I was staring at some polls the other day and a question hit me: what if “electability” were more or less taken out of the equation in presidential nominating contests? I decided to discuss that hypothesis and its implications at Washington Monthly:

One of the solid truisms of contemporary politics is that partisan and ideological polarization has significantly reduced the number of “swing voters” in most elections–especially presidential elections where major-party candidates are pretty well known by the time the campaign reaches its decisive phases. That also means there’s something of a “floor” beneath major-party candidates given the higher percentage of people who will eventually vote with their party (even if they prefer to call themselves “independent”) no matter what. So even if, say, Ted Cruz is Barry Goldwater reincarnated, he would, if nominated, do a lot better than Barry’s 38.5%.
But what if polarization (and for that matter such “fundamentals” as the economy) is even more powerful than we realize, and the exact identity of the candidates is pretty much irrelevant to the outcome? That could have a pretty profound impact on the nomination process, wouldn’t it, especially in a cycle like this one where partisans are understandably very anxious to win?
We’ll, it’s just one general election poll in one battleground state, and I’m pointing to it strictly as an example of something that might turn into a trend later on–but a new PPP survey of Iowa has this rather amazing range of general election trial heats:

PPP’s new Presidential poll in Iowa finds a tight race in the general election for President in the state. Hillary Clinton leads 7 of her Republican opponents while trailing 4 of them, but in none of the cases are the margins larger than 4 points. The strongest Republican against Clinton in the state is Ben Carson, who leads her 44/40. The other three GOP hopefuls ahead of Clinton all lead her by just a single point- Mike Huckabee at 44/43, Scott Walker at 44/43, and Marco Rubio at 43/42.
The Republicans who fare the worst against Clinton are Jeb Bush who trails by 4 at 44/40, and Rand Paul and Donald Trump who each trail by 3 at 43/40. The rest of the GOP hopefuls each trail Clinton by 2 points- Ted Cruz at 44/42, Carly Fiorina at 42/40, and Chris Christie and John Kasich each at 41/39.

PPP doesn’t test Bernie Sanders against the entire GOP field, but the tests it does offer show very small differences between his performance and HRC’s (he leads Trump 44/40; HRC leads Trump 43/40;) he leads Jebbie 41/40; she leads Jebbie 44/40).
If this does turn out to be a trend, what do you suppose might be the psychological effect among party activists, donors and “base” voters? They’d worry a lot less about electability and a lot more about how much they agree with–or would benefit from–the ideologies and policies of the various candidates, wouldn’t they?….
[W]hile my knee continues to jerk in a negative response to the proposition that ideological candidates are the only true or honorable candidates–sometimes “centrists” actually do believe in what they are proposing–it is entirely rational for ideologically motivated players in the presidential nominating process to prefer the maximum bang for their buck should their party win all other things being equal. My point here is that we may be approaching the day when all other things really are equal between “ideologues” and “centrists” in both parties when it comes to electability.

It’s just a hypothesis, mind you, but it’s something to watch.

Though there’s considerable disagreement over the damage, if any, done to Donald Trump in last week’s first official Republican presidential debate, there’s no question one candidate is getting roses strewn in her path for her performance in the “Happy Hour” forum among those who didn’t make the debate cut. I discussed the Carly Fiorina phenomenon, and the glaring question it raises, at Washington Monthly yesterday:

She’s basically running even with Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio in the only national GOP poll (from Rasmussen) taken since the debates, as is also the case in a new poll of Iowa from PPP. She’s not quite so strong in another new Iowa poll from Suffolk, but is running ahead of Bush, Huckabee and Paul there. Hell, Huck was campaigning in Iowa at a time when Carly was still counting her please-go-away money from HP and thinking about launching a losing Senate campaign. So her standing is pretty impressive.
It will be interesting to see if and when her standing compels her rivals or media to begin challenging her extremely thin qualifications to become president of the United States. Yes, the whole GOP needs her for gender diversity and for launching toxic attacks on Hillary Clinton into the atmosphere without too much gender backlash. But at some point, if you’re Jeb Bush with your two terms as Governor of Florida or Mike Huckabee with your two-plus terms as Governor of Arkansas or Rick Perry with your three-plus terms as Governor of Texas, you might get tired of looking up the leader board at Fiorina while pretending it’s non-germane that she blew up the company in her one CEO gig and lost her one political campaign by a near-landslide in the best Republican year since World War II…..
Maybe none of this matters to Republicans looking for an “outsider” candidate who’s done more than her share of Power Point presentations and has a good personal story (including being a cancer survivor). But we’ll never know until the questions get asked.

