From Inverse: Watching the new anti-vaxx propaganda film with true believers.

From the NY Times: A look at global coral die-off.

From NatGeo: Mapping the war in Syria.

From Fusion: A strange horror story from the Internet Age.

As we remember Merle Haggard, we should recognize that a new generation of talented country artists are emerging in the world beyond Nashville. Here’s Jason Isbell covering the old Guy Clark song, Desperadoes Waiting on a Train, for Austin City Limits.

Before there was gangster rap or heavy metal or even psychedelic rock, there were The Outlaws. Johnny Cash got himself banned from the Grand Ole Opry for smashing the footlights while high. Waylon Jennings refused to play the Opry because they wouldn’t let him bring drums on stage. Willie Nelson’s very public embrace of weed and his ‘unconventional’ appearance left him on the outs with Nashville. And then there was Merle Haggard.

Raised in a family of California Okies during the Depression, Haggard launched his country music career after he was released from prison. The man was born grizzled. Nashville loved his sales numbers, but hated his image. Like the other Outlaws, his refusal to sand down his edges left him on the margins of the Nashville scene while smiling crooners in Nudie suits packed the Opry stage.

Cash wrote songs about drugs and murder. Nelson celebrated liquor and drugs. Haggard’s first-person experience with poverty and the justice system never left him. Like the other Outlaws, his music centered on pride, pain, and the struggles of people at the margins.

While stereotypical Opry performers like Conway Twitty and Glen Campbell scored hits with sappy songs about love, Merle Haggard crashed the country charts in 1969 with ‘Working Man Blues.’ His album, ‘Okie from Muskogee’ was a legend marked by stories about prison, alcoholism, divorce, and poverty. His two most popular songs from the album were anthems of white blue collar resentment, mostly aimed at the emerging Hippie culture.

Merle Haggard died yesterday at the age of 79. He will be sorely missed.

Cruz scored a big win in Wisconsin. It doesn’t look like much on paper – Trump still only needs to collect about 54% of the remaining 888 delegates in order to lock up the nomination – about the same position he was in a few weeks ago. So far he has been earning around 46%.

Wisconsin is important because Cruz shouldn’t have performed well there. Wisconsin is rich in the wrong kind of religious conservatives, serious Catholics. This suggests that the race is changing and the #NeverTrump crowd are starting to gain some traction. It also suggests that Trump might struggle more than expected in Pennsylvania and he might be weaker in New York’s upstate districts.

The race is pivoting into some of Trump’s strongest geographies over the next few weeks. If he can’t rack up huge delegate wins in the Northeast then he’s finished.

Though the outcome of Wisconsin’s primaries look pretty predictable, there is still an interesting data story to watch. It would be fascinating to see an overlay of Trump’s strongest counties/precincts with the areas where George Wallace experienced his greatest success in the ’64 Democratic Primary. Here’s the problem: I haven’t been able to find the data from ’64.

Anyone know of a source somewhere? All my usual goto’s have failed.

Here’s a nice backgrounder on Wallace’s surprise success in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland in the ’64 race.

Postscript: Here’s a breakdown of the counties where Wallace scored his biggest margins of support in the ’64 Democratic Primary.

Waukesha 45
Ozaukee 42
Marquette 41
Vilas 41
Waushara 41
Green Lake 40
Winnebago 40
Forest 38
Milwaukee 38
Shawano 38
Walworth 38
Washington 38
Waupaca 38

Ones to watch tonight include “crucial” Waukesha County, along with the notorious Washington, Ozaukee and Milwaukee. Big thanks to everyone who pitched in to look for data and MassDem who found the golden nugget.

***And a second postscript – Ted Cruz is blowing out Trump in the counties around Milwaukee where Wallace scored some of his biggest wins. No real correlation to speak of here.

It will be quieter than usual around here for the next couple of months. This is a very intense time at the day job, culminating with a big trip to Southeast Asia in May. It’s all great stuff, but it means a lot of link posts and short pieces until things settle down in the summer.

In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to post a retrospective. There may be several of these over the next few weeks. Many of the links below go to an old blog site that acts as a sort of archive of old posts. The dates on those posts are the archive date, not the original posting date.

Perhaps we should start with a list of predictions about the 2016 election posted over the years:

Feb, 2011 – Sarah Palin won’t run for President.

June 2011 – The 2012 GOP nomination is descending into an embarrassing reality TV spectacle.

September 2011 – Republicans are guaranteed to nominate a nutjob in 2016.

September 2012 – How Romney’s impending loss is setting up a GOP Electoral College nightmare (preview of the Blue Wall).

November 2014 – Mid-term election results demonstrate that Republicans are now locked out of the White House.

December 2014 – The GOP base will pick the ’16 nominee.

January 2015 – Why Jeb will probably lose.

January 2015 – Why Cruz should be considered the front-runner for the nomination.

December 2015 – Why Republicans cannot hold the Senate.

January 2016 – Cruz will win Iowa by 3-5 pts.

February 2016 – No one can avoid a contested convention. Trump cannot win the nomination without winning a delegate majority. Cruz’s superiority in ground organization means he has the best odds in a convention contest. The Red Wedding Scenario.

February 2016 – The dynamics of a convention contest.

From The Verge: Corporate Plutocrats are rescuing America…again.

From GQ: Lawyer defending Trump’s campaign manager once bit a stripper. I mean, who hasn’t?

