The latest NH polls (here and here, for example) indicate possible double-digit victory margins for Sanders and Trump, with all of the caveats that apply for small survey samples and NH voters’ notorious proclivity for confounding pollsters.
For Republicans, the value of the late polls are also limited by the timing, which didn’t reflect the full effects of media buzz about the Rubio meltdown, nor the Christie or Kasich media/poll boomlets.
Looking at the worst-case scenario for the Clinton campaign, even a blowout in NH won’t diminish her prospects much in the longer run, since she still runs well in recent national polls. At most the NH results may serve as a flag for what may need to be tweaked in messaging, ground game, tone, policy and other strategic considerations. That’s likely the most useful function of the early primaries for all candidates.
That said, there will be contributions bumps for NH primary winners, with amounts depending on the margin of victory. Also, even a few delegates can swing a party nomination in a close one-on-one race.
But The media will soon be focusing on the coming month of party primaries in megastates that have large numbers of delegates, and the NH results will fade into anecdotal obscurity. These primaries will include four of the twelve most populous states, Texas, Virginia and Georgia, all on March 1st, ‘Super Tuesday’ and Michigan on March 8. There will also be closed caucuses in interesting purple states, like Nevada (Feb. 20), and Colorado on March 1.
Here’s the full primary calendar over the next month, with number of delegates, at-large delegates (in parenthesis) and type of primary/caucus for each state (More details here):

February 20, 2016

Nevada 35 (8) Closed caucus

February 27, 2016

South Carolina 53 (6) Open primary

March 1, 2016

Alabama 53 (7) Open primary;
American Samoa 6 (4) Closed caucus;
Arkansas 32 (5) Open primary;
Colorado 66 (13) Closed caucus;
March 1-8, 2016 Democrats Abroad 13 (4) Closed primary;
Georgia 102 (14) Open primary;
Massachusetts 91 (25) Semi-closed primary;
Minnesota 77 (16) Open caucus;
Oklahoma 38 (4) Semi-closed primary;
Tennessee 67 (9) Open primary;
Texas 222 (30) Open primary;
Vermont 16 (8) Open primary;
Virginia 95 (15) Open primary;

March 5, 2016

Louisiana 51 (7) Closed primary;
Nebraska 25 (5) Closed caucus;
Kansas 33 (4) Closed caucus

March 6, 2016

Maine 25 (5) Closed caucus

March 8, 2016

Mississippi 36 (5) Open primary; Michigan 130 (19) Open primary

Three or four days from now, after most of the post-primary analysis has been exhausted, the NH primary results will seem largely inconsequential — especially compared to Super Tuesday.