Tick tock.

Yesterday’s two events on Fox News, involving all 17 Republican presidential candidates, offered quite an extended show. But Fox took a more aggressive role in shaping the field than any media operation in memory. That’s what I wrote about this morning at TPMCafe:

The Republican Party has famously missed most of the markers set out for it in the RNC’s so-called “autopsy report” in March of 2013.
[But] here’s one thing Republicans promised themselves to do after the last cycle that’s actually been implemented: partner with conservative media so that the GOP candidates weren’t being subjected to hostile questioning from “outsiders.”
So today we had the first official GOP presidential debate, and the seven-candidate “undercard” forum earlier in the day, both sponsored by Fox News. And they put their stamp on the events in a way that is almost certain to shape, if not winnow, the gigantic GOP field.
At the 5:00 p.m. “Happy Hour” debate, virtually all of the questions were framed from the point of view of a conservative movement vetting the candidates, beginning with a battery about electability and exploring potential ideological heresies like Lindsey Graham’s openness to compromise with Democrats and Rick Santorum’s strange interest in wage levels for working-class people.
The candidate Republicans in general most wanted to promote to a higher tier, Carly Fiorina, was universally proclaimed the winner of the early forum, partly because she was one of two candidates who drew a question that enabled her to take a shot at Donald Trump even as she pandered to his followers. No one asked her (not in the forum, or in the extensive pre- or post-forum discussion at Fox) about her uniquely disastrous business and political record. It helped that Santorum, Pataki and Gilmore were clearly living in the 1990s, while Rick Perry returned to his inarticulate and gaffe-ridden 2012 ways. Bobby Jindal hung on to his prospects of serving in somebody else’s cabinet. All in all, it’s exactly what Republicans wanted from this event.
Fox News’ purpose in the main 10-candidate event was made plain with the first question: an in-your-face spotlight on Donald Trump’s refusal to promise not to run as an independent candidate. And the relentless pounding of Trump–on his bankruptcies, his past support for single-payer health care and abortion rights, his “specific evidence” for claiming Mexico has dispatched criminals to the U.S. (slurs about immigrants by other candidates didn’t come up) and even his sexist tweets—continued right on through to Frank Luntz’s post-debate focus group, designed to show how much damage Trump had sustained. It was by far the least impartial showing by debate sponsors I have seen, up to and including the disgraceful ABC-moderated 2008 Democratic event that involved a deliberate trashing of all the candidates.
The Trump-bashing agenda distracted from the other candidates significantly. In what may have been another example of Fox carrying water for the GOP and conservative orthodoxy, Chris Christie was invited to savage Rand Paul on surveillance policy and aid to Israel. Paul responded with a nasty crack at Christie’s famous hug of Obama, and Christie responded by citing the 9/11 survivors he had hugged (and that Paul had implicitly disrespected by objecting to warrantless wiretapping and so forth). On a separate front, Christie and Huckabee were invited to mix it up on “entitlement reform,” and they did so rather cordially. But these were the rare non-Trump points of collision.
The strange direction of the questioning made it hard to name a “winner.” Jeb Bush deftly handled a Common Core question. Scott Walker misdirected his way around a pointed question about his jobs record. Ben Carson gave some glimpses of the craziness of his world view (a reference to Saul Alinsky, an apparent dismissal of complaints about torture as–you guessed it!–political correctness), but recovered with a nice rap about his surgical successes in his closing. Rubio apparently impressed people who hadn’t heard his well-worn up-from-poverty story; he also covered his ideological flanks by denying he was for a rape/incest exception to a hypothetical abortion ban. And Kasich (who benefited from a home-crowd advantage) probably struck a chord with people who are not “base” conservatives and are thus open to his defense of his Medicaid expansion and his interest in people “left in the shadows.”
From the perspective of Fox News and its GOP allies, you’d guess the ideal denouement would be Trump crashing in the polls, to be replaced in the top ten by Carly Fiorina. We’ll see how avidly and universally the conservative spin machine pursues that outcome in the days just ahead.

