FiveThirtyEight: What Bernie Sanders Meant

Of course, election results are only one way to measure a candidate’s success. I had argued before the primary that Sanders’s biggest impact might be to push Clinton further to the left on the issues. The jury is still out on how much Clinton changed her rhetoric versus her actual positions (see: the $15 minimum wage), as Dave Hopkins of Boston College pointed out. Still, there can be little doubt that Sanders changed how issues were talked about during the campaign. Clinton didn’t try to beat Sanders by tacking toward the center, as Al Gore often did when Bill Bradley challenged him in 2000. Rather, Clinton highlighted issues where she was further left than Sanders, such as gun control.

Sanders’s greatest effect on Clinton’s positioning may have been on trade. Clinton entered the race having once called the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement the “gold standard.” She ended up against it, even though President Obama, whom she hugged closely throughout the campaign, was pushing the agreement. Sanders was resolutely against TPP, and Clinton ultimately flipped to Sanders’s side of the issue. Sanders also got Clinton to back free college tuition at state colleges and universities for all but the top of the income distribution. [...]

Let’s start with the most obvious problem that Sanders ran into: He never caught on with black voters and didn’t improve with them as the primary season went on. Black voters are the base of the Democratic Party. Clinton lost without them in 2008 and won with them in 2016. Clinton won every state where black voters made up at least 10 percent of the population, except for Michigan.1 In the North, Clinton regularly won black voters by 40 to 50 percentage points. In the South, she regularly won them by 70 to 80 percentage points. When you’re losing by this wide of a margin among a voting bloc that makes up somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of your party’s voters, your candidacy is going to have a hard time winning.

Sanders also struggled tremendously with Latinos, who are growing as a percentage of eligible voters. Sanders lost every contest, except for Colorado, where Latinos made up at least 10 percent of the voting eligible population.2 Further, as my colleague Nate Silver calculated, Clinton won 16 of 17 districts3 where Latinos made up a majority, beating Sanders by an average of 32 percentage points.4 Simply put, the two most consequential minority blocs in Democratic politics didn’t feel the Bern.

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Deutsche Welle: With TTIP talks stuttering, free trade is reaching its limits

Arbitration tribunals, for instance, are a hot-button issue in Europe, especially in Germany. Such private tribunals give investors the opportunity to sue a government if they feel that a country's laws restrict their "legitimate expectations." The EU and Canada were able to overcome this hurdle in their CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) negotiations by agreeing to nix arbitration courts in favor of a permanent dispute settlement tribunal. But it remains unclear whether TTIP negotiators can strike a similar compromise.

The same goes for rules concerning government bids. There is a lot of money at stake, said Laura von Daniels of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. "Inside the EU, public bids amount to 16 percent of GDP," she said. "In the US, it is up to 12 percent." [...]

At the moment, too much seems up in the air to foresee an end to negotiations. On a visit to Germany in April, US President Barack Obama said he expected the agreement to be hammered out by the end of the year. But since then, the prospect of free trade has grown more and more unlikely.

It is even uncertain whether the already finalized agreement between the EU and Canada will enter into force, after it was decided that it will have to be independently ratified by all national EU parliaments.

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Vox: How Vladimir Putin is being outfoxed by a Chechen warlord

This year has seen a sometimes bizarre battle of wills between Kadyrov and the Kremlin, though. Kadyrov has been Putin’s man in rebellious Chechnya since 2007. He has made Chechnya a haven of relative stability in the turbulent North Caucasus.

This is, however, a stability bought with Russian money and Chechen human rights. More than 80 percent of the Chechen Republic’s budget is provided by subsidies from Moscow, which have turned downtown Chechnya into a shining, high-rise (and virtually empty) architectural testament to Kadyrov’s vanity and enriched him and his cronies no end. [...]

By daring the regime to try to find a new Chechen leader, he was in effect forcing them to acknowledge that they could not. At the time, a Russian security official told me that "if anyone there even hints that he’d be willing to take Ramzan’s place, the Kadyrovtsy would throw his body in the Sunzha [River] next morning."

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Politico: Polish media goes back to pre-1989

The larger fear among political opponents is that the government will next look to bring private broadcasters and publishers to heel, and is already eyeing foreign-owned media in Poland.

The changes at TVP came quickly. Journalists out of step with the new authorities were pushed out. Newscasts are now unapologetically pro-government. On Saturday, TVP responded to criticism of its news agenda by condemning those who had pointed out Poland’s constitutional problems during the NATO summit, with commentators calling it “foul” and “shocking.” Poland has been embroiled for months in a crisis over which rules the country’s top constitutional court should follow.

The new-look state television is bleeding viewers, but those who’ve tuned out aren’t the people PiS is trying to influence. Its main evening news program has shed 750,000 viewers since the beginning of the year, falling to 2.7 million people. Overall, TVP saw a 19.8 percent fall in viewers since Jacek Kurski took over as TVP boss in January, putting it behind two private rivals.

“I don’t deny that some of the viewers, especially those with liberal views, have stopped watching us,” Kurski, a former MEP and PiS politician, said in a recent interview. “At the same time, many conservative viewers from right-wing areas of Poland have returned to TVP.” [...]

What PiS is doing is not unusual. Even after the end of communist rule in 1989, democratic governments of both the Left and Right sought to influence radio and television. But the scale of PiS’s overhaul is deeper than anything that has come before.

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Fusion: How Bernie Sanders lost black voters

Demoralized by police killings, left even further behind by economic inequality, held back for generations by structural racism, black people were primed for a political revolution.

Sanders was ready to lead one. From the time he announced his campaign, in April 2015, his crusade against economic inequality galvanized a sleeping sector of the populace that felt left out of the political process.

But Sanders seldom trained that same impassioned rhetoric on the problems that so many black voters wanted addressed: police brutality, white supremacy, and the ways in which economic inequality is inextricable from race.

It may have been white privilege, or simple cultural ignorance of black people and our plights. The Vermont senator, who built a movement on lofty promises like universal health care and free college, dismissed reparations for black people as “very divisive.” [...]

What makes the accounts of the former Sanders staffers particularly troubling is that the senator, according to his liberal and mostly white supporters, was supposed to be the ideal candidate for black people. [...]

Sanders’ response reminded some people of the language of “All lives matter”: “It’s not just black,” he said in part. “It’s Latino. In some rural areas, it is white.”

Sanders was in a staunchly activist, anti-establishment environment full of people who were very much open to a candidate who wasn’t afraid of speaking truth to power. Yet he didn’t seem able, or willing, to speak about race beyond citing statistics on discrimination against black people.

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