The pundit consensus regarding the final Republican presidential candidate debate before the NH primary is that poll front-runners Trump and Cruz did OK, despite the booing of The Donald, which had the unsavory whiff of a GOP establishment set-up. As Ed Kilgore noted, “Trump’s joke about the audience being heavily composed of Bush’s famously numerous donors rang pretty true.” Perhaps the Trump team’s shoddy advance work made it possible for the Bush campaign to dominate the audience. Still, adds Kilgore, Trump “did well in no small part by failing to be the center of attention,” and it’s likely that the debate didn’t entirely eradicate Trump’s formidable lead in the late NH polls.
NYT’s Alan Rappeport has a round-up of quick takes on the GOP candidate debate, including this nugget from Jessica Mackler, president of Democratic Super PAC American Bridge: “The Rubiobot got stuck on repeat, offering nothing but canned talking points, and still had no answer when challenged on his lack of accomplishments and failure to show up for work. He needed a big night tonight, but a system glitch had him short-circuiting.” You can find scathing reviews of Rubio’s performance pretty much everywhere. “Once Impervious, Marco Rubio Is Diminished by a Caustic Chris Christie,” read the Sunday Times above-the-fold headline. At Rubio’s expense, Christie showed he has the chops to go for the adversary’s jugular, if not the adequate likability needed to be an effective running mate.
The Democratic debate, on the other hand, was more substantial than the GOP’s demolition derby. From Michael Tomasky’s Daily Beast Post on the final Democratic debate in NH “Finally, a Debate That Voters Deserve“: “That was one of the best debates I’ve ever watched. The questions were (mostly) good and tough and not stupid, and Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow did a really good job of steering it without getting in the way. Both candidates were good. Very good. There were a few tough moments, a few tender moments. It was real. I don’t know if it changed the dynamic in New Hampshire, but it did suggest one possible path for Hillary Clinton to narrow Bernie Sanders’s huge lead so that we might see some drama next Tuesday after all.”
Despite some heated exchanges in the Democratic debate, The Guardian’s Richard Wolfe commended both candidates on their civility: “Bernie’s best moment – once again – was his mensch-like refusal to attack Clinton on the email saga. In fact, he stated publicly that he rejects repeated media requests to do just that…The moderators tried to lure Clinton into a similar attack on Sanders, about the number of apparent ethical questions surrounding Sanders staffers. She politely declines the opportunity to jump in, before the debate breaks for yet another ad break…After a debate in which both candidates have taken their gloves off, this was easily their most dignified moment.”
At PoliticusUSA RMuse shares a sobering thought on health care reform: “It is worth reminding Americans that if private insurance companies were not part of “Obamacare,” like they are part of Medicare and Medicaid, there would be no healthcare reform whatsoever. In fact, what seems lost on the “EmoProg” movement is that even with private insurance company involvement in “Obamacare,” Medicare, and Medicaid, Republicans have spent the past nearly six years doing everything in their considerable power to get rid of not only Obamacare, but Medicare as well. One is just baffled beyond comprehension why anyone in America would think for a second that any Republican will ever support raising trillions in taxes to fund a “Medicare for all” system; arguably a government socialized system when they want any healthcare system eviscerated.”
At The Washington Post Mike Debonis reports that “Flint water crisis emerges as a key piece of Democrats’ election-year message.” Dems should also project the crisis as ‘exhibit A’ evidence for the urgent need for infrastructure upgrades in stark contrast to the Republicans policy of infrastructure neglect and abandonment.
NYT columnist Charles M. Blow probes the Clinton campaign’s inadequate traction with younger voters and observes “Clinton is running an I-Have-Half-A-Dream campaign. That simply doesn’t inspire young people brimming with the biggest of dreams. Clinton’s message says: Aim lower, think smaller, move slower. It says, I have more modest ambitions, but they are more realistic.”
Sen. Sanders open embrace of ‘democratic socialism’ may resonate positively with younger voters, though it is likely more of a liability with older voters. Catherine Rampell notes in her Washington Post column that “respondents younger than 30 were the only group that rated socialism more favorably than capitalism (43 percent vs. 32 percent, respectively)” in a recent Yougov poll conducted January 25-27, while a Gallup poll conducted June 2-7 last year found that “34 percent of respondents age 65 and older said they would be willing to vote for a socialist, compared with about twice that level among respondents younger than 30.”
Every candidate should try to get a healthy share of young voters. But the significant lag in youth voter turnout even in presidential elections revealed in this chart from the U.S. Elections Project, may help explain why some candidates are more focused on older voters:

Last night’s debate between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders suggests that the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination could go the distance. No matter who wins the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, the readiness of both candidates for the long haul is striking. I would be surprised if either candidate put it away before the summer.
A couple of interesting observations from Alan Rapport’s New York Times round up, “Who Won the Debate? Critics Are as Split as the Candidates“:

“Powerful ending by Sanders. There’s an undeniable decency to him that you don’t often see at this level of American politics.” — Ezra Klein, founder of Vox.com
“Crucial distinction between Bernie and Hillary on Flint: She suggests solutions, he demands punishments.” — Charlotte Alter, writer for Time.
“Both made strong attacks, and both defended effectively. This was the most intense debate of the entire cycle, possibly foreshadowing an epic, long-running series of face-to-face contests alternating with primaries and caucuses well into the spring.” —Mark Halperin, managing editor of Bloomberg Politics

