I still have a bad taste in my memory from watching last night’s FBN Republican candidates’ debate from South Carolina. It was more prominent last night when I wrote about the debate at New York:

The Fox Business Network moderators led the Republican presidential candidates exactly where they wanted to go in Thursday night’s long debate by framing it as a response to the president’s relatively upbeat assessment of America in the State of the Union address. They begged to differ, and differed from each other (with one exception, which I’ll get to in a moment) mainly in their assessment of their qualifications to deal with a country besieged by immigrant-terrorists, refugee-terrorists, and rampant criminals; teetering on the edge of economic collapse; humiliated hourly by mocking, strutting enemies; and led by virtual traitors.
Ted Cruz, whose candidacy was already staked to the premise that conservatives can win the presidency without a single concession to anyone else, managed to ratchet up the high-pitched chattering whine of ideological extremism in his rhetoric via a closing statement that focused on Benghazi!, a pseudo-scandal that everyone other than the Faithful have written off for many months. Marco Rubio, his voice raised to a new stridency, is now routinely joining Ben Carson in blowing a Bircher dog whistle about Barack Obama aiming at a “fundamental change” in the nature of the country. He’s also now rationalizing his crabwise changes on immigration policy as a response to ISIS. Chris Christie, himself the target of attacks for being too much like Obama, suggested that massively expanded NSA surveillance could solve the problem of identifying “radical Islamists,” and sounded so much like a 1960s law-and-order candidate that you half expected him to attack the Earl Warren Court for taking the handcuffs off the criminals and putting them on the police. Even Jeb Bush, the only candidate to offer a real objection to Trump’s Islamophobia, seemed to suggest his rivals were mere paper tigers in assaulting the godless liberals.
A lot of the other exchanges — over Cruz’s qualifications to be president, and over his classic red-state demagoguery about “New York values;” and the Rubio-Cruz fracas over tax policy that seemed to revolve around the suspicion that a VAT tax was “European” — canceled themselves out or just reinforced the impression that these men had exotic preoccupations.
John Kasich shined a light on the dark landscape of America depicted by the debaters simply by coming across as a boring, standard-brand conservative. His suggestion that protesters against police excesses might have a point stood out like a Bernie Sanders protester (though Kasich’s mockery of Sanders’s electability might draw attention to the fact that no pollster has taken Kasich seriously enough to test him against Bernie!). We’ll see if this approach gives him an angle on a crucial slice of moderate voters in New Hampshire, or simply confirms him as the Jon Huntsman of this cycle.
In the end, the domination of the endless debate time by everything other than the basic economic issues you might expect from a business network showed how far into the fever swamps the GOP contest has strayed. When Donald Trump responded to the attack from host-state Governor Nikki Haley on “the angriest voices” by saying “I will gladly welcome the mantle of anger,” he did not stand out at all.

My New York colleague Jonathan Chait agreed:

Months ago, during the Summer of Trump, Republicans looked at the appearance of this gross, comic, orange interloper among them with a mix of shock and disdain. Fox News tried to discredit him as a serious candidate; nobody else onstage knew quite what to do with him. Since then, Trump has created facts on the ground, making himself an indispensable element of the party. He now seems completely normal.

And that is not a good sign for the GOP.

For a good while, Democrats have wondered how far back the rightward trend in the GOP would take Republicans. There are signs, as I discussed earlier this week at New York, that they are arriving at 1964 in their wayback machine:

For Republicans with a sense of history, chills might have gone down their spines at this passage from a Jonathan Martin piece in the New York Times about big donors warming to Ted Cruz:

What is more striking, and will cause deep consternation among Republican strategists, is that … donors are beginning to embrace Mr. Cruz’s argument that he can win a general election by motivating core conservatives to come to the polls rather than by appealing to swing voters.
Andrew Puzder, chief executive of the conglomerate that owns Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., supported both of Mr. Romney’s campaigns and has contributed to a number of “super PACs” and candidates this year, including Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. But after spending a couple of hours eating brisket with Mr. Cruz on Sunday at his campaign headquarters, Mr. Puzder said he was “very seriously considering” getting behind him, in part because of his appeal to the conservative base.
“I’ve become a one-issue voter,” Mr. Puzder said. “My one issue is whether somebody is going to win. My big question is: What is your path to a general election victory?”
Unhappily recalling that Mr. Romney won among self-described independents but still was soundly defeated by President Obama, Mr. Puzder said, “Part of the reason was that the base didn’t turn out to vote, and Senator Cruz understands that needs to happen.”

