The Deutsch letter cites no authority showing that this use of the JFC is not allowed, and it is hard to see what provision of the law it violates when donors give only small amounts that happen to benefit only Clinton. The letter says that maybe this is like an in-kind contribution from the DNC to the Clinton campaign, but I don’t see how it is that if the money is coming from the JFC not from the committee. The letter even says this means that those giving big checks to the DNC might thereby be giving more than the $2,700 to Clinton, which is not literally true—it is what the JFC is doing with the money, over which the donors have no control.

So legally this seems weak.

And politically, it is quite odd for Sanders, who would need the DNC’s support to win the presidency should be be the Democratic nominee, to be attacking the DNC. (Then again, Trump has relentlessly attacked the RNC, so this must be the celebration of the season.)

And yet, prominent Republican operatives are chomping at the bit to face Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont and self-described democratic socialist in the general election, believing he'd be an easier opponent than the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state.

"Republicans are being nice to Bernie Sanders because we like the thought of running against a socialist. But if he were to win the nomination the knives would come out for Bernie pretty quick," said Ryan Williams, a former spokesman for 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney's campaign. "There's no mystery what the attack on him would be. Bernie Sanders is literally a card carrying socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. There'd be hundreds of millions of dollars in Republican ads showing hammers and sickles and Soviet Union flags in front of Bernie Sanders."

"Hillary Clinton is a much more centrist candidate in comparison," Williams said, and she would have a better chance of winning over moderate and undecided voters, despite numerous polls showing that many Americans, even in the Democratic Party, don't view her as honest and trustworthy. "Bernie's numbers are better than hers right now because she's been in the political arena for 30 years getting beat up," he said.

...

Doug Heye, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said Clinton would be a tougher opponent due to her foreign policy fluency, "her toughness as a candidate," and the "Clinton attack machine" around her—groups like Correct The Record and Americans United For Change that are active on her behalf. He added that there's less room for the GOP to define Clinton than Sanders as "out of the mainstream."



"Her negatives are set in. There's no American out there who doesn't have a definite opinion on Hillary Clinton," Heye said. "That's just not the case with Bernie. The fact that some of his success has been looked on with bemusement, I think, speaks to that."

Believing that Sanders may be too far outside the mainstream to win the Democratic primary, the Republican National Committee is doling out reams of opposition research on Clinton, and virtually none on Sanders. (By contrast, the Democratic National Committee has continued to launch attacks on Kasich, even though he has no mathematical chance of winning the GOP nomination before the convention.) Still, the RNC's actions don't reflect its chairman's rhetoric about who it would rather face.

"I would rather run against Hillary Clinton," RNC Chair Reince Priebus said Friday on CNN. "I think anybody who's analyzed this knows that Hillary Clinton is in the ditch. We don't know how far into the ditch she is going to go, but she's not doing well."

'Win Every State'

Outside Republican groups have also focused their fire on Clinton. The Karl Rove-founded American Crossroads on Thursday launched a 30-second spot comparing Clinton to Richard Nixon, a move that could potentially help Sanders ahead of the contentious New York primary on Tuesday. In January, a Republican super-PAC ran a TV ad in Iowa that sought to boost Sanders with Democratic voters by touting his plans to offer "completely free" college education and to raise taxes on the "super-rich"—ideas that are popular on the left.


At a Republican debate in January, Kasich joked that "we're going to win every state if Bernie Sanders is the nominee." The same month, RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer tweeted Sanders-friendly commentary during a Democratic debate and quipped that he was trying to "help" the Vermont underdog.

"Most Americans have only a vague image of Bernie Sanders," Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, said in an e-mail. "They see him as a truth-telling outsider, which they find appealing. It’s very likely that many voters do not know that he is a self-described socialist. Although the socialist label isn’t nearly as toxic as it used to be, it is still a big negative. In a 2015 Gallup survey, 50 percent of Americans said that they would not vote for a socialist."

Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow)

4/18/16, 4:16 PM
Just 2 give u a taste of the elitist/condescending/racist/absolutely preposterous steaming pile of BS in my inbox...

pic.twitter.com/21jQjQv9rx

Deep South to me is built on two foundations: descendants of slaveholders and descendants of slaves who then stuck around because they basically accepted that environment. The more intelligent African-Americans left the South and that is why their descendants are voting more intelligently today.

The Republican Territorial Committee held a joint meeting Saturday at a gun range in St. Croix, but the meeting erupted into chaos with attendees shouting over one another, calling for points of order, and at one point, Gwen Brady, an elected delegate, being allegedly shoved to the ground, according to the Virgin Islands Daily News.

This is just the latest in the civil war within the island's Republican Party where a fight over delegates to the 2016 convention in Cleveland has left the group in disarray.

Virgin Islands Republican Party Vice Chairman Herb Schoenbohm told the paper that Brady was “slammed against the wall and thrown to the floor because she objected to the Gestapo-like tactics of the V.I. Chairman John Canegata.”

Schoenbohm also blasted the location of the meeting, telling the paper that Canegata was "banging the table with a large ammunition cartridge being used as a gavel" and walking around with a "firearm on his belt."

Bernie Sanders’ path to the nomination has narrowed to a sliver, and Tuesday’s primary in New York looks like it will squeeze it further. But the Vermont senator was defiant as he made the TV rounds on the eve of the crucial contest. His message: So what if I lose?

Sanders’ campaign in recent days has downplayed the importance of winning the popular vote in the delegate-rich state, pointing to Clinton's once gargantuan advantage in the polls shrinking to single digits by some counts.

"Those are the public polls. The bottom line is, let's look at the real poll tomorrow," Sanders told NBC's "Today" in the first of three in-studio interviews Monday morning. "Generally speaking, polling has underestimated how we do in elections."

The Sanders campaign blasted out an email Sunday night touting new poll numbers showing the senator within six points of Clinton, telling supporters that a victory in New York would be "the most shocking upset in modern political history."

"Here’s the truth: we don’t have to win New York on Tuesday, but we have to pick up a lot of delegates," campaign manager Jeff Weaver wrote. "This poll shows that if we keep fighting, we may actually have a chance to do both."

Despite his day-long detour to the Vatican last Friday, Sanders maintained that his campaign was focused on winning New York but also laid out several preemptive explanations for why it might not. Among them: the fact that independent voters cannot participate in Tuesday's closed Democratic primary.

"Now you're on to a big issue. Nothing much I can do. It's bad New York state election law," Sanders said during a discussion on "CBS This Morning" on Monday. "What it says to the many hundreds of thousands or more independents who would like to vote tomorrow for me or for anybody, they can't participate, I think that that's wrong, and that does hurt us. 'Cause we win independent voters by 2 to 1."

Bernie Sanders’ path to the nomination has narrowed to a sliver, and Tuesday’s primary in New York looks like it will squeeze it further. But the Vermont senator was defiant as he made the TV rounds on the eve of the crucial contest. His message: So what if I lose?

Sanders’ campaign in recent days has downplayed the importance of winning the popular vote in the delegate-rich state, pointing to Clinton's once gargantuan advantage in the polls shrinking to single digits by some counts.

"Those are the public polls. The bottom line is, let's look at the real poll tomorrow," Sanders told NBC's "Today" in the first of three in-studio interviews Monday morning. "Generally speaking, polling has underestimated how we do in elections."

...

"Here’s the truth: we don’t have to win New York on Tuesday, but we have to pick up a lot of delegates," campaign manager Jeff Weaver wrote. "This poll shows that if we keep fighting, we may actually have a chance to do both."

Despite his day-long detour to the Vatican last Friday, Sanders maintained that his campaign was focused on winning New York but also laid out several preemptive explanations for why it might not. Among them: the fact that independent voters cannot participate in Tuesday's closed Democratic primary.