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.