One final note: it’s interesting the biggest strategic decision facing the GOP in the days just ahead–whether to pursue various “defunding” demands up to and beyond the point of a government shutdown–came up briefly at the early event but not at all during the official debate. It makes you wonder if there was a call from the offices of the Senate Republican Leader to Fox News poohbahs indicating a candidate feeding frenzy on that subject would not be helpful.
That couldn’t happen, could it?

After months of scheming and maneuvering to boost their national poll standings and thus qualify for the ten-candidate first Republican candidates’ debate on Fox News, the hammer finally fell on seven would-be presidents who did not make the cut. I talked about the implications today at the Washington Monthly:

Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore…have been relegated to a 5:00 PM “forum” on Fox tomorrow that will last an hour; the top ten will rumble for two hours at 9:00 PM.
One of the story-lines for the next couple of weeks will be the fate of the candidates who didn’t make the cut. Will the media start treating them like the Walking Dead? Will donors and previously committed activists abandon them? Will any of them see the handwriting on the wall and just drop out? Or could this whole make-the-top-ten obsession of the last couple of months turn out to have been a chimera?
You’d have to figure that three of the leftover candidates have a survival advantage. Perry has gotten off to a good start substantively and in terms of early Iowa impressions. He also has a lifeline to Texas and Christian Right money. Fiorina remains a candidate other Republicans want to push in front of cameras to savage Hillary Clinton without the appearance of male pigginess. And Lindsey Graham is this cycle’s clown prince, beloved by media for his jokiness, his moderation on some domestic issues, and his mad bomber hawkiness on foreign policy, making him a nice matched set with Rand Paul.
As long as Rick Santorum has Foster Friess willing to finance his Super-PAC, however, he can probably stick around. And what else does Bobby Jindal have to do? Govern Louisiana? Hah!
In the wake of not making the Fox cut, Team Jindal has settled on an interesting reaction: predicting Bobby will overwhelm the field with his Big Brain (per Buzzfeed‘s Rosie Gray):

The Bobby Jindal campaign likewise responded with a certain level of disdain for its fellow undercard debaters.
“Unlike other candidates, Bobby has a tremendous bandwidth for information and policy,” said Jindal spokesperson Shannon Dirman. “He’s smart, has the backbone to do the right thing, and his experience has prepared him well for debates on any number of policy topics. If anyone thinks they can beat him in a debate I’d love to learn about it.”

Bobby used the term “bandwidth” himself a couple of times during Monday’s Voters First Forum in NH. It’s apparently the new term for “smartest guy in the room,” which will probably be etched on Jindal’s political tombstone. He’s got all the arrogance of Donald Trump, but without the poll numbers.

Another theory is that the “undercard” debaters tomorrow will benefit from not having to share a stage with Donald Trump. If no one much is watching, though, the 5:00 PM forum will just be another place in America without a spotlight tomorrow.

One of the frustrating things about the immigration debate is that many conservatives have gotten into the habit of complaining about any solution to the problem of 11 million undocumented people that involves citizenship or even legalization. But when it comes to an alternative the Right typically changes the subject to “securing the border,” which does nothing about the 11 million already here. Mitt Romney articulated the implicit position of many Republicans in 2012–“self-deportation”–favoring harassment of suspected undocumented people and immigrants generally until they choose to go “home.” But that was a political loser. And so most anti-immigration-reform Republicans now shut up or stay vague on the subject. But this week, Donald Trump kind of blew up the conspiracy of silence, which I wrote about at Washington Monthly.