From Quanta: Why Alpha Go is such a big deal.

From Quartz: Antarctic ice melt is a lot worse than we thought.

From Gizmodo: An MIT innovation that might replace passwords.

From the Texas Tribune: Texas counties struggle to survive the oil bust.

From the NY Times: California’s big experiment with the minimum wage.

From The Week: Why we are so hostile to one of our best friends: Doubt.

From The New Yorker: Dexter Filkins explores disappearing glaciers.

From Wired: Look on the bright side. Climate change is opening up new luxury cruise routes.

From Quartz: We’re about to discover whether Tesla will last.

From Aeon: Time for a more nuanced, evolutionary understanding of our immune systems.

Blue States are the epicenter of American capital investment and economic growth in the new economy. Republicans are supposed to the be the party of “big business” and commerce. Yet almost all new venture capital investment happens in Democratic-controlled regions. Only one city in a Red State, Austin, makes an appearance as a target of meaningful investment. And it is the most solidly Democratic stronghold in the South.

The unemployment rates in super-blue cities like Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco are lower than in Dallas or Houston and almost half the rate in Atlanta. Since the recession, California has absolutely swamped every other state in terms of overall job creation. The Bay Area is now the country’s undisputed wealth engine. Florida, Texas, and Arizona may be attractive places for the wealthy to retreat with the money they’ve earned, but if you want to get rich in our era you need to go to a blue city like Boston, New York, Seattle, or San Francisco.

So why are Blue States losing population in relative terms? Why does population growth in booming economies like San Francisco and New York lag behind poorer cities like Atlanta, Miami and Houston despite their economic vitality?

One explanation has to do with the fundamentally unequal shape of the knowledge economy. The rewards of success in Seattle or San Francisco are enormous, but it costs a lot just to get a seat at the table. And the industries generating this wealth are not like industrial age businesses. They need a few smart people with expensive, advanced educations, not hundreds of thousands of men wielding shovels or picks. That is a subject for another day.

What also burdens these places, especially the older Blue State cities of the North and East, is a heritage of ‘clientelism.’ To call it corruption is too simple an explanation.America’s big blue cities have inherited a culture in which incumbent industries and capital owners leverage a dense network of preferential regulation as a barrier to new competition.

This heritage may help explain why San Francisco is starting to displace New York as the global hub of capitalism despite its weaker access to the finance industry. It may also explain these blue cities on the West Coast are generally outperforming their peers in the Northeast. San Francisco is a relatively new city, with younger institutions that have less connection to 19th century clientelism.

Here’s a great explanation of clientelism, as defined by Princeton professor Francis Fukuyama, and digested at the fogbanking blog:

In this case we need to step back to “why corruption is bad”: it distorts economic outcomes in a way that we generally agree is not helpful, and it damages legitimacy of the government.

Fukuyama identifies two activities generally confused with corruption but are “not identical” to it: rent-seeking and “clientelism” (or “patronage”).

Rent Seeking: a rent is “the difference between the cost of keeping a good/service in production and its price.” Rents are driven by scarcity. Land in Manhattan is high in demand and low in supply, so rents there are high. Taxi licenses in New York are artificially low and thus pretty expensive, too. [All regulatory functions the government performs create artificial scarcities of some kind, so Fukuyama is careful not to indict all rents on principle or anything like that.]

Clientelism: Patronage is the reciprocal relationship of favors between a patron and client. Clientelism, to Fukuyama, is large-scale patronage, often involving a hierarchy of intermediaries. While usually considered a deviation from “best democratic practice”, Fukuyama considers clientelism to be at least a somewhat accountable (and, considering the natural pattern of human sociability, an incredibly common) situation. The setbacks to clientelism: a lower quality of government through nepotism instead of a more meritocratic bureaucratic model; strengthening the existing selectorate and dampens broader democratic accountability. Fukuyama suggests that poor citizens are cheaper to ‘buy’ than rich citizens, and therefore as countries become wealthier, the cost for clientelism spikes.

“The patronage-dispensing Big Man and his followers has never been fully displaced as a form of political organization up through the present.”

This blog seldom ventures into issues affecting the Democratic Party. Your fair author has little interest in matters over there. However, we are about to experience a generation of Democratic ascendance nationally and across most of the country. The single most vital issue that Democrats can address, the one that most defines the boundary between Clinton and Sanders Democrats, is the party’s approach to clientelism.

If the Republicans are at least by origin, The Party of Lincoln, then Democrats are the Party of Clientelism. There are benefits to this structure, as demonstrated by the ability of a competent politician like Hillary Clinton to resist The Politics of Crazy and defeat a political gadlfy like Sanders. There are also costs, like the way a patronage engine has successfully stunted the kind of political policies that a solid majority of Democratic voters wish to see.

Just dropping a thought on a quiet weekend, where perhaps it will send out tendrils.

Last July we started a GOPLifer comments-section pool to guess the date when Donald Trump’s campaign finally collapses. The winner would get a free copy of The Politics of Crazy. Here’s the definition of a ‘collapse’ for the purposes of the pool:

“Trump’s campaign is officially dead when his national polling average tracked by Real Clear Politics at this link, drops below 3% and stays there for seven consecutive days.”

Oh, what fun we’ve had since then. After dozens of entries, we are down to the Sweet Sixteen. Those folks who chose the calendar equivalent of “never” are starting to look pretty smart.

*correction – original post missed three entries.