Sanders scored on his emphasis on getting corporate money out of politics, regulating Wall Street and calling for fair trade policies to protect jobs. Clinton showed impressive acumen on foreign policy, was confident and eloquent on a range of issues and zinged Sanders for his five votes against the Brady bill.
Recent polling indicates that Sanders holds a strong lead in New Hampshire. But, as he noted during the debate, the early primary states don’t contribute a lot of delegates to the number needed to clinch the nomination, though they could be pivotal in a close race.
The early primary wins do impact fund-raising in a favorable way. Phillip Bump observes at The Washington Post, that following the debate, “The fourth-most-Googled question about Bernie Sanders is how can I give him money…Getting a voter to try and figure out how to give is a dream come true for any campaign. Having it trend on Google? Insane.”
The Politico Caucus, “a panel of top operatives and activists in the early nominating states,” gave Sanders the edge in the debate. But 65 percent of them said that Sanders would “lose in a landslide “to the Republican nominee.
Who “won” the debate is certainly less important than winning the election next week. But rest assured that this contest will intensify in the months ahead, regardless. By affirming their mutual respect for each other in every debate and their willingness to support their Democratic adversary against any Republican, both candidates can serve the cause of party unity, even as they define their differences.

Facebook may be rife with bickering between the supporters of Sanders and Clinton, but the candidates displayed impressive civility at last night’s Democratic forum, even as they put the heat on each other. Eric Bradner’s “6 takeaways from CNN’s Democratic town hall” at CNN Politics provides a good synopsis.
Looking forward to tonight’s Democratic debate in NH, Trip Gabriel, among other NYT political reporters, observes: “After Mrs. Clinton overwhelmingly — even shockingly — lost millennial voters in Iowa by 70 points to Mr. Sanders, I’ll be watching to see if she turns the focus from her résumé — a misty past beyond the recall of voters under 30 — toward the future, offering an optimistic vision of what she hopes to accomplish. Conversely, because Mr. Sanders lost seniors in Iowa by 43 points, I want to see if he tailors his message to try to bridge some of the gap.”
The Republican presidential candidate field just shrunk by two more candidates, with Sen. Rand Paul and former Sen. Rick Santorum bailing out, eliminating the need for a “kiddie table” going forward.
Trump and Rubio crank up the shameless Muslim-bashing in NH, blasting the President for daring to affirm religious tolerance and freedom at a Baltimore Mosque.
At U.S. News Matthew Dickinson writes, “In the pivotal state of New Hampshire, which holds its first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 9, roughly 44 percent of voters are not affiliated with either major party. This makes them eligible to vote in either party’s primary – but not in both. In contrast, Democrats make up about 26 percent of registered voters, and Republicans 30 percent. While Sanders’ core constituency is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, New Hampshire polls indicate that he runs particularly strong there among younger voters, those who did not vote in the 2008 or 2012 New Hampshire primaries and among independents. Trump tends to do better among lower-educated blue collar workers, but like Sanders polls indicate he also does slightly better among undeclared voters and among those who did not vote in the two previous New Hampshire presidential primaries. In short, both candidates are positioning themselves as political outsiders running against the party establishment, and as a consequence, they are partly trying to appeal to the same group of independent voters.”
WaPo’s Phillip Bump addresses an interesting question, “Should Bernie Sanders get credit for making the Democratic party more liberal?” I agree with Bump that the trend was well underway before Sanders’s candidacy, but credit him with driving the party’s policies a notch or two to the left.
Hats off to one of the greatest Democratic House members, Rep. Elijah Cummings, for putting the cause of safe, affordable medicine before advancing his political career. His continued service in the House insures that Democrats will have a uniquely strong and eloquent voice challenging Republican extremism on all major issues.
Scott Keyes has an important read at ThinkProgress, “Study Finds Republican Voter Suppression Is Even More Effective Than You Think.” As Keyes expliains, “In a new paper entitled “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes”, researchers at the University of California, San Diego — Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi — and Bucknell University — Lindsay Nielson — used data from the annual Cooperative Congressional Election Study to compare states with strict voter ID laws to those that allow voters without photo ID to cast a ballot. They found a clear and significant dampening effect on minority turnout in strict voter ID states…the researchers found that in primary elections, “a strict ID law could be expected to depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, Black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian American turnout by 12.5 points.” And that’s just one of their voter suppression techniques.
His campaign has $100 million, and this is the best he can do?

Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, explains “How Ted Cruz Engineered His Iowa Triumph” at Bloomberg.com. Issenberg discusses how Chris Wilson, the Cruz campaign pollster and director of analytics, targeted the pivotal group needed to win, following the Palin fiasco and Gov. Terry Branstad’s dismissal of Cruz as a worthy candidate:

Wilson swiftly recalibrated the challenge as a matter of numbers. On his phone, he summoned a report that counted 9,131 individual Iowans whom Wilson’s statistical models had identified as choosing between the two leading candidates. Those people existed at the overlap of likely caucus-goers who were seen as considering both Cruz and Trump; anyone who also ranked Marco Rubio highly was pushed out of the group. “These aren’t people you want to contrast with Trump and push to Rubio,” explained Wilson. (There were, separately, 6,309 voters then choosing between Cruz and Rubio but not Trump.) Those who remained were a remarkably homogeneous group: 91 percent male, two-thirds of them likely to self-associate as evangelical Christians.
For the closing days of the Iowa campaign, Cruz’s campaign had defined such pools for each of his major opponents as part of what was known internally as the Oorlog Project, named by a Cruz data scientist who searched online for “war” translated into different languages and thought the Afrikaner word looked coolest. It was just the latest way that Cruz’s analytics department had tried to slice the Iowa caucus electorate in search of an advantage for its candidate. They had divided voters by faction, self-identified ideology, religious belief, personality type–creating 150 different clusters of Iowa caucus-goers–down to sixty Iowa Republicans its statistical models showed as likely to share Cruz’s desire to end a state ban on fireworks sales.
Unlike most of his opponents, Cruz has put a voter-contact specialist in charge of his operation, and it shows in nearly every aspect of the campaign he has run thus far and intends to sustain through a long primary season. Cruz, it should be noted, had no public position on Iowa’s fireworks law until his analysts identified sixty votes that could potentially be swayed because of it.

Wilson, notes Issenberg, has “the most expansive brief of any pollster in either party’s 2016 field: his surveys not only guide Cruz’s strategy and define his message, but drive targeting decisions both online and off, including digital fundraising appeals.”
All targeting technology wizardry aside, Cruz, had a lot of assets going for him as the shiny new kid on the block, including a clear strategic sense about how to win the tea party’s ultra-right conservative evangelicals. More than any other GOP candidate, he really is one of them, and the authenticity surely shows. No doubt, he will move toward the center, if nominated. But it’s hard to see how he can shake some of his right-wing bonafides enough to make a credible pitch to political moderates. For the Democratic nominee, he may be more beatable than Trump.
The Cruz campaign developed a sophisticated method for shaping messaging to different sub-groups. Issenberg notes that the campaign “brainstorming sessions generated a master list of 77 local issues for Iowans,” with micro targeting exercises including Facebook trial balloons. The campaign also deployed Cambridge Analytica, which set out “to profile every American voter along each of the five dominant personality factors: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.” Further, adds issenberg,

Yet the 32 different personality types into which Cambridge Analytica segregated voters would be unmanageable if layered onto other divisions in the electorate. Wilson pushed the company to simplify its framework by pushing voters into just five clusters, including Timid Traditionalist, Relaxed Leader, and Temperamental. At the same time, he deployed the two full-time analysts that Cambridge had embedded in Cruz’s headquarters to work on building statistical models more directly relevant to political attributes…
…More than 300,000 Iowans were potential targets, having participated previously in at least one Republican primary, though Wilson spent 2015 expecting fewer than half that number to actually attend the caucus in February. Based on that turnout, Wilson had set a vote goal of 39,585, a number he expected to reach by both persuading likely caucus-goers and mobilizing new ones predicted to support Cruz. When he took those different behavioral buckets, split them by issue preference, and then again by personality groups, Wilson ended up with more than 150 segments in Iowa alone.

