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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: March 2016

Trump and Cruz Can Together Control a “Contested Convention”

Many Republican Establishment figures are excited if nervous about the possibility of denying Donald Trump and Ted Cruz their party’s presidential nomination via the first “contested convention” since 1976, and the first multi-ballot convention since 1952. But the two candidates are making it clear they cannot both be shut down, as I discussed today at New York:

There’s a big problem with such scenarios, however, and it transcends the unilateral threats Donald Trump is making about the disturbances and defections his followers might generate if he is denied the nomination. A more basic reality is that together Trump and Cruz are likely to command a solid majority of delegates going to Cleveland, even if neither of them has a majority on his own. And if they choose to deny any other candidates a shot at the nomination, they can almost certainly do so.
Their most direct means of control is via convention rules. And as Politico‘s Kyle Cheney reports today, the two camps are already talking about working together to make it a “two-man race” to the very end:

Advisers to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz say there’s no way they’ll allow John Kasich to even compete at a contested national convention — let alone prevail.
Trump and Cruz are betting that their dual dominance in the delegate hunt will permanently box out the Ohio governor, who has no mathematical path to the nomination and is openly pursuing a floor fight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
And their aides say Kasich won’t even make it to the floor.
“There is virtually zero chance he can even be nominated,” Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan Republican national committeeman who’s advising Cruz on his convention strategy, told POLITICO. “It’s a two-man race.”
Their confidence is rooted in the fact that Trump and Cruz are nearly certain to control the lion’s share of the 2,472 delegates participating in the July convention. Together, they’ve earned more than 1,000 delegate slots to Kasich’s 136. And those delegates will ultimately approve the rules that govern a contested convention.

One possible means for excluding Kasich is the famous 2012 rule, enacted to thwart a discordant Ron Paul faction in Tampa, that a candidate must have a majority of eight delegations in hand before her or his name can even be placed in nomination. That would take care not only of Kasich (barring some late-primary pyrotechnics) but any dark horse as well. But the more abiding reality is that a convention makes its own rules, and so long as Trump and Cruz control a majority and continue to work together to force a “two-man race,” they can do so.
That’s probably true even if there are a significant number of “false flag” delegates who don’t really support the candidate to whom they are bound on the first ballot. They are free to vote as they wish on procedural matters such as the rules. But it’s hard to imagine there will be enough of them to overcome the combined forces of loyal Trump and Cruz delegates. And for that matter, if you had to figure who will be most successful in “stealing” delegates prior to Cleveland, it will probably be Cruz with his well-organized campaign, not the inchoate forces of the anti-Cruz/anti-Trump Establishment.

So Establishment fantasies of nominating Kasich or Paul Ryan or anyone else other than Trump or Cruz may be as unlikely now as this whole cycle might have seemed a year ago.


New Policy Re Anonymous Sources Can Help Spur Less Biased Media Coverage

A few months ago James Vega posted a strategy memo at TDS addressing the GOP’s “standarized strategy for manufacturing bogus Democratic ‘scandals'” most recently used to gin up outrage about former Secretary of State Clinton’s alleged email improprieties. The memo held the New York Times and other MSM outlets to account for allowing themselves to be manipulated by a “profound fear of reporting anything that contradicts the notion that both political parties are basically equivalent” and suggested strategies for Democrats to respond effectively. As Vega put it,

…Once the GOP grasped the fact that the mainstream media would not honestly report the fact that they were engaging in an asymmetric extremist warfare against the Democrats, Republicans realized that they could use the traditional journalistic standards for reporting information given “off the record” or “on deep background” to easily manipulate the press without fear of exposure or censure.

Vega cites proposals by Norm Ornstein, which gems can use to help prevent media from being so easily-manipulated in the future, including:

• Sources that provide information that turns out to be false and defamatory should lose any “off the record” protection whatsoever and have their identities exposed.
• Reporters should not be allowed to publish information provided by a source that refuses to allow the writer to honestly describe relevant information about the sources’ partisan ties and affiliations.
• Reporters or editors who fail at this fundamental public responsibility should face dismissal, suspension or other consequences from their publishers severe enough to dissuade them from continuing to abuse the public trust.