The Donald has done a signal service to public debate by coming right out and endorsing the implicit immigration policy of much of the Republican Party (per a report from CNN’s Jeremy Diamond):

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential hopeful who shot up to the head of the pack over his controversial comments about illegal immigrants, is finally starting to lay out an immigration policy.
Trump said Wednesday in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that as president he would deport all undocumented immigrants and then allow the “good ones” to reenter the country through an “expedited process” and live in the U.S. legally, though not as citizens….
Trump would not say how he would locate, round up and deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants he says must go. Instead, he deflected, saying that while it may be a task too tall for politicians, it isn’t for a business mogul like himself.
“Politicians aren’t going to find them because they have no clue. We will find them, we will get them out,” Trump said. “It’s feasible if you know how to manage. Politicians don’t know how to manage.”

Yeah, sure: it’s just a management problem, and any tycoon worth his salt can figure out a way via universal hourly traffic stops and police raids on workplaces and maybe house-to-house searches to “find them,” and then it’s just a matter of setting up a few thousand transit camps and deploying a few hundreds of thousands of cattle cars to round ’em up and “get them out.”
Estimates of the cost of mass deportation of the undocumented start at about $265 billion and range on up from there; one key variable is whether a sufficiently terroristic atmosphere would encourage some of these people to “self-deport,” as Mitt Romney surmised. Trump might even claim some of these folk will self-deport to get a prime place in the line to reenter the country as a permanent helot class if they pass muster. In any event, it would indeed make this country a very different place.
Now that Trump’s forced this issue right out in the open, it’s time for us all to ask him and other Republicans who won’t endorse a path to legalization exactly how much they are willing to spend in money and in lost civil liberties to implement their plans. No sense weaseling around and dog-whistling this issue any more.

We can only hope the subject comes up early and often in next week’s first GOP presidential candidates’ debate.

The heavy maneuvering among Senate Republicans to get a vote on a symbolic, sure-to-be-filibustered-and-if-necessarily-vetoed amendment cutting off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood in response to the series of videos an antichoice sting operation is generating sure looks like Kabuki theater to most Democrats. But it reflects a bit of a panic among Republicans dealing with the fury of antichoicers over the failure of the GOP to keep its promises. I wrote about this at Washington Monthly yesterday.

[W]ho really cares how far down the road to perdition the [Planned Parenthood defunding} amendment was allowed to proceed?
But for serious antichoice types, the answer to this question would be: We do, and thus the entire GOP we’ve been propping up for decades should, too. That’s pretty much the message sent by conservative columnist Emmanuel Gobry at The Week today:

I sincerely believe in the pro-life agenda. And it frustrates me to no end that even as pro-lifers have delivered electoral majorities to the GOP over and over again, the GOP has not kept up its end of the bargain. Five Republican-appointed justices sit on the Supreme Court, and yet Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land.
Early this year, the GOP failed at what should have been a simple task: Pass an enormously popular late-term abortion ban. Passing a bill that polls well, and is symbolically very important to your biggest constituency, ought to be the no-brainer to end all no-brainers. But Republican politicians couldn’t even do that.
And now, after the devastating revelations that Planned Parenthood routinely engages in the sale of baby organs for profit — something that is illegal, unethical, and disgusting on at least 12 different levels — GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell couldn’t bring himself to allow to the Senate floor a bill to defund that activity by Planned Parenthood. Why not? Because he wants to pass a highway bill instead — a pork-laden monstrosity that comes with the disgusting cherry on top that is the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, a corporate welfare program that free-market conservative activists particularly detest.

The road Gobry wants the GOP to take on abortion legislation will inevitably end at a government shutdown that will backfire on Republicans. And Lord knows Senate Republicans have used every code word imaginable to elicit a negative position on Roe v. Wade from judicial nominees, especially since the Souter “stab in the back,” but hey, the current fly in the ointment, Anthony Kennedy, was the appointee of The Gipper himself, the man who made uncompromising opposition to reproductive rights an unchanging part of the GOP platform.
But I guess if you think legalized abortion is an American Holocaust, as folks like Gabry often suggest, then you’re probably going to insist on results for your decades-long investment of energy, money, votes and agitprop. I mean, if anti-choicers can successfully convey the lie that they are only concerned about a tiny number of late-term abortions that “shock the conscience” of the casual, murder-tolerating Good Germans in the political center–when their real goal is to ban the vast majority of abortions that occur in the first trimester, that do not shock that many consciences–then can’t the GOP contrive some way to get the ball over the goal line? So that leads to the sort of strict liability, “no excuses” demand that Gobry issues:

We should rule with fear. For the past 30 years, we’ve been bringing a hymnal to a gunfight. The Tea Party has shown how it’s done: Don’t like someone? Primary them. End their political career. That’s the only thing politicians fear.
I’m done waiting. I hope you are, too.