It’s hard to imagine Trump utilizing such micro targeting and message development, given his shoot-from-the-lip approach. In this sense the Iowa GOP Caucuses were, for the GOP, a telling contest between charisma and hard-headed political science, and charisma was decisively out-played. It paid off at crunch time, as issenbereg explains:

A few hours before the caucuses began, Wilson sat in the hotel lobby and looked at his final projections and all the different ways Cruz could exceed his vote goal of 35,178. As of that day, 39,541 Iowans had directly confirmed their intention to caucus for Cruz, with nearly 4,000 of them doing so over the web site. At the same time, the campaign had 29,830 turnout targets, infrequent voters whom statistical models predicted were likely to support Cruz if they did end up choosing to caucus. It was a slice of that group deemed the least likely to turn out–with less than one-in-four odds of doing so–who received a controversial get-out-the-vote mailer that essentially shamed voters into turning out in the closing weekend of the race. Rubio, Trump, and Iowa’s secretary of state slammed the move as “not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.”
About three thousand of Cruz’s turnout targets were selected to receive the mail, an aggressive version of a common technique refined through dozens, possibly hundreds, of different social-science experiments confirming that the “social pressure” of shaming non-voters can in fact serve to motivate them. The “Voting Violation” design evoked an official government document, and the inclusion of neighbors’ supposed voting records had been shown to be far more potent than merely letting voters know their own records were public. Cruz’s campaign had to send the mail out under its own name–as opposed to that of a super-PAC or other outside group, as is preferred with such tactics liable to incite blowback–because it was the one with the most current list of the people Cruz needed to mobilize. (Some other campaigns, notably John Kasich’s, have effectively outsourced all their highly targeted voter contact to allied super-PACs.)

In his concluding paragraph Issenberg adds “Cruz advisers anticipated the cynical media response, but accepted the risk.” If Democratic micro targeting provided an edge in 2008 and 2012, the safe assumption is that it will not be the case in 2016. The respected Des Moines register poll was right that the Democratic Caucuses result would be close, but they were significantly off about the GOP tally, which is a credit to the Cruz campaign.
Whether Cruz wins or loses his party’s nomination, it’s likely that his targeting and message teams will be on board with the GOP presidential nominee. Dems need to make sure their team is at least as sharp.

Hillary Clinton has narrowly edged Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Iowa caucuses. But her razor-close margin of victory is being called a “virtual tie” in media post-mortems, as well the Sanders campaign. It’s really a win-win for both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, and their respective teams are brimming with excitement, going into New Hampshire.
For former Maryand Governor Martin O’Malley, it was the end of the trail, and he “suspended” his campaign. Credit O’Malley with running an upbeat, issue-oriented campaign and setting an example of admirable civility. In another year, he might have done better and the seriousness of his policies probably deserved better media coverage.
The close race between Clinton and Sanders helps both of them, and perhaps more importantly, the Democratic Party. An overwhelming Clinton victory would likely have revived the potentially-toxic “coronation” meme. The close margin insures that both campaigns will get more attention from voters as we move into the primary season. Up till now the Republicans, energized by Trump’s outrage du jour, have hogged media coverage. We’ll see more balance now, especially since he has been whipped pretty bad by Ted Cruz.
The same goes for the dignified tone of civility set by both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. If they can sustain this spirit of mutual respect and a refusal to mud-wrestle, Democrats will be the adult party in the eyes of thoughtful swing voters in November.
Sen. Ted Cruz’s impressive upset, contrary to the findings of even the respected Des Moines register poll, holds a couple of instructive lessons about him for Democrats. First, his team has a solid ground game, and he is evidently a capable hands-on strategist and organizer. His successful campaign turn-out techniques merit some attention.
Second, Cruz apparently has little hesitancy about playing dirty, as the controversy about his late-campaign “report card” mailer indicates. Trump and Paul complained about it, as did the Iowa Secretary of State. The Cruz campaign also allegedly implied that Carson had dropped out of the race. It is noteworthy that none of the other Republican campaigns tried anything quite so sleazy.
Third, offending the ethanol industry, as did Cruz, is not political suicide in farming states in 2016. It may not even be risky.
Going forward, expect Trump to roll like a wounded whale. As for the rest of the Republican field, they are coming for front-runners Cruz, Trump and Rubio in a big way, and their field has only been winnowed by one drop-out, Huckabee, as of this writing.
The Clinton and Sanders campaigns will have to sharpen their offense, now that it is clear that theirs is a close race. But surely both campaigns “get it” that maintaining a high tone — and a unified party — will serve them well in November