Vega concludes that “If editors and reporters in the mainstream media aspire to be objective, they can start by refusing to allow themselves to be manipulated by the GOP.” In effect argues Vega, “Failing to do this is represents the endorsement and support of pro-Republican partisan dishonesty in their reporting that is different from the partisan propaganda of Fox News and talk radio commentators only in degree and not essential character.”
Since Vega’s memo and mounting criticism against biased reporting that elevates bogus “scandals,” it appears that some major media outlets are doing some constructive soul-searching. In her Public Editor’s Journal article, “Tightening the Screws on Anonymous Sources” in The New York Times, Margaret Sullivan explains that “Times editors are cracking down on the use of anonymous sources…Although the policy does not ban anonymity, it is intended to significantly reduce…an overreliance on unnamed sources.” Further, adds Sullivan,

It requires one of three top editors to review and sign off on articles that depend primarily on information from unnamed sources – particularly those that “hinge on a central fact” from such a source…
The policy also requires any other use of anonymous sources to be approved by a desk head – for example, the ranking culture, metro or international editor – or that person’s immediate deputy. It also “underscores what has been our policy”: that an editor must know the identity of an unnamed source.
The new policy also aims to significantly “ratchet down the use of anonymous quotation,” Mr. Purdy said. It would make such quotation relatively rare. Too often, he said, such direct quotations allow sources to express “their impression, their spin, their agenda” without accountability. And, he said, they don’t allow readers to evaluate motive because they don’t know where the information is coming from.

Sullivan warns that “the devil, of course, is in the enforcement.” She notes that recent experiments using the new policies have been encouraging. More rigorous standards for using anonymous sources is a welcome change in America’s most prominent newspaper, and it’s likely that the better newspapers, and perhaps some electronic media outlets, will follow suit.
But no one should be deluded that such well-intentioned policy changes will automatically prove to be permanent. It will require constant vigilance and monitoring both inside — and outside — major media outlets against equal constant pressure from partisan scandal-mongers.
For now, however, give the Times credit for addressing the issue in a credible way. May their example be contagious.


Creamer: Diverse Electorate Can End Trump’s Threat to Democracy, Lead Democratic Wave Election

The following article by Democratic strategist Roberrt Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The rise of Donald Trump — and the events of the last week — have promoted serious discussion of the question of whether fascism can in fact triumph in the United States of America.
I do not raise that question simply as a means of slurring an opposition political candidate, or movement. I raise it as a technical, analytic question that deserves a serious answer.
In 1935, during the rise of fascism in Europe, the novelist Sinclair Lewis published a semi-satirical novel entitled It Can’t Happen Here. In the novel, a United States senator named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip is elected to the presidency, demanding that America return to patriotism and traditional values, and promising dramatic economic and social reforms. He argued that America needed a strong man to make the country great again.
After he is elected, Windrip imposes a semi-plutocratic totalitarian form of leadership supported by a paramilitary reminiscent of Europe’s brown shirts.
Now, 80 years later, the question of whether it could happen here once again confronts America.
Donald Trump, like the fascist leaders of Europe in the 1930s and their counterparts in South America in the 1970s and ’80s, argues that he — a strong leader — can “Make America Great Again.” Like earlier fascists, he addresses legitimate economic discontent by targeting international enemies, and internal threats that must be expunged from the body politic. In Trump’s case, the “internal enemy” is comprised of “illegal” immigrants who are “rapists and criminals” and who, he argues, take American jobs. But they also include Muslims — of any stripe. And, he doesn’t mind whipping up latent white racism wherever he can find it.
Like other fascist movements, Trump says out loud — and legitimates — the kind of hateful, violent language that was previously whispered only in the privacy of people’s living rooms.
And like previous generations of fascists, Trump frames his rhetoric in populist terms, while actually promoting policy solutions that would instead benefit plutocrats like himself.
And it’s worth noting, that while he doesn’t always use exactly the same rhetoric, Senator Ted Cruz shares many of Trump’s values.
It’s not hard to see why Trump has been successful in Republican primary politics.
Much of the elite media and Washington political class was blindsided by his appeal. But this is because many of them missed the central underlying fact of American politics: normal people haven’t had a raise in thirty years.
In the years 1986 to 2016, the real per capita gross domestic product — the best measure of the economic property of a society — increased 48 percent.
But virtually every dime of that increase went to the top 1 percent — and often the top .01 percent — of the population. Median household incomes barely budged. Measured in 2013 dollars, median household income was $50,488 in 1986. In 2013 it was $51,930.
There has been some fluctuation over the period. After dropping to $48,884 in 1993 — the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency — it increased to $56,080 in 1999. A year and a half later Clinton turned over the Oval office to George W. Bush.
Of course the economic record of Bush ended in utter catastrophe with the Great Recession. Since then, President Obama has built the economy back with a record 72 months of successive private sector job growth. But median household income still isn’t moving because the Republicans in Congress and the rules of the economic game still allow the corporate establishment to hang onto most of the fruits of that growth.
The iconic political result is the middle class Iowa focus group participant who said: “I haven’t had a raise in 30 years — and all of the growth has gone to those guys at the top, and all of the poor people at the bottom.”
Democrats Clinton and Sanders have answered by pointing to the 1 percent, the corporate CEOs and the wealthy — a political message which has the advantage of being true.
Trump and the Republicans have taken the opposite tack — whipping up antagonism to “immigrants,” “lazy people who don’t get a job,” and — frankly — anyone who is “not like you.” This of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth.
We know empirically the effect that increasing income inequality has on political polarization.
Several years ago, political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal published a study showing a direct relationship between economic inequality and polarization in American politics.
They measured political polarization in congressional votes over the last century, and found a direct correlation with the percentage of income received by the top 1 percent of the electorate.
They also compared the Gini Index of income inequality with congressional vote polarization of the last half-century and found a comparable relationship.
Economic stagnation is the breeding ground for fear, racial hatred and extremist rhetoric. That is particularly true if other forms of social change simultaneously cause people to fear for their personal meaning and place in the world. An increasingly diverse America, the redefinition in relationships between men and women, gay and straight, is frightening to some Americans.
Racism is not the same thing as racial prejudice. Racism develops where a group of people’s meaning and status in life are tied to their self-definition, as “not Black,” or “not Brown.”. If personal meaning doesn’t come from excelling in your work life, or economic success, it’s a lot easier for people to be convinced that they need to define themselves through race and nationality.
It is no accident that fascism arose in Europe out of the economic depression of the 1930s, and in South America in a period of economic stagnation.
And Trump’s ability to dominate the Republican political dialogue is also the direct result of the behavior of Republican elites — ever since the resurgence of the “Conservative Movement” in the 1980s and especially since the Gingrich “revolution” and the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency.
The GOP has been divided for decades into its social conservative/populist wing, and the business wing. In fact the business wing always called the shots — and used the mass wing of the party as cannon fodder to win elections so they could cut taxes for the wealthy, reduce government “regulation”, and cut trade deals that benefit huge corporations.