This is, of course, an argument a certain kind of conservative has been making for decades, back to and beyond Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign based on the idea of offering (to use the title of the pro-Goldwater campaign book written by a young right-wing activist named Phyllis Schlafly) “a choice, not an echo,” in repudiation of the Republican Establishment’s perpetual idea of “moving to the center” to win swing voters.
The cataclysmic defeat incurred by Goldwater drove this conviction underground for a while, and even the Goldwater veteran Ronald Reagan ran a conventional swing-voter-oriented “referendum on the incumbent” campaign in 1980. This hasn’t kept his hagiographers from remembering it differently, and so there has been a regular debate within the GOP over base versus swing-voter strategies ever since. Sometimes campaigns blurred the strategies, as in 2004, when George W. Bush’s reelection effort focused to a considerable extent on base mobilization, but only after four years of careful and systematic swing-voter pandering via Karl Rove’s famous initiatives targeted to married women (No Child Left Behind), seniors (Rx Drug Benefit), and Latinos (comprehensive immigration reform) — initiatives conservatives are still deploring to this day….
Cruz is the first viable candidate in a while who has gone wall-to-wall with a path to the nomination and an electability argument founded entirely on the theory that, when united and energized, conservatives can win the presidency on their own. Sometimes he strains his credibility even with true believers by talking of many tens of millions of conservative Evangelicals waiting to be called to arms as Christian soldiers by someone like his own self. Nonetheless, the quite factual decline in the number of swing voters and various theories of “missing white voters” have made the old-time religion of ideological mobilization tantalizing if not entirely convincing. Perhaps today’s conservatives think that a reincarnation of Barry Goldwater could win today and that the vast rollback of New Deal and early Great Society programs Goldwater demanded is still possible.
In any event, big donors and Republican Establishment opinion-leaders used to exist in order to refute such dangerous talk. If they are beginning to buy it instead, this could be a fascinating and dangerous year for the GOP even if Donald Trump is vanquished and then domesticated.

If Cruz’s campaign adopts the slogan: “In your heart, you know he’s right,” then we’ll know the half-century regression is complete.

2012 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico and more recently CEO of Cannabis Sativa, a marijuana products and licensing company, announced this week that he would again pursue the radically anti-government party’s ballot line. At New York I discussed the significance of the vaccum Johnson is filling:

Johnson’s announcement probably marks the sad realization of many libertarians that the mainstream political breakthrough, or “moment” (as Robert Draper put it in a much discussed New York Times Magazine feature in August 2014), they had hoped for isn’t happening. That’s because the presidential campaign of the supposed vehicle for that breakthrough, Senator Rand Paul, has made even Jeb Bush’s effort look effervescent.
It’s instructive to compare Senator Paul’s standing right now to that of his father — supposedly marginalized by his eccentric congressional record, unsavory associations, and peculiar obsessions — at this point in 2012. According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, Rand Paul is currently running seventh nationally with 3 percent. Twenty-six days from the first votes in 2012, Ron Paul was running fourth nationally with just under 10 percent. In Iowa, Rand Paul is tied for seventh place with 2.6 percent. Ron Paul was tied for second place with 17.4 percent at this point in 2012. And in New Hampshire, supposedly a very libertarian friendly jurisdiction, Rand Paul is in ninth place with 3.8 percent. In 2012 at this juncture, Ron Paul was in third place with 14.5 percent.
The whole premise of the Draper piece was that Rand Paul had taken the old man’s creed and modified it enough to make it acceptable to mainstream Republican audiences, while potentially adding some independent and even Democratic voters to an old white GOP base badly in need of new recruits. Instead, he seems to have lost some of the old magic of the Revolution, and more than a few voters.

Some Libertarians, who are notoriously uncomfortable with compromise, are probably happy not to have to deal with the temptation of a Republican candidate who has come from but appears to have left behind the True Creed. There’s always John Galt to cite as an ideal.

