RUTHFULLY YOURS

A terrible way to forecast the 2016 contest is to gauge whose supporters are the loudest. Presidential elections are not decided by partisans or ideologues.

The arithmetic is pretty simple: 41% of voters in the 2012 presidential election described themselves as moderates, and 29% as independents. Almost all Republicans (93%) and self-described conservatives (82%) voted for Mitt Romney, but that wasn’t enough. Even if Mr. Romney had won every Republican or conservative voter, it still wouldn’t have been enough.

Because there are roughly 5% more Democrats than Republicans, the GOP needs a solid majority of independents to win a national election. In 2012 Mitt Romney outpolled Barack Obama among independents, 50% to 45%. But that didn’t take him across the electoral college finish line.

It is safe to predict that the proportions that held in 2012 will be about the same this year. About two-thirds of the voters will not be Republicans. Thus it is vital to pay early attention to how each of the candidates is doing among independents. A long, drawn-out primary that forces candidates to make strong appeals to the party’s ideological base can hurt the eventual nominee in November

Hillary Clinton today defended a 2011 e-mail instructing her staffer at the State Department, Jacob Sullivan, to remove a document’s classified marking and send it over an unsecured line. “Headings are not classification notices and so oftentimes we’re trying to get the best information we can,” she told John Dickerson on Face the Nation.

“Obviously what I’m asking for is whatever can be transmitted, if it doesn’t come through secure to be transmitted on the unclassified system,” Clinton said. ”So, no, there is nothing to that, like so much else that has been talked about in the last year.”

Dickerson said the e-mail showed she was “very facile” in how to navigate around classification laws and asked, “You’re saying there was never an instance, any other instance in which you did that?”

Clinton replied that her instructions to Sullivan reflect “common practice” and then pivoted to attacking Republicans for throwing things “against the wall … to see what sticks.”

Dickerson followed with a question about another e-mail in which Clinton expressed bewilderment another staffer was using private e-mail to conduct government business — “which is what you were doing.”

Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal has been a difficult one for the public to understand and for journalists to explain. But Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who helped uncover Watergate 40 years ago, clarified things a lot on Fox News Sunday today when he said that an e-mail in the most recently released batch shows Hillary trying to “subvert the rules” that she expected others to follow.

A few days earlier, Joe DiGenova, a well-respected former district attorney for the District of Columbia, told The Laura Ingraham Show that “there is vitriol of an intense amount developing” in the intelligence community and that FBI agents “are already in the process of gearing themselves to basically revolt if [the Justice Department] refuses to bring charges” against either Hillary Clinton or her former State Department staffers.

It was the State Department’s data dump in the wee hours of January 1 that revealed a particularly eyebrow-raising e-mail from Hillary Clinton: In one note in February 2011, she expressed surprise that a State Department employee was using a private e-mail to conduct State business. She wrote this e-mail, seeming to express dissatisfaction at the employee’s use of private e-mail, on her own private e-mail server — through which she sent all her e-mails while secretary of state.

Donald Trump exemplifies one of the strange and lamentable dynamics in democratic discourse: People tend to have the strongest opinions on those things about which they have the least knowledge. Herr Apfelstrudelführer imagines himself issuing decrees that presidents have no power to issue, and he doesn’t seem to understand that illegal immigration — his headline issue — isn’t in the main driven by people walking across the Mexican border. He doesn’t seem to understand how laws are made or how government money is appropriated. He has, to say the least, a lot to learn.

Now he wants to launch a trade war with China over a trade deficit that he isn’t bright enough to understand.

This isn’t that surprising. Trump inherited a fortune, and, like many heirs, he’s a bit thick when it comes to the realities of money — my habitual comparison of him with Paris Hilton is not offered tongue-in-cheek. Those companies didn’t bankrupt themselves. Most of his success as a businessman has been in the entertainment business, and that’s a perfectly respectable racket, but I don’t want to see the troops saluting President Gwyneth Paltrow or President Kim Kardashian, no matter how much money they’ve piled up, and Trump is in essentially the same league, albeit with worse taste than Mrs. Kanye West.