Before you chuckle at the arrival of another intra-GOP fight over priorities, keep in mind that if Republicans win the White House and hang onto the Senate, they will indeed run out of excuses for saying “later” to their antichoice activists. Perhaps they’ll be forced to resort to the “nuclear option” to get rid of any possible filibuster against antichoice legislation or the next Republican Supreme Court nominee. As for said nominee, I think we will see an end to all of the dog-whistling about abortion; no matter how much it violates every premise of our legal system to pre-commit judges to a position on future litigation, we’ll see nominees who are all but visibly frothing to overturn Roe. In other words, if 2016 goes their way, the antichoicers may be able at long last to call in what I’ve referred to as a balloon payment on their mortgage on the soul of the GOP.

Don’t be surprised if the antichoicers keep Republicans hopping.

Something Democrats should keep in mind in trying to understand the opposition as that while we look at the last few election cycles and see massive discontinuity between presidential and midterm elections, many Republicans think of 2012 as a pure aberration in an upward spiral of support for them that reassume its strength in 2014 and is still building steam. At the Washington Monthly I addressed some fresh evidence that’s an illusion:

A lot of Republicans came out of their 2014 landslide fully expecting to keep the party going right into the presidential cycle. There were a lot of reasons to doubt that optimism, from the change to a presidential cycle with less positive turnout patterns for the GOP, to the end of a six-year midterm dynamic that was sure to fade, to an improving economy. But whatever changed, the evidence is growing clearer that the 2014 party’s over. Here’s some relevant data from Pew just out today:

The Republican Party’s image has grown more negative over the first half of this year. Currently, 32% have a favorable impression of the Republican Party, while 60% have an unfavorable view. Favorable views of the GOP have fallen nine percentage points since January. The Democratic Party continues to have mixed ratings (48% favorable, 47% unfavorable).

Part of the problem is that Republicans themselves are less enthusiastic, which is a bit strange since they are being offered the largest presidential field in recent memory. Perhaps it is the inability to blame Congress’ fecklessness on Harry Reid any more.
Interestingly, despite or because of all the shrieking among Republicans about the world being this terrible place where no American is safe, the GOP advantage on foreign policy has vanished since the last Pew survey on the parties in February, and its advantage on “the terrorist threat at home” has been cut in half. But perhaps most significantly, views of the two parties on economic policy are pretty stable for now.
Any way you slice it, any thoughts by Republicans that the landscape is tilting in their direction in this cycle really come down to the fairly abstract notion of an electorate that thinks it’s time for a change after the Obama administration. If contrary to that notion this turns out to be a “two futures” election in which voters are simply comparing the two parties and their candidates, the landscape just isn’t tilting Right.

There are some “ifs” in that last sentence, but then again, the last really boffo Republican presidential election performance was all the way back in 1988.

As James Vega noted in his last post, there’s renewed interest in the white working class vote this cycle–but you have to look at it from a number of angles to understand the dynamics of this vote. I discussed those different perspectives as TPMCafe today:

[I]n this presidential cycle, the fear that a nominee not named Barack Obama will fall short of his turnout and vote-share levels among the Obama Coalition has led to schemes of making up the votes elsewhere. And whereas Hillary Clinton has a plausible case she can boost the Democratic vote among women, other Democrats–especially supporters of Bernie Sanders–are looking wistfully at that old flame, the white working class vote.
Sanders represents the strongly-held belief of many progressives, especially in the labor movement, that a clear, loud and consistently articulated “economic populist” message can at least partially rebuild the New Deal coalition with its cross-racial, class-based sinews, particularly if “corporate Democrat” flirtations with Wall Street and professional elites are abandoned along with excessive “identity politics” cultural preoccupations that might alienate white workers. But muting points of identity with the Obama Coalition in order to pursue a purely class-based “colorblind” politics isn’t without its intra-progressive risks, as Bernie Sanders himself found out last weekend in Phoenix when he ran afoul of #blacklivesmatter protesters.
And while it is entirely unfair to accuse Sanders of white-working-class chauvinism, much less racism, he’s paying the price for being associated with an “economics first!” point of view that can fairly be seen as an obstacle for minority folk (and arguably feminists) who want a higher priority placed on challenging white male patriarchy in non-economic arenas. And so a candidate who hoped to draw white working class voters back into a coalition with minority voters has instead heightened doubts he understand the latter.
This is a test that Hillary Clinton, herself the object of some talk about a possible revival of white working class support (though largely based on her husband’s performance back in the 1990s and her own in Democratic primaries in 2008), may have to face herself at some point soon.
Beyond the candidates, there are some Democratic observers–notably a long-time expert on this demographic, Stan Greenberg–who believe the key to regaining a portion of the white working class is to identify with its hostility to government as corrupt and ineffective and offer a “populist” agenda that prominently includes political and government reform.
Despite their already strong standing among non-college-educated white voters, Republicans think there’s still political gold to mine in this demographic as well, in no small part because they are struggling to open up any really new avenues for growing their vote. Many are mesmerized by Sean Trende’s analysis after the 2012 elections suggesting there were millions of “missing white votes” in 2012 that helped doom Mitt Romney, mostly among “downscale northern rural” voters. This has led to a boom of “conservative populist” talk, some of it as superficial as non-college graduate Scott Walker’s endless paeans to Kohl’s shoppers, some a bit more focused on promoting the already-robust GOP anti-Washington themes, odd as they seem with Republicans controlling Congress.
One 2016 GOP presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, signaled early on that he would identify with white working class voters who were sufficiently integrated into the GOP to vote in presidential primaries but had not internalized Republican elite economic positions. Building on the “populist” rhetoric of his 2008 campaign, Huckabee announced he would oppose both the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and the “entitlement reform” proposals that are equally beloved of the GOP’s business wing. But Huck has so far run a desultory and poorly financed campaign mostly focused on hustling copies of his latest book, and tending to his conservative evangelical base by waxing hysterical on alleged threats to Christianity.
Into Huck’s lost opportunity has moved another candidate who opposes trade agreements and entitlement reform, along with the business wing’s solicitude for sanity on immigration policy, packaged in the form of the ultimate celebrity businessman: Donald Trump.
Trump’s shocking surge into the lead in 2016 Republican polls, and his possible return to earth after giving his rivals and the RNC an excuse to bring the hammers of hell down on him by disrespecting John McCain’s war record, has obscured his sources of support. Efforts to typecast his supporters ideologically, or in terms of prefab party factions like the Tea Party, have largely run aground. But it’s difficult to identify a better fit for Sean Trende’s “missing white voters”–downscale and largely non-southern–than Donald Trump. And a new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows Trump at his peak attracting 33 percent of non-college educated white voters among Republicans and Republican-leaners, as opposed to 9 percent of college educated white GOpers and leaners. (Bernie Sanders, in contrast, runs better among college educated than non-college educated Democrats against Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Democratic field.) Even if Trump quickly falls to earth, he has to be taken semi-seriously as a potential independent candidate in 2016.
And here’s the real shocker in that WaPo/ABC poll: In a hypothetical three-way race with Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, Trump pulls 31 percent of white non-college educated voters, dead even with HRC and just three points behind Jeb.
So who’s the white working class hero? Potentially it’s the Democratic nominee, if she or he takes Stan Greenberg’s advice. But let’s not discount Donald Trump, who’s a reminder that the white working class is now by the numbers predominantly an angry anti-elite constituency that doesn’t love GOP economic positions–but isn’t waiting to be invited back into the Democratic tent, either.