Ever since it became obvious that Donald Trump’s most compelling appeal was to non-college educated Republican-leaners, it’s been difficult for the so-called Reform Conservatives, a.k.a. Reformicons, who had been arguing for a GOP focus on this category of voters. Needless to say Trump isn’t what these conservative intellectuals had in mind, as I discussed earlier this week at New York:

It’s been just over a decade since two young conservative intellectuals penned a challenge to Republican economic-policy orthodoxy at the Weekly Standard after noting the GOP’s dependence on white working-class voters:

This is the Republican party of today — an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now “the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club.”
Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn’t just out of touch with the country as a whole, it’s out of touch with its own base.

Ross Douthat (now a New York Times columnist) and Reihan Salam (now at National Review) went on to lay out a policy agenda that they thought might finally begin to align the GOP with the economic interests of its middle-class, non-entrepreneurial supporters, focused on more generous child tax credits and other pro-parenting initiatives; “market-based” health-care reform; wage subsidies (as opposed to minimum-wage mandates); and a retreat from the Bush administration’s immigration policies.
Douthat and Salam expanded their essay into the 2008 book Grand New Party, and three years later, Mr. Sam’s Club Republican himself, Tim Pawlenty, launched an unsuccessful presidential campaign that mainly just looked like a bland effort to appeal to GOP voters across factional lines. But joined by others who began calling themselves “reform conservatives” or Reformicons (Ryan Cooper wrote a useful taxonomy of them early in 2013 for the Washington Monthly), those calling for a more middle-class-oriented domestic policy stance by the GOP (the Reformicons mostly ignored foreign policy) grew into a loose, if elite, faction that sought influence in various parts of the GOP. In early 2014, Reformicons put together something of a rough policy playbook under the sponsorship of then-high-flying House GOP leader Eric Cantor. And as the 2016 presidential contest took shape, Reformicons were found in prominent positions in the campaigns of Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Jeb Bush. Rubio looked to be the best vehicle for Reformicon ideas, given his youth, his warm embrace of “family-friendly” tax policies, and a Hispanic identity that made his sudden opposition to comprehensive immigration reform (an about-face that most, if not all, Reformicons supported) go down easier. Sure, Rubio’s tax plan gave trillions to corporations and wealthy individuals and relative peanuts to working-class families (a good reflection of the balance of power in the GOP), but it won plaudits for heretical courage nonetheless.
And then, like a very bad joke (You call that Sam’s Club Republicanism? Here’s Sam’s Club Republicanism!), along came a presidential candidate who represented what many in the white working class really wanted: not just a GOP Establishment figure who paid their economic interests lip service, but someone who violently opposed liberalized immigration policies along with the pro-trade, “entitlement reform” orthodoxy of wealthy GOP elites, and articulated a fear of cultural change and national decline that most well-off Republicans, continuing to prosper during the current economic “recovery,” could not begin to fathom. Worse yet, it seems Republicans’ best idea for “taking Trump down” was to show he is not a “true conservative” on economic issues. As Reformicons could have told them, neither are most white working-class Republican voters….
Could Republicans have headed off the calamity Trump may represent for them by listening to the Reformicons and paying greater tribute to the white working class? Maybe. But the other possibility is that we are seeing a long-suppressed explosion of conflict between Republicans motivated by cultural discontent and hostility to Democratic constituencies and those who actually buy into economic policies designed to propitiate wealthy “job creators.”

If that’s so, Trump is just the beginning of the GOP’s problems.

Of all the variables affecting the 2016 presidential contest, one of the more important is the extent to which the “Obama Coalition” of young and minority voters will stay in the Donkey column in requisite numbers. There’s some new evidence it will that I discussed at New York this week:

One clue (h/t Paul Waldman at the Washington Post) is provided by a new Reuters analysis of recent polling on party identification. Here are the most important numbers:

– Among Hispanics who are likely presidential voters, the percentage affiliated with the Republican Party has slipped nearly five points, from 30.6 percent in 2012 to 26 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, Hispanic Democrats grew by six percentage points to 59.6 percent.
– Among whites under 40, the shift is even more dramatic. In 2012, they were more likely to identify with the Republican Party by about 5 percentage points. In 2015, the advantage flipped: Young whites are now more likely to identify with the Democratic Party by about 8 percentage points.
– Meanwhile, black likely voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic, at about 80 percent.
Overall, the study shows, the Democratic margin in party ID has grown from 6 percent in 2012 to 9 percent this year.

