There are still plenty of people, from moneybags donors to political scientists, along with some Democrats, who are convinced Jeb Bush will ultimately win the Republican presidential nomination. Maybe Bush himself is supremely confident despite his dubious poll ratings and the beatings he seems to take everytime he tries to engage Donald Trump.
But I have to say, Team Bush’s current situation just has to be discouraging, particularly when you consider what might have been, as I discussed today at the Washington Monthly:

A new Quinnipiac poll of Iowa shows Bush still scratching around the second tier of candidates at 5%, below even the doomed Rand Paul, and with an underwater approval ratio of 43/51. Worse yet, a new Bloomberg Politics/St. Anselm’s poll of New Hampshire shows that a month-long positive ad blitz by Murphy’s Right to Rise Super-PAC has done absolutely nothing to improve Jeb’s horse-race standing or his approval ratios.
Think about how this must feel to Jeb Bush himself. He’s been spending time in Iowa since 1980, when he campaigned there for Poppy. Yet the more Iowans see of him, the less they seem to like him, which is not a recipe for a late surge, is it?
More broadly, consider the arc of Jebbie’s political career. Had he not in his first gubernatorial run unaccountably stumbled against the He-Coon, Lawton Chiles, in the great Republican year of 1994, he would have almost certainly been the dynastic presidential candidate in 2000 with massive Establishment and Conservative Movement backing (indeed, he was universally considered the one True Conservative in the whole clan back then). As governor of Florida, he probably would not have needed a coup d’etat from the U.S. Supreme Court to carry the state and the election. He could have been the one to “keep us safe” after 9/11. As the most serious of the Bush brothers, he quite possibly would not have required Dick Cheney as a caretaker and foreign policy chief, and perhaps would not have rushed into an Iraq War so precipitously. With his experience governing a perennial hurricane target, Jeb almost certainly would not have mishandled Katrina so grievously. But any way you look at it, he’d probably by now be enjoying the warm embrace of a post-presidential career instead of enduring the insults of surly Tea Partiers on the campaign trail and looking up wistfully at the poll standings of people like Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
The Carson thing has got to be especially galling to Jeb. Here’s a guy who not only has never run for office, but is suspending his campaign to go on a book tour. Yet the same poll that shows a majority of Iowa Republicans disapproving of Jeb Bush gives Carson an almost unimaginable 84/10 ratio.
Maybe Bush has nerves of steel or Murphy has hired a hypnotist to accompany him everywhere and buzz away any consciousness of discouraging words. But if I were him I’d be tempted to blow the whole thing off and go make money until it’s time for assisted living. As it stands, Jeb must wonder if Lawton Chiles is laughing at him from the Great Beyond.

When Jim Webb dropped out of the Democratic presidential contest while indicating he was considering an independent run for the White House, most observers–and Webb himself–seem to think the path to relevance would proceed from an appeal to “centrists” who wanted more moderation than the two parties were offering. At TPM Cafe I disputed that premise at some length:

Webb is ignoring the abundant evidence that a majority of self-identified “independents” are functionally either Democrats or Republicans, with another chunk of “independents” not much bothering to participate in elections. But still, is there any possible traction for an indie candidate in 2016, whether it’s Webb or campaign finance reform crusader Larry Lessig or (despite his pledge to the contrary) Donald Trump?
Perhaps. But if it exists the indie electoral gold is not sitting there in the middle of the road where earnest centrists tend to sit until they are run over by fast-moving ideologues. It’s among voters who are actively alienated from both parties not because the Democratic and Republican parties are “extreme” but because they tend to exclude points of view deemed incompatible by the parties — but not by these voters.In an important National Journal article earlier this month, John Judis described these voters as “Middle American Radicals,” a surprisingly hardy cohort of non-college educated middle-class white voters who have been at the center of a variety of insurgencies against the two-party orthodoxy, from George Wallace’s campaigns to Ross Perot’s, Pat Buchanan’s, and — yes — Donald Trump’s. They are increasingly found in the ranks of Republican voters, but they have never internalized the economic views of GOP elites, particularly liberal immigration laws, multilateral trade agreements and “entitlement reforms” affecting Social Security and Medicare. And they are instinctive “wrong track” voters, particularly in difficult economic times, who have little use for politicians or the governmental institutions they run.
Until 2008, Democrats spent an inordinate amount of time and energy pursuing a regularly declining percentage of downscale white voters in their native habitats, especially the South, the border states, and the Midwestern “Rust Belt.” The emergence of an Obama coalition built on young and minority voters has more recently made historically low percentages of white non-college educated voters tolerable. But this year it’s Republicans who should be worried about this vote, with Trump galvanizing opposition to immigration reform, entitlement reform, and — very soon — the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and even embodying a kind of militaristic non-interventionism that seems appealing to “wrong track” voters as well. Take a look at Ron Brownstein’s recent article on Trump’s strong position with non-college-educated Republican voters in almost every state where polls have been taken and you’ll see how well his act has played.
The bottom line is that of all the major demographic categories, non-college-educated white voters are probably the least attached to the two parties. That’s not true of all of them, of course: union members among them are often stubbornly loyal to Democrats, while conservative evangelicals are strongly bonded to the GOP. But Middle American Radicals are, as they have often been in the past, a prime target for anyone fantasizing about a third party.
If so, is there any candidate who could theoretically mobilize them, other than Trump?
Probably not. On paper, Jim Webb might fit the bill. He so embodies the Scots-Irish Appalachian segment of this demographic that he quite literally wrote the book about them. He has a strong military record and an equally strong record of opposing stupid wars. And he’s shown loyalty to the white working class in ways that accentuate the demographic’s issues with the contemporary Democratic Party, from hostility to affirmative action to a refusal to demonize the Confederate flag.
But aside from Webb’s conventionally liberal overall record, there’s a big problem with him going indie with a white working class base: the one time he ran for office, in Virginia in 2006, he won with the same urban-suburban coalition secured by big-city civil rights lawyer Tim Kaine a year earlier. That’s not to say the Scots-Irish Appalachian voters in Southwest Virginia Webb seemed to yearn to represent were completely invulnerable to Democratic appeals: Northern Virginia tech exec Mark Warner won that region solidly in his 2001 gubernatorial base, mainly via a sophisticated economic argument based on the idea that technology might help the stricken region full of dying traditional industries leapfrog more successful neighbors. But for whatever reason, Jim Webb could not win them over.
Still, Republicans have more to lose than Democrats to the happy feet of downscale white voters in 2016, whether or not an independent candidate is in the field. Mitt Romney won 61% of this demographic in 2012 and still lost. A July ABC/Washington Post survey showed a Trump independent candidacy holding Jeb Bush to 34% among white non-college educated voters. Anything remotely like that would doom Republicans to defeat. And beyond that, Democrats worried that Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders (or for that matter, Joe Biden) can’t duplicate the 44th president’s performance among the Obama coalition may be looking towards white working class voters newly hostile to conventional GOP economic policies with new interest as well.

I’d say if Jeb Bush vanquishes Donald Trump after a nasty primary season, the possibility of white working class defections in November could become a real and dangerous possibility for the GOP.

I think it’s a consensus judgment that former Sen. Jim Webb didn’t turn in a particularly good performance in the first Democratic presidential debate, showing himself on issue after issue as being out of step with his party, and a bit grouchy to boot. But some efforts to make Webb out as a symbol of a whole generation of superannuated Democrat went too far, in my judgment, as I discussed at Washington Monthly:

At TNR Elspeth Reeve reminded us that Webb was in some circles touted as the “It Guy” in 2007 after his boffo response to Bush’s State of the Union Address. I think she overstates it a bit; I was on a liberal list-serve back then in which the idea of Webb being Obama’s or Clinton’s running-mate was regularly discussed, and generally found lacking.
But it’s Reeve’s argument that Webb represents the entire pre-Obama Democratic preoccupation with white working-class and/or southern white voters–including the political strategy of both Clintons–that really gives me pause. After cataloguing, rather over-generally, post-2004 Democratic angst about their inability to connect with “rednecks,” Reeve makes this retroactive judgment:

Today, it’s clear that liberals did not have to change. They had to wait. It wasn’t new ideas that fixed Democrats’ problems. It was demographics, and a cultural shift in their direction. In between the era of Nascar angst and this election is the Obama administration. But the bridge between the old view and the new one is Hillary Clinton
.
In Tuesday’s debate, though, Hillary Clinton highlighted her proposals that would undo some of her husband’s signature legislation, including his draconian 1994 crime bill. She talked about “reforming criminal justice,” saying “we need to tackle mass incarceration.”
In 2008, Hillary was downing shots of whiskey with voters. Compared to Obama, she boasted, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” Now Clinton seeks to hold on to Obama’s coalition. This August, she met with Black Lives Matter activists and tried to explain her husband’s record. “I do think that there was a different set of concerns back in the ’80s and the early ’90s,” Clinton said. “And now I believe that we have to look at the world as it is today, and try and figure out what will work now.”