Along with all the campaign financial disclosures rolling in this week, we’ve begun to see some assessments of the organizational efforts of the two leading Democrats in the polls and in fundraising, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. You might think that Bernie Sanders’ grassroots enthusiasm might be giving him an organizational lead over the top-heavy and Establishment-oriented Clinton in the early states, but that’s not automatically how it’s playing out, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly:

Journalists are just now coming to grips with this, and there’s always a danger on such subjects of buying campaign spin. But there does seem to be a growing recognition that Hillary Clinton’s campaign differs from its 2008 predecessor because of a pervasive emphasis on organization-building in the states.
WaPo’s Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy come at the story from a different angle today, noting that HRC’s high “burn rate” for contributions is being driven by systemic investments in campaign infrastructure:

Details in the newly filed reports paint a picture of a campaign harnessing the latest technological tools and constructing the kind of deep ground operation that Clinton lacked in her 2008 bid. That kind of organizing capability has gained importance as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination, has drawn large crowds and gained ground in polls….
Clinton’s operation is paying rent in 25 cities across nine states, Federal Election Commission filings show. Along with about 340 staff members on the payroll, the campaign had hired nearly 60 field organizers by the end of June.
“It’s a sign that she’s approaching the campaign differently than the last time,” [David] Axelrod said. “They didn’t have as thoughtful an approach to laying the foundation for that campaign, and it ended up hurting them when it ended up being an organizational fight.”

At the “Politico Caucus” subsite, where there’s a sort of large focus group of early-state “Insiders,” the judgment is even clearer, per Katie Glueck:

Asked to assess what Clinton is doing right, and wrong, in their states, almost every Caucus participant — Democrats and Republicans — answered the question of what she’s doing right by saying Clinton has pulled together a strong staff and is doing all of the little things right when it comes to being organized for the early state contests and beyond.
“Doing right: building and investing in a monster field operation. Scares the hell out of this Republican knowing that many of those staff will easily pivot to organizing for the general election,” an Iowa Republican said.
“HRC is building a campaign rooted in organizing,” added a New Hampshire Democrat. “I’ve been to several house parties & campaign events and there are always new faces present — faces that weren’t involved in the 2012 presidential race. There is absolutely no one taking this primary race for granted whatsoever.”
“The organizing strategy is straight out of the Obama 2007 playbook,” an Iowa Democrat added. “The crew is enthusiastic and well-trained on the basics (pledge cards, pledge cards, pledge cards). Sanders and O’Malley will find it impossible to compete with the sheer size of the organizing.”
In New Hampshire, in particular, Democrats also largely lauded Clinton for visiting more rural parts of the state that are often overlooked. And across the board, her staff was praised for keeping cool amid the rise of Bernie Sanders.

Meanwhile, there’s also some recognition that the impressive enthusiasm that suffuses Bernie Sanders’ campaign is not automatically transmittable into a good organization, helpful as it is. At TNR earlier this week, Suzy Khimm suggested that the Occupy-influenced passion for decentralized political organizing could be a problem for Team Sanders:

Sanders is betting that passion will enable him to surmount the serious obstacles he faces in broadening his base of support. But that also means the campaign needs to find a way to corral popular enthusiasm into more traditional, on-the-ground organizing if Sanders wants a real shot at expanding his base beyond largely white, liberal enclaves. That means convincing more supporters to embrace a more centralized, hierarchical type of organizing, while still preserving the authentic, grassroots populism that Sanders embodies for his fans.

It’s obviously early still. But Iowa, with its arcane Caucus rules and high expectations for hands-on politics, will likely be the acid test for Democratic candidates in terms of organization. Hillary Clinton’s experience there in 2008 was horrendous; not only did she finish third, but Iowa depleted most of her campaign treasury for a while there. As for Sanders, there’s also a recent precedent that should be instructive: the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean, whose troops had all the enthusiasm in the world, but also finished third in Iowa despite huge numbers of volunteers, good poll numbers and endorsements from Tom Harkin and Al Gore.

In a discussion of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, which is gaining strength but is struggling to convince skeptics he has a realistic path to the nomination, I offered some thoughts today at Washington Monthly about electoral strategies that rely on unconventional coalitions and the risk they run of descending into wishful thinking.