Political Strategy Notes

NYT’s Trip Gabriel explains why “Ohio Looms Large in Both Races on Tuesday,” and notes, “Ohio has emerged as a critical contest, the one large state voting this week where Mr. Trump appears vulnerable. A victory here by Gov. John Kasich would complicate Mr. Trump’s attempt to gather a majority of delegates needed for the nomination…On the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont hoped for a repeat of his stunning upset over Hillary Clinton last week in Michigan, as he hopscotched the Midwest to push his central message that American workers have suffered too much under trade deals.”
In the wake of the Clinton-Sanders debates, Jared Bernstein has a NYT Op-Ed explaining why “The Era of Free Trade Might Be Over. That’s a Good Thing.”
Alan I. Abramowitz offers “A Simple Model for Predicting Hillary Clinton’s Vote in the March 15 Democratic Primaries” at Crsytal Ball. Abramowitz notes, “A simple model based on two predictors — the racial composition of the Democratic primary electorate and a dummy variable for region — explain over 90% of the variance in Hillary Clinton’s vote share in this year’s Democratic primaries through March 8.” Abramowitz evaluates outcomes based on this model.
From Daily Kos Elections “Morning Digest: Can Team Blue retake the House in 2016? Only if they completely run the table“: “We rate just 52 seats as potentially competitive as of today, and the Democrats hold 16 of them. In other words, if Democrats hold all their vulnerable seats, they’ll need to sweep 29 of the 36 GOP-held districts we have on the big board to retake the House. Needless to say, this is an extremely tough task…However, a Donald Trump nomination could scramble the general election outlook in unexpected ways–just as he’s upended the Republican primary–so we could see more revisions to our ratings than we would in a typical election year.”
James Hohman’s Daily 202 notes “Obama could announce his Supreme Court pick as early as this week” and “sources tell The Post that the president has narrowed his choice down to three finalists,” including Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Sri Srinivasan, a judge on the same court; and Paul Watford, a judge on the federal Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
At The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza ponders “The Great Divide: Clinton, Sanders, and the future of the Democratic Party.” Lizza quotes Simon Rosenberg, president anad founder of New Democratic network, who adds “Sanders is speaking to a rising generation who want both a better and more responsible capitalism and a better and more ethical politics…Unrigging the system will be a central focus of Democratic politics for years to come–as it should be.”
Michael J. Mishak’s TNR post, “Have Republicans Already Lost Florida?” takes a clear-eyed look at GOP prospects in the November election the Sunshine state: “Once dominated by conservative Cubans in South Florida, the Latino electorate is growing more diverse and more Democratic–driven in large part by a booming Puerto Rican diaspora in the central part of the state. Nearly 400,000 Puerto Ricans have settled in the Orlando area, with thousands coming from the island each month. Still others are relocating from the Northeastern U.S., and they now make up 27 percent of Florida’s Hispanic vote. (Hispanics of other ancestry, such as Mexico and South America, now make up 42 percent, while just 31 percent are Cuban American.) Puerto Ricans in Central Florida played a key role in helping put Barack Obama over the top in 2012, though they also have a strong independent streak…Among these folks, the Trump message comes across like a warning siren.”
Eric Bradner of CNN Politics provides “Your guide to Super Tuesday 3,” and notes, “Clinton is all but assured of finishing her sweep of the South by picking up wins in Florida and North Carolina…The real battleground will be the Midwest. Sanders will try to replicate his stunning victory in Michigan last week by winning similar big, manufacturing-heavy, states: Illinois, Missouri and Ohio.”
Daily Beast columnist Olivia Nuzzi raises an issue Trump’s fellow Republican candidates would rather forget in her post, “Weak GOP Rivals Fail to Condemn Donald Trump’s Thugs.”


