to be counted — the clear majority of which (and on this all pundits agree) will be votes for Sanders. These data were all available, this past Tuesday, simply by looking at Associated Press and New York Times live voting results and owning a calculator. Yet when they were reported by The Huffington Post as key components of the argument Sanders will make to super-delegates in Philadelphia once neither he nor Secretary Clinton have secured the Democratic nomination via pledged delegates alone, no less a “neutral” arbiter of this election cycle than The Washington Post sent its bloggers scurrying online to note, in a furious blur of one-handed typing, that Clinton’s exit polls in Alabama looked amazing six weeks ago.

Here’s the thing: Arizona’s live voting results wouldn’t matter so much if they weren’t part of a pattern.

Clinton won North Carolina by 13.8% — much less than the poll-predicted 24% — but only won Election Day voting 52% to 48%.

In Illinois, she won the state narrowly (1.8%) but lost Election Day voting. Same thing in Massachusetts. Same thing in Missouri.

She saw massive decreases in her polling (and ultimately victory) margin in the week before Nevada. The same thing happened in Iowa, which ended in a tie. Early voting in Ohio favored Clinton by more than 30 points, but she won the state by only 13.8%.

Those who saw this data pattern and asked, anxiously, “What gives?” — not conspiracy theorists or opponents of early voting, simply those who wondered whether maybe voters like Clinton less the more they see of her — were told (in another bait-and-switch that left many scratching their heads) that they don’t care about African-Americans or their votes.

Yet virtually all of us support Senator Sanders precisely because we do care, because — for instance — Sanders was arrested during the Civil Rights Movement and marched with Dr. King, endorsed Jesse Jackson for President twice, and has a 100% rating from the NAACP. He also never supported a presidential candidate who opposed the Civil Rights Act. Obviously the Hillary Clinton of 2016 isn’t the Hillary Clinton who campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1966, but here’s the thing: the Bernie of 2016 is the Bernie of 1966, and that’s a pretty great thing.

So this last criticism was both unfair and cruel.

The final word on electoral math, FiveThirtyEight.com, has Sanders at about 90% of his “delegate target” for winning the nomination via pledged delegates.

By way of comparison, that figure for Trump — the presumptive Republican nominee — is 96%. What’s striking about this figure is that Sanders is at 90% in this measure with the half of the nominating process that’s most favorable to him yet to come. Meanwhile, as of today Clinton is at her lowest point ever in this measure — 110% — and dropping fast. Things will get worse if, as anticipated, Clinton gets swept by Sanders in this weekend’s Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Moreover, the projections FiveThirtyEight.com has made for how Sanders will perform in future caucuses are, in retrospect, laughable. The website presumes Sanders, if he wins these caucuses, will win them (and their delegates) at a 55% to 45% clip. The problem is, not only does the structure of caucuses make such close results unlikely, in actual fact Sanders has been winning caucuses by between 35 and 50 points. Indeed, FiveThirtyEight.com has been so foolhardy about Sanders’ performance in caucuses that just this past Tuesday the website’s founder (and the nation’s top polling expert), Nate Silver, predicted that, in a best-case scenario, Sanders would lose 1 net delegate to Hillary Clinton after the votes in Arizona, Idaho, and Utah.

Instead, he gained 18 net delegates.

And his “delegate-target percentage” rose, after three relatively small states had voted, from 86% to 89%.

And the only news that came out of that “Western Tuesday” voting was: Hillary Clinton won Arizona.