These numbers should obviously not be taken at face value. For one thing, self-identification is not an infallible indication of voting behavior. For another, Republicans have recently been winning self-identified independents in competitive races. And for still another, there are obviously people who don’t vote for, or actually vote against, “their” party’s presidential nominee, though such cross-party voters have been declining in numbers rapidly of late.
The central question is whether the stability of the Obama coalition is attributable to what Democrats are doing to keep them happy or what Republicans are doing to repulse them, for all the GOP’s protestations of inclusiveness. If the latter is the case, Republicans might want to nominate a candidate (e.g., the relatively young Hispanic candidate Marco Rubio) with a fighting chance of mitigating the damage. If the former is the case, it would seem the theory that Obama and only Obama can keep “his” coalition together might be wrong, and Republicans have a bigger problem than the precise identity of their nominee.
Many Republicans would protest that even if Reuters’s numbers are accurate, they measure preferences, not enthusiasm, which will tilt results in their direction. I would observe that the numbers are based on Reuters/Ipsos polls of likely voters, so to some extent “enthusiasm” is baked right into them. Now, if Ted Cruz’s claim that 54 million conservative Evangelicals “sat out” 2012 and are waiting for someone just like him to vote for is somehow true, then such hordes of new voters would obviously outweigh any current voter ID advantage Democrats might have. On the other hand, if the Cruz theory is true, we are far, far beyond the realm of empirical evidence and rational argument, and perhaps the donkey party can mobilize elves and wood-sprites to offset the aroused Evangelicals.

Yeah, for those who are interested in data rather than spin, there’s no real indication so far that the Obama Coalition will crack next November.

Bernie Sanders has been spending some time lately arguing that he is the rare Democrat who can appeal to Donald Trump’s white working class following. It’s a fine idea. But his approach to them brings back some bad memories of past campaigns, as I discussed earlier this week at New York:

Remember “Bittergate,” one of the big but ultimately not decisive moments of the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating process? It’s pretty clear Bernie Sanders doesn’t, because he’s repeating Barack Obama’s much-repented mistake of condescendingly speaking of white working-class voters’ concerns on noneconomic issues as representing displaced anxiety about lost jobs and low wages.
On Face the Nation yesterday, Sanders had this to say about Donald Trump’s appeal to downscale white voters:

“Many of Trump’s supporters are working-class people and they’re angry, and they’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they’re angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries, they’re angry because they can’t afford to send their kids to college so they can’t retire with dignity,” Sanders said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“What Trump has done with some success is taken that anger, taken those fears which are legitimate and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims, and in my view that is not the way we’re going to address the major problems facing our country,” he said.

Compare that to Obama’s famous remark about the same kind of voters in 2008:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Other than the fact that Obama’s comments were made in a private Bay Area fund-raiser and subsequently leaked, while Sanders made his on national television, they differ mainly in that the former slighted the hot-button subjects of religion and guns while the latter limited his condescension to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim appeals. But in both cases you get a strong whiff of the ancient lefty habit of claiming the noneconomic concerns of economically stressed people represent a “false consciousness” actively promoted by the economic ruling class.
What should Sanders (and other progressives) be saying to less offensively make their case for working-class economic populism? For one thing, it would be helpful not to conflate quasi-economic issues with totally noneconomic issues, as Sanders does with immigration and terrorism. You can tell people that corporate power rather than “illegal immigration” is the reason wages have been stagnating without insulting them. Telling them they should be worried more about money than (in their view) their families’ and their country’s security against terrorism is another matter altogether, especially when in both cases you are more than slightly hinting they are bigots for listening to Donald Trump. Having a progressive answer to fears about terrorism — even if it’s to say such fears are exaggerated — is invariably better than changing the subject or implying that if you care about terrorism you are a conservative.
Barack Obama apologized immediately and often for “Bittergate,” and did not again make the mistake of appearing to tell downscale voters their professed concerns and beliefs show what dopes they are. But Democrats seem to need a reminder now and then, just as Republicans seem to need a reminder that their contempt for the poor and minorities is as easy to spot as Mitt Romney at a civil-rights rally.