March 11: Is There Such a Thing as “Trumpism”?

As we all continue to mull the greater meaning of Donald J. Trump, it’s generally assumed he’s built a cult of personality for himself, and not any sustainable movement or point of view beyond a crude authoritarianism. But at least one left-of-center writer thinks otherwise. I discussed the topic at some length at New York, beginning with an observation about Thursday night’s subdued Republican candidate debate:

With the volume turned down, the emptiness and incoherence of Donald Trump’s approach to public-policy issues becomes especially clear. He’ll make good deals and will be lethally inclined toward America’s enemies (including, for the moment, global Islam, it seems). Even on the one topic where he seemed to have a new thought — supporting the deployment of ground troops to fight ISIS — no reason was given for the change in position, other than a sort of gut feeling it would be necessary to “destroy ISIS.”
Everyone understands that Trump is exploiting a rich and very real vein of public sentiment, centered in but not limited to white working-class folk who may have voted Republican in the past but never shared the economic and foreign-policy views of the business and movement-conservative elites who run the GOP. Some optimistically view this Trump constituency as an addition to the Republican coalition; I think it’s mostly elements of the existing coalition that are threatening to leave unless the party changes. Either way, does this all go away if Trump loses or gets bored and goes back to different modes of brand promotion?
You might think so, but a certain erudite if occasionally cranky polymath and thinker, New America’s Michael Lind, believes there’s something we can call Trumpism, and it’s the future of conservative politics. Here’s how Lind boils it down in a piece on Trump as “the perfect populist” at Politico:

It remains to be seen whether Trump can win the Republican nomination, much less the White House. But whatever becomes of his candidacy, it seems likely that his campaign will prove to be just one of many episodes in the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national populist movements, such as the National Front in France and the United Kingdom Independence Party in Britain. Unlike Goldwater, who spearheaded an already-existing alliance consisting of National Review, Modern Age, and Young Americans for Freedom, Trump has followers but no supportive structure of policy experts and journalists. But it seems likely that some Republican experts and editors, seeking to appeal to his voters in the future, will promote a Trump-like national populist synthesis of middle-class social insurance plus immigration restriction and foreign policy realpolitik,through conventional policy papers and op-eds rather than blustering speeches and tweets.

Now, that’s a fascinating prospect, isn’t it? The entire conservative policy and messaging edifice, the product of hundreds of billions of dollars of investments and many years of development, employing God knows how many thinkers, researchers, gabbers, and writers, replaced by an infrastructure devoted to making Trumpism not just a brand or an epithet but a whole way of thinking about public life.
Where this would all come from is a mystery. The Trump campaign itself is a strange assortment of personal retainers, hired guns, and the occasional public figure reeking of brimstone after climbing aboard Trump’s bandwagon out of what appears to be sheer opportunism. When you look at a guy like Sam Clovis — the intellectually well-regarded Iowa “constitutional conservative” who abandoned Rick Perry’s sinking ship last summer and signed on with Trump as “senior policy adviser” — you see someone who’s probably winging it as much as the Donald himself. So the question abides: Does Trump represent anything larger than himself (not that he could imagine it!)? Is he the harbinger of some “national populist” movement that will kick conventional conservatism to the curb, or just (like many right-wing demagogues before him) the vehicle for the occasional rage that seizes people furious with change?
It’s hard to say…. If Trump is somehow elected president, the challenges of actual power may domesticate him and make him a real Republican. Without question, the prestige of the presidency and its vast patronage inside and outside government would stimulate the kind of interest in developing Trumpism that Michael Lind expects. If he wins the Republican nomination but then loses the general election, it’s far more likely the right will turn the whole Trump phenomenon into an object lesson about the consequences of irresponsibility and ideological laxity.
And if Trump can’t even make it to Cleveland and seize the nomination with all of the things working in his favor at present, he’ll become just another loser, and no more likely to become the founding father of a new ideology than Rick Santorum. So don’t hold your breath waiting for the development of Trumpism until and unless Trump takes the oath of office as president. But then we’d have more things to worry about than the future shape of center-right thinking, wouldn’t we?

Democrats need to work hard to make sure it does not come to that.


Is There Such a Thing as “Trumpism”?

