A lot of the hype over Carly Fiorina’s performance at the CNN Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night was emanating from Republican elites frantic for anyone or anything to end Donald Trump’s momentum. So there’s been a palpable sense of anticipation of data to show that, as one Politico article this morning put it, the “Trump fever has broken.”
Well, the first poll is in, and it is helpfully limited to people who actually watched the debate. I discussed the results at <Washington Monthly today:

[T]here now is some “new data,” but it’s not going to much cheer the Trump-hating Republican Establishment.

Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina won Wednesday’s second Republican presidential debate, according to voters who watched the Simi Valley showdown polled by Morning Consult.
It was a performance that vaulted Fiorina into the top tier of a crowded field. A plurality of 29 percent of registered voters who watched the debate said Fiorina won, just higher than the 24 percent who said real estate mogul Donald Trump came out on top. Seven percent said retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson won the debate, while 6 percent each chose former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

But here’s the catch:

Trump continues to lead the Republican primary field. Thirty-six percent of registered voters who watched the debate said they would choose Trump, compared with 12 percent for Carson and 10 percent for Fiorina. Rubio placed fourth, at 9 percent, followed by 7 percent for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and 6 percent for Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

So Carly’s boom really just means that now 58% of respondents support a candidate with zero experience in public office. And that’s among the people who actually watched the supposedly Trump-destroying debate.
We’ll see what later polls say, but for the present the idea things are about to return to normal and voters will sagely choose between “real candidates” Bush and Rubio and Kasich looks no closer to reality than before.

Nice work, RNC.

Last night I live-blogged that endless GOP presidential debate at the Washington Monthly, and then had to make sense of it all in a column for TPMCafe, wherein I concluded the main event left things essentially where they had been with perhaps Fiorina replacing Carson as the red-hot outsider:

Like a really brutal boxing match between equals, the CNN Republican presidential debate was long and bloody and not terribly conclusive.
For the second time in two debates, the moderators had a big impact. But while the Fox debate revolved around a network decision to demolish (or at least rein in) one candidate — Donald Trump — the CNN debate was skewed heavily by a format that began nearly every question with a quote from one candidate about another, and then allowed follow-up by the candidate quoted. This naturally favored the more combative and quote-worthy candidates, and also guaranteed another Trump-heavy debate.
The candidates who had been on the receiving end of the most errant Trump snarks — about Fiorina’s experience and Jeb’s wife — had a great opportunity to make hay, and Fiorina took full advantage of it.
Her deftly delivered line about women hearing exactly what he said after he tried to spin it away (which managed also to underline a criticism Trump had made of Jeb Bush for dissing women’s health care services) was the line of the night, and was probably only partly offset by the back-and-forth with Trump about her, er, ah, interesting business career. I couldn’t really tell whether Fiorina’s rapid-fire detail on national security issues came across as showing her policy chops or mixing up a word salad.
Beyond that, the constant opportunities to get drawn into murky and divisive sniping made it difficult to name “winners.” The losers were mostly the poor schlubs — Huckabee, Paul, and to some extent Walker — who apparently hadn’t criticized other candidates enough to get equal air time.
But then there was Ben Carson, the candidate who came into the debate with a big upward arrow next to his name.
On the positive side, he managed to get through the debate without so much as once saying the words “political correctness” or muttering darkly about Alinskyites destroying the country. Indeed, the only discussion involving him and conspiracy theories cast him as the defender of traditional medicine against the vaccinations-cause-autism people. On the other hand, he almost certainly hurt himself with his conservative following by confirming and then defending the rather shocking news that he advised George W. Bush in the days after 9/11 to try diplomacy rather than war. Another low moment for Carson was Trump having to remind him that progressive taxation was not some sort of new-fangled “socialist” idea.
The rest of the candidates were largely up and down. People who aren’t tired of the patented Rubio Second-Generation rap or the Cruz I’ll-Fight-For-You rap may have been impressed by those two, who are simply good public speakers (though I wonder who advised Rubio to rant about our “left-wing government” and “The Left” so much). Jeb Bush probably thrilled people who like him already, and annoyed people who don’t; his spirited defense of his brother’s Iraq policies just reminds people of W.’s worst moments and his own confusion over them.
Above all, I don’t think this debate did much to solve any of the Republican Party’s problems. Did it “take down” Donald Trump, as so many hoped? I don’t think so, despite the bountiful opportunities the other candidates — at the earlier “J.V.” debate, where the first four questions were about Trump, as at the main event — had to do so. Did it “winnow” the field? Nobody did that badly, and the candidates with the least steam, like Mike Huckabee, are already committed to a living-off-the-land county-by-county effort in Iowa. Did the “uprising” on behalf of “outsider” candidates with dubious qualifications abate? Probably not; whatever ground Carson lost was probably gained not by the “experienced” pols but by Fiorina, whose background remains a real time bomb that only Trump has tried to exploit.
Should the “outsiders” fade, moreover, this debate did little to help build an “Establishment” consensus behind a candidate prepared to move into the lead just as people start voting. Indeed, an Establishment candidate long left for dead, Chris Christie, may have revived his extremely limited prospects with a good performance tonight. So the long slugfest may have resolved nothing.

Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking on the now-mature Invisible Primary, and as the days get shorter the initiation of the real thing in Iowa gets closer. Better get it in gear, GOP party elites, if you want to clean up this mess.

As part of my regular effort to tamp down any unnecessary talk about “struggles for the soul of the Democratic Party,” I’d recommend a Nate Silver piece at FiveThirtyEight that scolds journalists who lazily lump together Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as fellow “populists” fighting together against their parties’ elites. Here’s what I had to say about it today at the Washington Monthly:

As part of his argument, Nate put up a chart showing the percentages in which Bernie Sanders voted with selected Senate Democrats in the last full Congress. The colleague with which Sanders agreed most was Barbara Boxer at 96.2%. No surprise there. But not far behind Boxer on the Bernieriffic scale were a couple of famously “centrist” senators, Cory Booker (95.8%) and Maria Cantwell (95.8%), both of whom have probably been called corporate whores by a lot of Sanders supporters on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, the Donkey Party colleagues with which Bernie agreed least often include a virtual rogue’s gallery of New Democrats or even Conservadems. But you know what? Sanders voted with Joe Manchin 82% of the time; with Max Baucus and David Pryor 87% of the time; and with Joe Donnelly, Kay Hagan and Mary Landrieu 90% of the time. In three of these cases, moreover, these senators were running unsuccessfully for reelection in red states in a bad midterm cycle, presumably moving them far to the right.
Nate contrasts this relatively high level of party solidarity shown by Sanders to Trump’s adoption of wildly heterodox positions and his apparent hatred for his own party. I’d say it shows for the umpteenth time that despite more tolerance for ideological dissent the Democratic Party has less to fight over than you’d think.
Yes, I know, all Senate votes are not equal, and yes, most of the really vicious intra-Republican fights are over strategy and tactics (e.g., the Defunding Planned Parenthood and Obamacare brouhahas) rather than matters of principle or even policy. But all in all, Democrats do not look like a party coming apart at the seams even with the hourly reports that they are in a panic over Hillary Clinton’s standing in selective states vis a vis Sanders, Biden (the non-candidate enjoying an imaginary boom), or any Republican you can name.

The Democratic Party remains a pretty robust coalition.

One of the perennial topics of this election cycle so far is the role of Super-PACs, those vehicles for really large donors that some presidential candidates are relying on heavily, especially on the Republican side of the barricades. I wrote about some concerns involving these beasts today at the Washington Monthly:

At the Atlantic Molly Ball poses a provocative question: will that super-weapon of contemporary politics, the Super-PAC, wind up being a lot more trouble that it’s worth to candidates who cannot even talk to the strategists and operatives deployed to “their” Super-PACs?
Ball focuses on the prohibition on “coordination” as the key problem with Super-PACs. I dunno. For one thing, I have a hard time imagining a serious presidential campaign going up in flames because of a “rule” no one other than the toothless Federal Election Commission is in a position to enforce. For another, the candidates were all free to coordinate with Super-PACs to their hearts’ desire before officially declaring (this was supposedly why some of them, especially Jeb Bush, waited so long to announce) their bids. Wouldn’t you figure Mike Murphy of Right to Rise worked out a daily operational plan with Jeb running right up to the Convention, with four or five variables factored in to account for what happens along the way?
Now it’s true that such advance planning probably did not anticipate an early Invisible Primary dominated by Donald J. Trump. And indeed, the signs of trouble in Bushworld Ball mentions all involve how the candidate and the Super-PAC are dealing, or failing to deal, with The Donald. Trump’s emergence, moreover, has had a huge ripple effect on all the rival campaigns, not just those from whom he has presumably won poll respondents, but even the bottom-feeders who see no reason to give up since the presumed front-runners are down there with them messing around in the single digits as well.
But it’s way too early to pass judgment on Super-PACs as a group. For all I know, some monster of a Super-PAC not tied to any candidate may be building up a plan and a war chest as we speak to go totally medieval on Trump on the fairly reasonable assumption that no one, not even Jesus Christ, could survive a sustained and vicious negative ad barrage with an unlimited budget. And partisan Super-PACs will presumably play a big role in the general election, especially on the GOP side, when the strategic decisions such entities must make are a lot less complicated…..
I don’t think we should spend too much time wondering if Mike Murphy is weeping with frustration as he looks at his silent cell phone and realizes once again the Jeb’s not going to call.

As with so many other aspects of politics, we’ll have to wait until it’s all over to see if this is a cycle that breaks the mold or one that shows the CW can survive momentary craziness.

Are you one of those Democrats who don’t think it ultimately matters that much who wins the 2016 presidential contest, especially if someone you consider a corporate lackey wins the Democratic nomination? You really, really need to pay attention to Republicans plans for the Supreme Court, which encompass vast economic as well and social and civil rights issues. I discussed one very prominent conservative blueprint for remaking America via SCOTUS at Washington Monthly today:

I really do appreciate the efforts of Constitutional Conservative legal beagles Randy Barnett of Georgetown and Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law in laying out in some detail–and not in a legal journal but in the Weekly Standard–rules for examining future Republican Supreme Court appointments. It’s not just a litmus test in the making–which presidential candidates in both parties typically say they do not want to administer–but a rationale for a litmus test. And their piece has the advantage of being very clear on the key points.
To Barnett and Blackman, who first discuss the notorious history of Republican SCOTUS appointments they view as betrayals, the big thing is that prospective Justices have a clearly documented willingness to ignore both other branches of government–the principle behind the receding Republican doctrine of “judicial restraint”–and stare decisis–the principle against overturning well-settled Court precedent–in pursuit of the “original” meaning of the Constitution. That means treating SCOTUS as an all-powerful institution communing with eighteenth century Founders–or worse yet, Con Con mythologies about those Founders–and empowered to kill many decades of decisions by all three branches of government, precedent and democracy be damned. No wonder they talk repeatedly about needing Justices–and presidents–with courage! And the dividing line between good and bad “conservative” Justices could not be made much clearer: Alito goooood! Roberts baaaaaad! Barnett and Blackman even suggest their rules should be made clear to and then demanded by presidential primary voters!
If that actually starts happening, it will be as or even more important to watch as any other discussions of any other issues. As Brian Beutler recently noted in an important piece at TNR, Barnett and Blackman are among other things leading advocates for a return to the Lochner era of jurisprudence, whereby most regulations of private economic activity by the executive or legislative branches would be declared unconstitutional as an abridgement of “natural law” concepts in the original Constitution and an exotic understanding of the due process clauses in the 5th and 14th amendments. These are dangerous people to let anywhere near a Supreme Court nomination. But they and many others like them, who now play a dominant role in the very powerful conservative legal fraternity the Federalist Society, are likely to be right there with their litmus test in hand.

Think about that before uttering any “not a dime’s worth of difference” assessments this year.