If this is all you had to go by, you wouldn’t know that Bill Clinton showed remarkable and sustained strength among African-American voters, despite Ricky Ray Rector and welfare reform and the 1994 Crime Bill (which was not, BTW, “signature” Clinton legislation; it was signature Biden legislation that contained some benign signature Clinton priorities like 100,000 cops deployed in community policing strategies and an Assault Weapons Ban and the Violence Against Women Act). Remember his reputation as “the first black president?” That didn’t come out of nowhere.
I also have to express some reservations about the underlying suggestion that an interest in appealing to white working class voters is inherently disreputable or involves a morally dubious choice. These voters were obviously central to the progressive coalition from the 1920s through the 1970s; Since then, and even now, Democrats have had reason to believe a segment of this part of the electorate is open to their appeals without any sacrifice whatsoever of the party’s commitments to nonwhite voters. And while HRC is indeed trying to “hold onto Obama’s coalition,” if she slips at all the votes necessary to win have to come from somewhere. Maybe they will come from professional women. But she might want to stay in practice downing a shot and a beer.

I’d add to that last observation the equally important point that it would be nice if Democrats could make a comeback in downballot contests which determine control of the U.S. House and of state governments. Doing that while happily writing off white working class voters will not be easy.

Amidst all the inevitable talk about who “won” and “lost” in last night’s first Democratic presidential debate, it should not be forgotten that the cause of Democratic unity had a pretty good evening despite some serious media provocation to support the ever-ready “Democrats in Disarray” meme. I wrote about this today at TPMCafe:

When the first Democratic presidential debate got underway last night, you got the immediate impression that the CNN organizers were determined to dash the expectation that it would be a less fractious event than the network’s Republican debate last month. Moderator Anderson Cooper, normally the most irenic of talking heads, got in touch with his inner Jake Tapper and began barking harsh criticisms at the candidates. But with few exceptions during the long contest, the five donkeys on the stage did not rise to the bait, and as a result the event often turned into Democrats versus CNN.
That was made most obvious by the signature moment of the debate: Bernie Sanders shouting at Cooper that the American people are “tired of hearing about [HRC’s] damn emails.” As a stand-in for the media hounds insisting on maximum coverage of the damn emails, Cooper gamely tried to press the issue, to no avail.
For their own part, the candidates did not go after each other much at all (HRC challenging Sanders’ gun record was an exception, as was Chafee calling HRC unqualified by her poor judgment on Iraq–his campaign’s one attention-grabbing talking point)….
[T]here just wasn’t the sense of a party in crisis that Republicans have projected again and again in the two debates, the two “undercard” events, and many exchanges on the campaign trail. Virtually no GOP presidential candidates have a kind word to say about their party’s leadership in Washington. Even challenged directly to distinguish themselves from Barack Obama, the five candidates were careful not to criticize him. In the Republican field, one candidate has called another a “egomaniacal madman”; another routinely calls several of his rivals “losers”; and the candidate most beloved of party elites is disliked by a majority of rank-and-file voters. There’s nothing like that on the Democratic side at present.

We’ll see how long it lasts, but without question, Democrats are for the most part minding their manners, and remembering the big picture.

Perhaps it was overshadowed by the growing chaos in the House Republican Conference, but this has been a week also marred by back-and-forth media wars between journalists claiming inside knowledge that Vice President Joe Biden did or didn’t personally promote the “story” that his late son made a deathbed request that he run for president. This caps months of mostly unsourced media speculation on the subject, much of it expanded on by Republicans and conservative media always happy to push a “Democrats-in-disarray” narrative.
I finally made an exasperated plea at the Washington Monthly:

[I]t’s time for the vice president to publicly say “Yes,” “No” or “Maybe” to a presidential run instead of letting this bizarre speculation continue perpetually. “Maybe’s” fine with me; I’d personally be fine with him admitting he’s offering himself as a fallback option if something terrible happens to the field. But sorta kinda running for president via media hints that are turned into attacks on Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the Democratic Party itself should no longer be an option. I have no direct evidence on the question of whether or not Biden is personally fanning the speculation, but have no doubt he’s the one person who can resolve it.

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post echoed this sentiment today:

It was right and good that Democrats gave Biden plenty of space to make his decision. But at this point, every additional day that goes by makes his own viability that much less realistic. He’d have to ramp up a campaign organization and raise a huge amount of money in a ridiculously short amount of time. At what point do we get to say that a Biden candidacy is no longer plausible?
If Biden wants to tell us that he’s prepared to enter the race down the line, but only if it really looks like Sanders is going to win the nomination, that’s fine — at that point, all bets would be off anyway. We just need him to say something more concrete.