As we all continue to mull the greater meaning of Donald J. Trump, it’s generally assumed he’s built a cult of personality for himself, and not any sustainable movement or point of view beyond a crude authoritarianism. But at least one left-of-center writer thinks otherwise. I discussed the topic at some length at New York, beginning with an observation about Thursday night’s subdued Republican candidate debate:

With the volume turned down, the emptiness and incoherence of Donald Trump’s approach to public-policy issues becomes especially clear. He’ll make good deals and will be lethally inclined toward America’s enemies (including, for the moment, global Islam, it seems). Even on the one topic where he seemed to have a new thought — supporting the deployment of ground troops to fight ISIS — no reason was given for the change in position, other than a sort of gut feeling it would be necessary to “destroy ISIS.”
Everyone understands that Trump is exploiting a rich and very real vein of public sentiment, centered in but not limited to white working-class folk who may have voted Republican in the past but never shared the economic and foreign-policy views of the business and movement-conservative elites who run the GOP. Some optimistically view this Trump constituency as an addition to the Republican coalition; I think it’s mostly elements of the existing coalition that are threatening to leave unless the party changes. Either way, does this all go away if Trump loses or gets bored and goes back to different modes of brand promotion?
You might think so, but a certain erudite if occasionally cranky polymath and thinker, New America’s Michael Lind, believes there’s something we can call Trumpism, and it’s the future of conservative politics. Here’s how Lind boils it down in a piece on Trump as “the perfect populist” at Politico:

It remains to be seen whether Trump can win the Republican nomination, much less the White House. But whatever becomes of his candidacy, it seems likely that his campaign will prove to be just one of many episodes in the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national populist movements, such as the National Front in France and the United Kingdom Independence Party in Britain. Unlike Goldwater, who spearheaded an already-existing alliance consisting of National Review, Modern Age, and Young Americans for Freedom, Trump has followers but no supportive structure of policy experts and journalists. But it seems likely that some Republican experts and editors, seeking to appeal to his voters in the future, will promote a Trump-like national populist synthesis of middle-class social insurance plus immigration restriction and foreign policy realpolitik,through conventional policy papers and op-eds rather than blustering speeches and tweets.

Now, that’s a fascinating prospect, isn’t it? The entire conservative policy and messaging edifice, the product of hundreds of billions of dollars of investments and many years of development, employing God knows how many thinkers, researchers, gabbers, and writers, replaced by an infrastructure devoted to making Trumpism not just a brand or an epithet but a whole way of thinking about public life.
Where this would all come from is a mystery. The Trump campaign itself is a strange assortment of personal retainers, hired guns, and the occasional public figure reeking of brimstone after climbing aboard Trump’s bandwagon out of what appears to be sheer opportunism. When you look at a guy like Sam Clovis — the intellectually well-regarded Iowa “constitutional conservative” who abandoned Rick Perry’s sinking ship last summer and signed on with Trump as “senior policy adviser” — you see someone who’s probably winging it as much as the Donald himself. So the question abides: Does Trump represent anything larger than himself (not that he could imagine it!)? Is he the harbinger of some “national populist” movement that will kick conventional conservatism to the curb, or just (like many right-wing demagogues before him) the vehicle for the occasional rage that seizes people furious with change?
It’s hard to say…. If Trump is somehow elected president, the challenges of actual power may domesticate him and make him a real Republican. Without question, the prestige of the presidency and its vast patronage inside and outside government would stimulate the kind of interest in developing Trumpism that Michael Lind expects. If he wins the Republican nomination but then loses the general election, it’s far more likely the right will turn the whole Trump phenomenon into an object lesson about the consequences of irresponsibility and ideological laxity.
And if Trump can’t even make it to Cleveland and seize the nomination with all of the things working in his favor at present, he’ll become just another loser, and no more likely to become the founding father of a new ideology than Rick Santorum. So don’t hold your breath waiting for the development of Trumpism until and unless Trump takes the oath of office as president. But then we’d have more things to worry about than the future shape of center-right thinking, wouldn’t we?

Democrats need to work hard to make sure it does not come to that.


Krugman: Has Protectionism’s Political Moment Arrived?

Paul Krugman has what may well be the best column you will find about the politics of trade in the 2016 presidential elections. Anyone with interest in this issue should read the whole thing. A couple of excerpts:

The Sanders win defied all the polls, and nobody really knows why. But a widespread guess is that his attacks on trade agreements resonated with a broader audience than his attacks on Wall Street; and this message was especially powerful in Michigan, the former auto superpower. And while I hate attempts to claim symmetry between the parties — Trump is trying to become America’s Mussolini, Sanders at worst America’s Michael Foot — Trump has been tilling some of the same ground. So here’s the question: is the backlash against globalization finally getting real political traction?

If so, we can expect tweaks in messaging on the part of presidential, and perhaps down-ballot, candidates to amp up their protectionist cred. Krugman cautions, however:

You do want to be careful about announcing a political moment, given how many such proclamations turn out to be ludicrous. Remember the libertarian moment? The reformocon moment? Still, a protectionist backlash, like an immigration backlash, is one of those things where the puzzle has been how long it was in coming. And maybe the time is now.