The respected Des Moines Register’s final poll before the Iowa Caucuses has Sanders and Clinton in stat tie, and Trump only one point above m.o.e. with Cruz. The poll has a good track record. Wining the IA Caucuses doesn’t necessarily mean all that much in terms of primary momentum, although it sure helps with contributions — as much as $50 million for the victor, according to NBC commentator Chuck Todd.
Charlie Cook argues at national Journal that “Both the GOP and Demo­crat­ic races will turn on wheth­er emo­tion tops or­gan­iz­a­tion.” Cook shares a sobering perspective: “nom­in­a­tions are about del­eg­ates, and very, very few are se­lec­ted in Iowa, New Hamp­shire, or, for that mat­ter, South Car­o­lina and Nevada, the oth­er two Feb­ru­ary con­tests. March is the month that is the moth­er lode of del­eg­ates; then the pro­cess ex­tends at a more muted level un­til the Cali­for­nia primary on June 7.”
So, how often does the winner of the caucuses become a party nominee or president? As Thomson/Reuters notes, “Since 1976, there have been seven contested caucuses in the Republican Party. Of those contests, three winners have become the party’s nominee…Since 1972, there have been nine contested caucuses in the Democratic Party. Of those, the winner of the caucuses has gone on to be the Democratic nominee five times…As those numbers show, Iowa picks the eventual nominee only about half the time.”
Dan Balz argues at The Washington Post that the iowa Caucuses do matter, because they begin the winnowing out of candidates. NYT’s Trip Gabriel agrees and cites the just “three tickets out of Iowa” saying.
Jason Noble of the Des Moines Register explains why the complex “Caucus night math matters in close Democratic race.”
Key statistics to note tonight: Will the Democratic winner’s percentage and raw numbers totals match Obama’s totals in 2008?
In his Washington Post, column on “The monumental fall of the Republican Party,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. nails the disastrous tilt of the GOP in recent years: “The fixed smile on Donald Trump’s face as Sarah Palin unleashed her free-association, who-knows-what-she’ll-say-next harangue endorsing him on Tuesday sent its own message. “How long do I have to stand here?” it seemed to say. But of all the developments in the astonishing Republican presidential contest, this moment told us what we need to know about the state of a once-great political party…Today’s Republican crisis was thus engineered by the party leadership’s step-by-step capitulation to a politics of unreason, a policy of silence toward the most extreme and wild charges against Obama, and a lifting up of resentment and anger over policy and ideas as the party’s lodestars.”
Meanwhile, a new Bloomberg News poll indicates former Mayor Bloomberg isn’t getting much traction: “A poll of likely caucusgoers conducted for Bloomberg Politics and The Des Moines Register and released on Saturday night found just 17 percent of Democrats and 9 percent of Republicans had a “favorable” view of Mr. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.”
“58 percent of Americans currently favor Medicare-for-All once they learn more about it, and 81% of Democrats already believe it is the best solution. So, rather than demonize it with lies and scare tactics, we should be educating more and more people who are disillusioned with their current healthcare so that more and more of us can demand something better from our representatives.” from “The Real Healthcare Debate Democrats Should Be Having” by Paul Y Song, MD at HuffPo.