Political analyses of the future prospects of the two major parties vary according to a lot of variables. But to over-simplify, some observers stress long-range trends while others focus on short-term events that could significantly bend future trends. A good example of the former has just been published by Peter Beinart at The Atlantic, and I discussed my misgivings about it at New York today:

Excessive faith in the inevitability of progress is one of the hazards of being a “progressive”…. Peter Beinart has written an election-year table-setter that political people left of center will be forwarding to one another to ward off fears of a Ted Cruz presidency or worse. Its title is “Why America Is Moving Left.” I wish I were sure he is right.
Beinart’s jumping-0ff point is his belief that though conditions might seem right for an old-fashioned law-and-order backlash to phenomena like #blacklivesmatter, liberalizing forces in both parties will prevent that from happening. Again, I’d feel better about that prediction if it rang true a few years from now.
One big factor preventing a shift to the right, says Beinart, is that the “centrist” forces in the Democratic Party, which in the ’80s and ’90s pushed for accommodation of conservative ideology, are largely gone. He speaks as the former editor of one such institution, The New Republic. I feel qualified to respond not only as a fairly substantial contributor to TNR for a while, but also as a former staffer at two other “centrist” institutions he mentions, the Democratic Leadership Council and the Washington Monthly. In Beinart’s view, the center-left discredited itself by enabling George W. Bush’s domestic and international agenda. While his account is oversimplified — the DLC, for example, attacked the Bush tax cuts pretty aggressively, though some of its congressional allies voted for them anyway — I’d say there’s some truth to it. But it’s also true that Democrats absorbed enough “centrist” common sense in the 1990s to make it possible to exploit the implosion of conservatism under Bush. And some of the ideas Beinart writes about as “centrist,” such as the neoliberal advocacy of means-testing big social programs (associated with WaMo), were not accommodations of conservatism but rather efforts to make more funds and political energy available for the truly needy. Unlike the kind of split-the-differences “centrism” that really has expired, there could be a future for means-testing, as suggested by Hillary Clinton’s habit of looking in that direction for new social initiatives like pre-K and paid family leave….
All quibbling aside, Beinart is obviously right that the Democratic Party is more consistently liberal than it has ever been. But the idea that it’s all part of a leftward trend that is invincible even within the Republican Party is much more problematic.
Yes, ultimately, the more progressive views of millennials mean that a GOP that has been trending pretty steadily rightward for four decades will have to adjust to reality, at least on cultural issues. And yes, the fact that many of the conservative movement’s most fervent causes — such as fighting universal health coverage or same-sex marriage or any sort of gun regulation — are not exactly sweeping the country means they will not have a cakewalk in presidential contests where the electorate is not skewed in their favor.
But that’s an influence, not a trend. Beinart believes any GOP general election candidate this next year will smell the coffee and appeal to millennials and minority voters by repudiating the hard-core conservatism that’s characterized the nominating process for so long. You sure would not guess that from the electability theories of candidates and analysts alike, who believe a supercharged turnout by the same old conservative coalition could prevail if reinforced by natural fatigue with a two-term president, a sluggish economy, and terrorist fears. Beinart also believes a Republican president would turn the page to the left. Yet the most profound reality the country faces is that a GOP president with a GOP Congress could, via the budget reconciliation process, repeal almost all of Obama’s accomplishments. The nascent and in many respects faint progressive impulses of the Reformicons are to a considerable extent just too little and too early.
Yes, in the long run there are forces that will build a wind to the back of progressives. But today’s conservative-movement-dominated GOP is too radical and too close to total power for anyone to take that to the bank. Some very reactionary days could be just ahead.

It really is going to depend on what happens next year.