Krugman critiques the overstated arguments of protectionists and globalists alike, and notes the limited ability of the candidates to do what they say about managing global trade. He concludes, however, by expressing his strong belief that “the case for more trade agreements — including TPP, which hasn’t happened yet — is very, very weak. And if a progressive makes it to the White House, she should devote no political capital whatsoever to such things.”
A sobering thought for voters — and for the leading candidates as they compete to win the support of American workers, a great many of whom have become deeply distrustful of U.S. trade policy.


March 10: Battle of the Republican Establishments

In all the talk about Trump battling the Republican Establishment, a major source of confusion is the failure to understand that there are actually two Republican Establishments that hate Donald Trump but can’t quite agree on a strategy to stop him. I wrote about this topic at New York earlier this week:

The day after Super Tuesday, Mitt Romney (as the immediate past nominee of a nongoverning party, he would have once been called the “titular head” of the GOP) laid out the Republican Establishment’s game plan for stopping Donald Trump.

If the other candidates can find some common ground, I believe we can nominate a person who can win the general election and who will represent the values and policies of conservatism. Given the current delegate selection process, that means that I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and for John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state.

Everybody outside TrumpWorld was onboard, right? Wrong. Especially following the March 5 caucuses and primaries, when he solidified his second-place position in delegates, Ted Cruz and his backers made it clear they believe the most efficient method of stopping Trump is for Republicans to unite behind his own candidacy. It’s Marco Rubio’s “anti-Trump consolidation” theory adopted by another candidate now that Rubio is struggling to survive. And thus with most of the Republican Establishment digging under the sofa cushions for funds to help Rubio beat Trump in Florida, Team Cruz was up in the air in the Sunshine State running anti-Rubio ads.
Was this a rogue action by a candidate not exactly known in the Senate as a team player? Perhaps. But more fundamentally, the strategic rift in the anti-Trump coalition is the product of two very different Republican Establishments: that of self-conscious movement conservatives, who find a Cruz nomination either congenial or acceptable, and the non-movement-party Establishment, which is as hostile to Cruz as it is to Trump.
The conservative-movement Establishment can be found in organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and opinion vehicles like National Review magazine. Their basic mark of distinction is that they view the GOP as a vehicle for the promotion and implementation of conservative ideology and policy position rather than as an end in itself. They are virulently anti-Trump (as evidenced by National Review’s recent special issue attacking the mogul) for all the reasons most Republicans (and for that matter, Democrats) evince, but with the additional and decisive consideration that Trump has violated conservative orthodoxy on a host of issues from trade policy to “entitlement reform” to the Middle East. Members of this Establishment do not uniformly support Ted Cruz; some are fine with the equally conservative (if far less disruptive) Marco Rubio, and others have electability concerns about the Texan even if they like his issue positions and his combative attitude toward the Republican congressional leadership. But suffice it to say they are not horrified by the idea of a Cruz presidency, and many have concluded his nomination is an easier bet than some panicky Anybody But Trump movement that at best will produce the unpredictable nightmare of a contested convention even as Democrats (more than likely) unite behind their nominee. RedState’s Leon Wolf neatly expressed their point of view yesterday:

Maybe you preferred someone who is a better communicator than Cruz or who stood a better chance of beating Hillary in the general. Sorry, but for whatever reason, your fellow voters have ruled each of those candidates out, and Rubio’s collapse this weekend pretty much put that nail in the coffin. It’s now a choice between guaranteed loser Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who might actually win.

From the movement-conservative perspective, it’s not Cruz who’s going rogue but instead elements of the party Establishment (including the members of Congress who conspicuously hate Ted Cruz) that cannot accept that it has lost control of the GOP this year and is insisting on a contested convention as a way to reassert its control behind closed doors in Cleveland. Party Establishmentarians are often conservative ideologically, too, but are dedicated to pragmatic strategies and tactics at sharp odds with Cruz’s philosophy of systematic partisan confrontation and maximalist rhetoric. And they are highly allergic to risky general-election candidates.
But there’s a fresh crisis in the party Establishment after the March 8 contests in four states, wherein Trump won Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii, Cruz won Idaho, and Marco Rubio won — maybe, it hasn’t been totally resolved yet — one delegate in Hawaii and absolutely nothing else. And new polls of Florida are beginning to come in that don’t look promising for Rubio. Even as party Establishment and even some conservative-movement Establishment folk pound Trump with negative ads, there are signs of panic. Most shocking, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, normally the most reliable of party Establishment mouthpieces and a big-time neoconservative booster of Rubio’s foreign-policy positions, publicly called on the Floridian to drop out of the race and endorse Cruz in order to stop Trump.
We’ll soon see if the divisions between the two Republican Establishments will quickly be resolved by the surrender of party types like Rubin. Some may instead try to reanimate Rubin or switch horses to Kasich, who has a better chance than Rubio to win his own home state next week. Still others may make their peace with Trump, or resolve to spend the rest of the cycle focused on down-ballot races.