There are good reasons why running as a third party candidate should be a non-starter for an astute business leader, even one richer than Trump. Brendan Nyhan explains at The Upshot. Conservative columnist George Will agrees, albeit for different reasons.
What can American workers learn from worker organizing in other countries? Eric Dirnbach addresses the issue in is Labor Notes article reviewing “New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism,” edited by Immanuel Ness. See also Ness’s newer book, “Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class.”
For an in-depth look at the thinking of angry white working-class voters, read “Why I’m voting for Trump: CNN talks to more than 150 people in 31 cities to explore what’s driving the Trump phenomenon.”
Americablog’s Jon Green reports that “Virginia Republicans take aim at absentee voting in latest voter suppression push.”
Carl Hulse explains at The New York Times how Dems plan to leverage the GOP’s Planned Parenthood fiasco.
AP reports that “More white Americans now share the view, long held by minorities, that racism is a national problem and should be confronted, according to an analysis of recent public opinion polling…The review, compiled by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in conjunction with the Northeastern University School of Journalism, concludes that a majority of Americans across racial groups think more should be done to end racism.”
In RawStory’s “Trump’s battle with the GOP pits ‘silent majority’ against conservative establishment,” University of Oregon political science professor Joseph Lowndes has an insightful take on the devolution of the Republican Party.
In addition to the horrific human cost of the Flint water crisis, the economic costs and scope of needed repairs are astounding. Rachel Maddow continues her superb reporting on the Flint water debacle with an illuminating interview with a master plumber on what it will take to restore safe drinking and bathing water to the city.
Both Trump and Megyn Kelly have to be thinking that tonight’s GOP presidential debate ratings will be higher still if he changes his mind and shows. Either way, Trump has played the MSM again, despite Kelly’s assertion that “the truth is, he doesn’t get to control the media.” If Trump shows, credit him, once again, with clever ratings manipulation. If he skips out, he will be roundly lambasted as a wimp. Hey didn’t John McCain lose cred for a no-show threat late in the ’08 campaign? Trump’s critics, particularly cartoonists, are already having a glorious snarkfest (see here, here and here).

The prevailing pundit wisdom is that the Republicans’ majority in the U.S. House of Representatives will hold through the 2016 elections. As Kyle Kondik wrote at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, “a continuing GOP House majority remains by far the likeliest outcome of next year’s House election.” At Politico, Lauren French writes, “Democratic leaders privately admit that they don’t have a chance of regaining control of the House even with Trump or Cruz as the Republican nominee.”
Most of the pundits who hold this view say that Democrats do, on the other hand, have a good chance of winning back majority control of the U.S. Senate. Given the high negatives of current GOP frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, however, Democrats can’t be blamed for entertaining hopes that the pundits are wrong about the House elections.
A net Democratic pick-up of the necessary 30 House seats to win a majority and the speakership is an ambitious goal. But is it really impossible? In the 21st century, there have been net gains of that magnitude on two occasions. Dems only picked up 1 seat in 2000, while Republicans netted 8 House seats in 2002 and 3 seats in 2004. Democrats picked up 31 House seats in 2006 and 21 more in 2008. Republicans picked up 63 House seats in 2010. Democrats only picked up 8 seats in 2012, and lost 13 seats in 2014. So two of the 8 House election years of the 21st century had one party picking up more than 30 seats.
Factors like intensifying polarization and gerrymandering add to the obstacles facing Democrats in meeting the challenge of a 30-seatHouse net gain in 2016. On the other hand. But, as Brent Bukowsky writes at The Hill:

Almost all Democrats are praying that Republicans nominate for president Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. From Democratic establishment insiders who support Hillary Clinton to populist insurgents who support Bernie Sanders, there is a virtually unanimous view that Trump or Cruz would lead the GOP to a defeat so devastating Democrats would probably regain control of the Senate and have a fighting chance to take back the House.

Kondik says that “Democrats probably cannot win the House next year, but Republicans can lose it with a combination of boneheaded missteps.” Yet, given the tone and tenor of recent GOP campaign screw-ups, “boneheaded missteps” in the Republican presidential field’s near future don’t seem all that improbable.
If the GOP regains enough sanity to nominate someone other than Trump or Cruz, the pundits will likely prove correct — that the Republicans will hold their House majority. Even if Trump or Cruz wins the nomination, however, their party could still hold the House majority — but it is far less likely.

Democratic strategists should be paying close attention to Republican TV ads in Iowa. This is the opening salvo, and the quality, quantity, message content, slant, tone, placement choices, cost and other aspects of the GOP ads offer clues about how to beat their eventual presidential nominee. We can also get a sense of how good their ad machinery is, as the 2016 campaign cranks up.
Toward that end, Nick Corosaniti’s “As Iowa Caucuses Approach, Political Ads Swamp TV Channels” provides an instructive introduction. Among Corosaniti’s observations:

Ted Cruz was accused of proposing a socialist tax plan. Marco Rubio was called out for supporting “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. Bernie Sanders denounced the “rigged economy,” and Jeb Bush’s campaign was called a “train wreck.”
And that was just during the 6 o’clock news.