If you are a political party or party faction, and you find yourself in what appears to be a durable minority position with the electorate as it currently exist, you have four basic options to boost your standing: (1) you can tailor your message to pick off “swing voters” (e.g., the median voter theory that constantly dictates “moving to the center”); (2) you can increase your appeal to the marginal voters who already support you but need encouragement to vote (conventional GOTV efforts), recognizing that the noisier techniques help the opposition turn out their vote, too; (3) you can somehow try to engage consistent non-voters who you think agree with you; or (4) you can reshuffle the deck by creating new coalitions that raid your opponent’s ranks without moving in your opponent’s direction.
It’s natural to the more movement-oriented and ideological party factions who hell no don’t want to move to “the center” and who recognize the shortcomings of conventional GOTV, to gravitate towards the third and fourth approaches. But while such “hidden majority” strategies may represent imaginative “outside the box” thinking, they can also represent wishful or even delusional thinking, too, particularly for those who simply don’t want to adjust their creed to public opinion and so are tempted to treat public opinion as an illusion created by The Man’s false choices and voters’ “false consciousness.”
A good example is the “libertarian moment” argument that someone like Rand Paul can draw disengaged young people into the political arena and/or pull liberal voters across the line via his positions on non-interventionism or privacy or drugs and criminal justice. As I and other critics have pointed out, young people are almost always relatively “disengaged” from voting for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the political choices they are given, and party preferences run a whole lot deeper than any one or two or three issues, for very good reasons.
It’s not that surprising we are hearing similar “hidden majority” talk on the left with the rise of Bernie Sanders, who indeed could use a theory of “electability” to defy the inevitable derision of MSM analyts who assume his screw-the-traitorous-center approach would mean death for Democrats in a general election. Yesterday at Ten Miles Square our own Martin Longman thought out loud about the kind of strategy that could make a Sanders election realistic. It’s interesting that he mentioned Rand Paul as another “unorthodox” pol that might find a way to stick it to The Man:

To win the overall contest, including the presidency, however, he is going to have to achieve a substantial crossover appeal. If he beats Hillary, he’s going to lose a portion of the Democratic coalition in the process, and he’ll have to make up for it with folks who we don’t normally think of as socialists or liberals.
Some of this deficit can be made up for simply by bringing people into the process who would otherwise have stayed home, but that alone will never be enough. If you think the electorate is so polarized that Bernie can’t change the voting behaviors of very many people, then there’s really not even a conceptual way that he could win. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to wait and see if he can appeal to a broader swath of the electorate like he has consistently done in his home state, then the “white liberal” vote isn’t quite as decisive.
Honestly, a lot of these potential Bernie voters are probably toying with Rand Paul right now. Most of them probably can’t imagine themselves voting for a socialist from Vermont. But substantial parts of his message are really almost tailor-made for these folks. They hate big money in politics, for example, and feel like everyone else has a lobbyist in Washington but them. They hate outsourcing and are suspicious of free trade agreements. They’ve lost faith in both parties and their leaders. They can’t pay their rent or afford college. Their kids are all screwed up on painkillers and are seemingly never going to move out of the house. They’re sick of investing in Afghanistan while American needs get ignored. And they want the blood of some Wall Street bankers.
Bernie Sanders is going to make a lot of sense to these folks, even if they think Hillary Clinton is the devil and are trained to despise liberals.

Now anyone with a sense of history realizes there have been moments when new and at the time radical options have emerged and scrambled existing party coalitions. Just possibly hatred of financial elites could be like slavery or trust-busting or civil rights, a powerful sentiment just waiting for a galvanizing movement or candidate to reduce prior notions of partisan differences to dust. But if so, it should start becoming apparent at some point via measurements of public opinion, like general election polls (not just early-state surveys or crowd sizes in activist centers).
Bernie Sanders and his supporters have every right to claim they are in the process of overturning the table of the moneylenders in the temple of Democracy, and creating a mind-bending coalition that combines liberals with former non-voters and “populist” conservatives; that may be the only plausible theory of “electability” Team Sanders can muster. But at some point it needs to materialize in measurable ways, and beyond that point it could become cranky and then delusional.

This obviously won’t be a problem for those Sanders supporters who are really only interested in “keeping Hillary honest” or moving the party in a progressive direction, though such folk could be a problem for Sanders if they start dropping out of his camp once those tasks are completed. But in general, anyone in politics must remain aware that “hidden majorities” may not be real if they stay hidden.