In any event, time’s running out for the anti-Trump coalition.


The Battle of the Republican Establishments

In all the talk about Trump battling the Republican Establishment, a major source of confusion is the failure to understand that there are actually two Republican Establishments that hate Donald Trump but can’t quite agree on a strategy to stop him. I wrote about this topic at New York earlier this week:

The day after Super Tuesday, Mitt Romney (as the immediate past nominee of a nongoverning party, he would have once been called the “titular head” of the GOP) laid out the Republican Establishment’s game plan for stopping Donald Trump.

If the other candidates can find some common ground, I believe we can nominate a person who can win the general election and who will represent the values and policies of conservatism. Given the current delegate selection process, that means that I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and for John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state.

Everybody outside TrumpWorld was onboard, right? Wrong. Especially following the March 5 caucuses and primaries, when he solidified his second-place position in delegates, Ted Cruz and his backers made it clear they believe the most efficient method of stopping Trump is for Republicans to unite behind his own candidacy. It’s Marco Rubio’s “anti-Trump consolidation” theory adopted by another candidate now that Rubio is struggling to survive. And thus with most of the Republican Establishment digging under the sofa cushions for funds to help Rubio beat Trump in Florida, Team Cruz was up in the air in the Sunshine State running anti-Rubio ads.
Was this a rogue action by a candidate not exactly known in the Senate as a team player? Perhaps. But more fundamentally, the strategic rift in the anti-Trump coalition is the product of two very different Republican Establishments: that of self-conscious movement conservatives, who find a Cruz nomination either congenial or acceptable, and the non-movement-party Establishment, which is as hostile to Cruz as it is to Trump.
The conservative-movement Establishment can be found in organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and opinion vehicles like National Review magazine. Their basic mark of distinction is that they view the GOP as a vehicle for the promotion and implementation of conservative ideology and policy position rather than as an end in itself. They are virulently anti-Trump (as evidenced by National Review’s recent special issue attacking the mogul) for all the reasons most Republicans (and for that matter, Democrats) evince, but with the additional and decisive consideration that Trump has violated conservative orthodoxy on a host of issues from trade policy to “entitlement reform” to the Middle East. Members of this Establishment do not uniformly support Ted Cruz; some are fine with the equally conservative (if far less disruptive) Marco Rubio, and others have electability concerns about the Texan even if they like his issue positions and his combative attitude toward the Republican congressional leadership. But suffice it to say they are not horrified by the idea of a Cruz presidency, and many have concluded his nomination is an easier bet than some panicky Anybody But Trump movement that at best will produce the unpredictable nightmare of a contested convention even as Democrats (more than likely) unite behind their nominee. RedState’s Leon Wolf neatly expressed their point of view yesterday:

Maybe you preferred someone who is a better communicator than Cruz or who stood a better chance of beating Hillary in the general. Sorry, but for whatever reason, your fellow voters have ruled each of those candidates out, and Rubio’s collapse this weekend pretty much put that nail in the coffin. It’s now a choice between guaranteed loser Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who might actually win.

From the movement-conservative perspective, it’s not Cruz who’s going rogue but instead elements of the party Establishment (including the members of Congress who conspicuously hate Ted Cruz) that cannot accept that it has lost control of the GOP this year and is insisting on a contested convention as a way to reassert its control behind closed doors in Cleveland. Party Establishmentarians are often conservative ideologically, too, but are dedicated to pragmatic strategies and tactics at sharp odds with Cruz’s philosophy of systematic partisan confrontation and maximalist rhetoric. And they are highly allergic to risky general-election candidates.
But there’s a fresh crisis in the party Establishment after the March 8 contests in four states, wherein Trump won Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii, Cruz won Idaho, and Marco Rubio won — maybe, it hasn’t been totally resolved yet — one delegate in Hawaii and absolutely nothing else. And new polls of Florida are beginning to come in that don’t look promising for Rubio. Even as party Establishment and even some conservative-movement Establishment folk pound Trump with negative ads, there are signs of panic. Most shocking, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, normally the most reliable of party Establishment mouthpieces and a big-time neoconservative booster of Rubio’s foreign-policy positions, publicly called on the Floridian to drop out of the race and endorse Cruz in order to stop Trump.
We’ll soon see if the divisions between the two Republican Establishments will quickly be resolved by the surrender of party types like Rubin. Some may instead try to reanimate Rubin or switch horses to Kasich, who has a better chance than Rubio to win his own home state next week. Still others may make their peace with Trump, or resolve to spend the rest of the cycle focused on down-ballot races.