Corosaniti goes on to note that presidential candidates of both parties have spend $40 million on ads, $6 million in the last week for 167 different political ads. That tells you that campaigns nowadays allocate on average roughly a third of their ad budgets for TV for the final two weeks leading up to a primary.
As for who is spending what, Corosaniti notes, “Trump is spending $500,000 a week of advertising on the air in the state…While Mr. Bush is spending robustly in New Hampshire, the super PAC supporting him, Right to Rise, has spent nearly $8 million in Iowa and is running a battery of ads attacking Mr. Rubio, John R. Kasich and Chris Christie, in hopes of weakening them before they head to New Hampshire…” Debate drop-out Rand Paul is still in the Iowa ad game, and his Super-PAC has a couple of ads airing on the local NBC affiliate. Carson’s campaign is “one of the biggest spenders in Iowa with more than $2.6 million on television.”
Iowa ad spending is a little different, owing to its status as the first state-wide caucus. Further, “In Iowa, you’re talking about a fairly small universe of caucusgoers, compared to the general population or general voting public,” said Carl Forti, a Republican strategist. “You’re spending a lot of money to talk to very few.” It’s important to remember, however, that Iowa is a sometimes swing state.
Corosaniti has some interesting insights about the choice of ad placement in Iowa:

..Saturday night’s “Wheel of Fortune,” for example, was blanketed by 11 political ads from nine candidates in its half-hour broadcast. The show’s older audience, including many holdovers who watch the nightly news, was a high-value target for candidates in both parties.
The weekend’s major sports events allowed some ads to avoid being lost in a blizzard of others. Viewers of the United States Figure Skating Championships on NBC saw a 60-second advertisement from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign twice in 20 minutes.
And during the A.F.C. championship game between the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos, viewers saw Mr. Rubio make trick football catches in one ad and Mr. Cruz go duck hunting with Phil Robertson of the TV show “Duck Dynasty” in another.

It’s no surprise that football rules when it comes to reaching white working-class voters, who conservative Republicans view as a major element of their base in every state. The ‘Wheel of Fortune’ placement is likely designed to reach high-turnout, low-to-medium information, working-class seniors.
It’s kind of pathetic, when you think about it, that crappy TV programs are among the most effective pathways to reach key constituencies. Are the better news documentaries or more substantial movies so unworthy of political ad placement?
I gather that most of the GOP ads are pretty shrill, although Corosaniti doesn’t shed much light on the tone choices of individual candidate ads, other than one of Carson’s spots, which mirrors his comparatively low-key personality: “Accompanied by slow music, it showed Carson supporters with outstretched hands, as the written words “Our Hands” gave way to “Heal,” “Learn,” “Unite” and more.” He ads that Carson is also working the hell out of Facebook feeds. Doesn’t sound like that one is going viral.
I assume that Democratic ad wizards are watching GOP political spots closely. Most of the aggregate data about how individual ads are perceived will remain secret. But so far there is not much buzz about any specific ads, such as Justin Trudeau’s viral ‘escalator’ spot in Canada. The sour overall tone of the Republican candidates interaction thus far suggests that any of them pitching an optimistic spirit for the future under a Republican administration will not be an easy sell.
Online ad share is growing fast. But broadcast television still rules, when it comes to ad budgets and is projected to account for about $8.5 billion of the $11.4 total ad spending for 2016, compared to about $1 billion for digital media, according to Issie Lapowsky, writing in Wired. But Larry Grisolano, who supervised political ads for the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns, predicts that in 2016 presidential campaigns will allocate “nearly a quarter of their spending to digital media.”
The distinction may prove to be moot, sooner than later. With the arrival of the new generation of affordable ‘Smart’ TVs, a rapidly growing share of viewers will be checking their emails and Facebook feeds on the couch, creating a far more seamless viewer connection between both forms of media. Viewers are increasingly watching the same ads on their TVs, iPads and cell phones — an accelerating trend which could favor Democrats’ ability to reach younger voters.