After months of watching Donald Trump seize and maintain almost constant media coverage via out-there rhetoric and policy proposals, we have to wonder what’s next. I thought about that and reached a startling conclusion at New York yesterday:

Trump’s first big leap into the badlands of previously unmentionable policies was to embrace a “deport ’em all” posture on undocumented immigrants that others had hinted at and argued toward but never quite came out and articulated. More recently, he’s placed himself beyond the outer bounds of acceptable discourse on national security by suggesting the families of terrorists should be targeted and killed, and then by calling for a temporary ban on entry into the United States by Muslims (other than those employed, of course, by the Trump organization). With every such step, Trump seems to have found hitherto unplumbed depths of extremism among Republican primary voters, even as he shocked progressives, Establishment Republicans, and the mainstream media into giving him attention, often in the increasingly irrational hope that he has finally gone too far.
But where can he go next? I have an idea of where that might be, and it’s frighteningly consistent with what he (and his doppelgänger Ted Cruz) has said about national-security challenges generally, and the fight against ISIS specifically. It’s “Kaboom! Nuke ’em ’til they glow!”
Trump has shrewdly occupied that niche in conservative foreign-policy thinking populated by people who simultaneously oppose what George Washington called “entangling alliances” and the “no-win wars” America has engaged in since World War II — but who favor retaliatory military action against the country’s enemies so long as it is swift, certain, and as lethal as possible. Often called “isolationists” by their enemies because they mistrust diplomacy and drawn-out military engagements, they are naturally drawn to air power as the way to project force with a minimal risk of U.S. casualties or of the kind of quagmires that Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq turned out to be. And when pressed, these nationalists with an intense antipathy for “limited war” are prone to flirt with the idea of waging nuclear war. It’s the tradition that led many “isolationist” Republicans who backed Robert Taft’s opposition to NATO to support Douglas MacArthur’s proposal to use nuclear weapons against China during the Korean War. (In turn, MacArthur endorsed Taft’s 1952 presidential campaign against the conventional anti-Communist Dwight D. Eisenhower.)
It’s also the tradition that motivated Barry Goldwater’s criticism of LBJ’s “no-win war” in Vietnam in 1964, even as he supported letting field commanders launch tactical nuclear weapons. Nukes are the best and ultimate friend of American exceptionalists who hold the lives of foreigners in low regard and cherish the idea of the United States as a peace-loving country that will tolerate no restraints on its righteous use of arms once it is provoked into action. And even more obviously, the threat to go nuclear is the toughest posture a potential strongman president could possibly take.
Does that sound like Trump and his supporters? It sure does to me. The willingness to use nukes to make it clear messing with America is suicidal is entirely consistent with what some have called the “Jacksonian” tradition in American foreign policy, which has long exerted an emotional pull among the conservative white working-class Americans who arguably form Trump’s base. When he talks about destroying ISIS without getting into the kind of “mess” he says we created in past Middle Eastern interventions, and without respect for civilian lives, it’s a short if audacious jump to the tip of a warhead as the tip of the American spear.

Ted Cruz, who’s already talked about finding out “if sand can glow in the dark,” would probably follow Trump in this direction if he takes it. And if either does, another healthy inhibition in American politics would have fallen by the wayside.

It’s become a cliche that this election cycle is breaking all sorts of precedents. But it’s true, and one could become a biggie if it persists: the disastrous failure of Team Jeb Bush’s lavish paid media strategy. I wrote about it at New York earlier this week:

Unless his campaign really starts to cook, Team Bush is on a trajectory to become one of those historic profiles in futility that influence future behavior. And it could push the already crusty and embattled theory that you win elections by dominating TV airwaves with paid advertising right off the cliff.
The latest report from NBC’s Mark Murray (based on data from the network’s ad-monitoring partner SMG Delta) on ad spending by presidential candidates not only reinforces the general story of a disconnect between money out the door and invisible-primary poll standings; it specifically draws attention to the ongoing disaster of Bush super-pac Right to Rise’s massive pro-Jeb advertising campaign in the early states. Up until now, Bush’s allies have outspent the entire remainder of the field in paid media, with $35 million already gone. Nearly half of that is in New Hampshire, where Bush is currently in sixth place according to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, with about one-fourth the level of support of front-runner Donald Trump, who has spent almost nothing on ads. But the worst could be yet to come: According to Murray, Right to Rise also has another $28 million in ads in the pipeline. Unless Team Bush has already executed some big strategic pivot without anyone knowing about it, you have to figure they are for the moment almost literally doubling down on positive ads touting Bush’s fine conservative record in Florida, at a time when GOP voters have decided they really don’t like governors.
Right to Rise’s Mike Murphy, whose reputation is on track to become one of campaign ’16’s most lurid casualties, has publicly floated the idea of using the rest of his war chest to “carpet-bomb” everyone in the field other than Donald Trump, creating a Bush-Trump battle to the finish in the smoking crater of the contest. It’s not clear whether that was a dark omen of things to come, or a head-fake, or an indication that it’s time for donors to pry Murphy’s fingers off the keys to the vault lest Jeb Bush go down in history as the man who selfishly wrecked his party’s prospects in a critical presidential year. He’s already in danger of joining Phil Gramm and Lloyd Bentsen and John Connally in the pantheon of big-spending presidential candidates voters just didn’t like.

Bush really needed the modest praise he got after Tuesday night’s debate. With that and a few million dollars, you can buy an early state ad campaign.

Looking back at the last year, it really hit me that the fabled Republican Establishment has taken a very good hand and played itself into a big hole. I summed it all up at New York:

The Republican Party emerged from the 2014 midterm elections in fine fettle. Analysts competed to describe exactly how long it had been since the GOP had the kind of power it would exert in Congress and in the several states — pretty much everywhere other than the White House. And the White House itself, with Barack Obama about to leave office with poor job-approval ratings, a meh economy, and overseas crises growing like Topsy, seemed an overripe fruit ready to fall.
Best of all, the party elders appeared to have finally gained the upper hand in their battle with angry tea-party conservatives.They largely avoided the rash of primary defeats to unelectable wingnuts that cost them the Senate in 2010 and 2012, and even got candidates to attend special training sessions where they learned not to stumble into stupid comments about things like “legitimate rape.” The RNC’s 2013 “autopsy report” on the 2012 presidential loss that stressed the demographic importance of not offending Latinos, women, and young people had become the conventional wisdom. And in sharp contrast to 2012, it appeared the party would have a large and deep 2016 presidential field, led by candidates with impressive federal and state experience like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and John Kasich.
Fast-forward to the waning days of 2015 and of the invisible primary before the presidential nominating process gets very real and very fast. Far from debating the best vehicle for minority outreach, the GOP presidential field is being driven into a nativist, Islamophobic frenzy by a candidate nobody thought would even run. Establishment favorite Jeb Bush appears to be trying to decide whether to crawl off to (politically) die or instead use his super-pac to damage every other candidate not named Donald Trump in order to lift himself above a desolate landscape. The most viable alternative to Trump at present may be a harshly right-wing freshman senator despised by his colleagues who is stopping just short of embracing the entire Trump agenda.
It’s all gotten so bad that Republican pooh-bahs (including RNC chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) convened a “secret” dinner to plot a strategy to block Trump at the convention if his success continues into the voting phase of the nomination contest. This development was instantly leaked to the Washington Post, presumably by someone believing it would send a “help’s on the way!” message to Republicans worried about a party veering out of control. Instead, it produced this reaction (as reported by Talking Points Memo):

If Republican party bosses continue meeting to discuss how to derail Donald Trump at the convention, Trump won’t be the only one to turn his back on the GOP. Now, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson says he’ll leave too.
“If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning.
“If this was the beginning of a plan to subvert the will of the voters and replaces it with the will of the political elite, I assure you Donald Trump will not be the only one leaving the party.
“I pray that the report in the Post this morning was incorrect. If it is correct, every voter who is standing for change must know they are being betrayed. I won’t stand for it.
“This process is the one played out by our party. If the powerful try to manipulate it, the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next summer may be the last convention.”

So what was intended as a quiet session to explore ways to block Trump without giving him an excuse to run as an independent is already spurring anti-Establishment revolt that will feed the paranoia of “angry outsiders” while generating an open invitation to an indie Trump run from another candidate.

Can it get worse for these people? I cannot wait to find out.