In any event, time’s running out for the anti-Trump coalition.


Political Strategy Notes

At The Plum Line Greg Sargent quotes from an interview he conducted with pollster and Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg, focusing on white working-class voters and Hillary Clinton’s prospects: “Michigan will end up making her a stronger candidate, both in the primary and the general election,” Greenberg told me this morning. “It will lead her to be focused more on change and the economy…This will enable her to unite the party, and compete for working class voters in the general against Trump,” Greenberg concluded. “She’s going to win. She’ll be stronger when she wins in the right way.”
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein of Brookings write, “”The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier–ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” That passage, which framed a core part of the argument of our 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, was vilified by conservative commentators, called a rant and a parody…Fast forward to 2016. Incredibly, Republican destructiveness is even worse than it was four years ago–and the party is paying for it with a surge of anti-establishment populism that is tearing apart its coalitional base…The Trump disaster, especially if it leads to a Democratic sweep of the 2016 elections, may provide the basis for a major rethinking and realignment of a deeply dysfunctional Republican Party.”
Naturally the media is full of let’s-you-and-her-fight yada yada about how tense and angry was last night’s Democratic presidential debate. For a more level-headed take, however, read “Anti-Trumpism Won the Democratic Debate: Both Sanders and Clinton went all-in on pro-immigrant policy, making a good long-term bet for Democrats.” by Pat Garofalo at U.S. News.
Lots of agonized hand-wringing from pollsters and poll analysts about the utter failure of polls in Michigan. Carl Bialik does a painful post-mortem in his FiveThirtyEight post “Why The Polls Missed Bernie Sanders’s Michigan Upset.”
Sorry GOP establishment whiners. Trump is not winning your decaying party’s presidential nomination because Dems are crossing over in the primaries.
For a more in-depth look at underlying issues presaging the collapse of the GOP, read “Why Donald Trump Is Winning and Why His Nomination Could Shatter the Republican Party” by Alan I. Abramowitz, Ronald Rapoport, and Walter Stone at the Crystal Ball. Among the authors’ observations, reporting on their national survey of 1,000 registered Republican and independent voters: “…We examined the relationship between Trump support and a variety of factors that have been identified as possibly explaining reactions to Trump’s candidacy: authoritarianism, nativism, and economic liberalism. The results…show that there were strong relationships between all three of these predictors and where respondents ranked Trump among 11 possible Republican candidates…In addition to authoritarianism and nativism, economic attitudes also predicted support for Trump. In contrast to most other Republican presidential candidates and, indeed, most other prominent Republican officeholders, Trump has sometimes veered from conservative orthodoxy on economic issues…If we combine authoritarianism with nativism and economic liberalism we get an even stronger prediction of Trump support…a Trump candidacy would almost certainly produce serious divisions among GOP leaders and voters, potentially leading to the election of a Democratic president and major Republican losses in down-ballot contests, including key U.S. Senate races.”
Need a lift from the political doldrums? Try David Nir’s Kos post, “In a miraculous set of victories, Kentucky Democrats keep their state House out of Republican hands.”
One of the stronger arguments for Democrats nominating Hillary Clinton is that her presidency would serve as a source of inspiration for more women to get into politics. It seems obvious, which may be why there has been surprisingly little discussion about it. I say stronger because the gross underrepresentation of women in federal, state and local elective offices is highly consequential. How can we have legislatures that do a good job of serving American families and children when women are largely locked out of the decision-making process? Of course all of the caveats apply, e.g. – women can be reactionary leaders too (Palin, Bachman etc.) and, yes, a progressive male is going to be more family-friendly than a right-wing female. But overall, we can’t expect balanced decision-making in our democratic institutions when women are only 20 percent of the U.S. Senate, 19.3 percent of the House of Reps, 12 percent of Governors, 24.5 percent of state legislators, and 19 percent of the mayors of America’s 100 largest cities? (sources also at: Center for American Women in Politics) Getting more women into elective office across the U.S. should be a much higher priority for voters. A Clinton presidency can only help that and the argument is made stronger by her impressive experience. When girls and young women see a woman leader in the white house, more of them will see themselves as potential leaders. America needs that.
You can make a case that the real “Super Tuesday” is March 15, when FL, OH, IL, NC and MO pick their delegates. That’s not as many states as the 13 on March 1, but it does include 4 of the 11 most populated states. Plus MO ranks 17th in population. That’s a big bundle of delegates, and it includes several major swing states. Further, writes Leada Gore at Al.com: “The day is particularly important as it marks one of the first times a winning candidate can take all of a state’s delegates. Past primaries awarded proportionately, with the highest vote getter getting the most delegates. The March 15 primaries include some winner-take-all states – Florida, Missouri and Ohio,” with FL as the largest of the 50 states to award all of its delegates to one candidate.