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.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the reaction of Democrats–particularly the president and Hillary Clinton–to the Oregon massacre. But there’s been less analysis o the radicalization of Republican views that has made both of them all but give up on any legislative fix to the problem of gun violence. I discussed this at some length today at TPMCafe.

What neither Obama nor Clinton did was focus on begging congressional Republicans to end their total ban on legislation addressing such outrages as the gun show loophole to gun purchase background checks.
Of course, that would have been a waste of time. For even if we are now seeing a polarization of Democratic opinion on guns away from any idea of compromising with a GOP that is totally beholden to the gun lobby, it is a response to an earlier and much more radical polarization of Republicans. And to a remarkable extent, the default position of conservatives has less and less to do with arguments about the efficacy of gun regulation or the need for guns to deter or respond to crime. Instead, it’s based on the idea that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S. government.
This was once an exotic, minority view even among gun enthusiasts who tended to view the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to gun ownership not to overthrow the government but to supplement the government’s use of lethal force against criminals. Treating the Second Amendment as an integral legacy of the American Revolution appealed to gun rights advocates who sought firm ground against regulations with no possibility of compromise.
But more importantly, it gave a dangerous edge to the claims of conservative extremists–who recently began calling themselves “constitutional conservatives”–that their ideology of absolute property rights, religious rights and even fetal rights had been permanently established by the Founders who added in the Second Amendment to ensure any trespassing on their “design” by “tyrants” or popular majorities could and should be resisted.
Nowadays this revolutionary rationale for gun rights is becoming the rule rather than the exception for conservative politicians and advocates. Mike Huckabee, a sunny and irenic candidate for president in 2008, all but threatened revolutionary violence in his recent campaign book for the 2016 cycle, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy:

If the Founders who gave up so much to create liberty for us could see how our government has morphed into a ham-fisted, hypercontrolling “Sugar Daddy,” I believe those same patriots who launched a revolution would launch another one. Too many Americans have grown used to Big Government’s overreach. They’ve been conditioned to just bend over and take it like a prisoner [!]. But in Bubba-ville, the days of bending are just about over. People are ready to start standing up for freedom and refusing to take it anymore.

Dr. Ben Carson, another candidate thought to be a mild-mannered Christian gentleman, recently disclosed that he used to favor modest gun control measures until he came to realize the importance of widespread gun ownership as a safeguard against “tyranny.”

“When you look at tyranny and how it occurs, the pattern is so consistent: Get rid of the guns,” Carson told USA Today.

Combined with Carson’s signature belief that “progressives” are undertaking a conspiracy to impose “tyranny” via stealth and “political correctness,” one might fear he thinks the time for taking up arms is relatively near, and would be particularly justified if any gun regulations were enacted.
Perhaps the most surprising statement on this subject from a Republican presidential candidate was by a rare figure who dissents from the right-to-revolution talk, per this report from Sahil Kapur at TPM a few months ago:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s argument that the Second Amendment provides the “ultimate check against government tyranny” is a bit too extreme for potential 2016 rival and fellow Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“Well, we tried that once in South Carolina. I wouldn’t go down that road again,” Graham said, in an apparent reference to the Civil War. “I think an informed electorate is probably a better check than, you know, guns in the streets.”

Graham joked about this, but liberals generally are not amused by the suggestion that “patriotic” Americans should be stockpiling guns in case “they”–it’s not clear who, of course–decide it’s time to start shooting police officers and members of the armed forces in defense of their liberties, which in some cases are perceived to be extremely broad. Indeed, a lot of Second Amendment ultras appear to think the right to revolution is entirely up to the individual revolutionary. Here’s Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, the darling of the GOP Class of 2014, talking about this contingency in 2012:

I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere…But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.

You can wonder, as I often do, how people like Ernst would react to such rhetoric if it were coming from a member of a black nationalist or Islamist group. But clearly, there’s no point in progressives seeking any “compromise” with them on gun issues. They can only be defeated by a true mass social movement supporting reasonable gun regulation. But it’s important to understand that according to the Cult of the Second Amendment, opponents of gun measures have every right to fire back, literally.

The “right to revolution” talk on the Right needs to stop now.

I’d like to add a note to what the previous Staff post had to say about President Obama’s remarks on the community college shootings in Oregon yesterday, as I expressed at Washington Monthly:

It has to be the most candid presidential reaction to breaking news in my memory; Obama even angrily mocked the ritualistic character of his own past reactions to gun massacres.
But the center of his argument is the one I keep making here: America is mainly exceptional among advanced democratic nations not in our personal or economic liberty, but in our strange belief that letting everyone stockpile weapons is essential to the preservation of our freedom, and in the consequences of that strange belief. That’s what the worship of the most extreme interpretation possible of the Second Amendment, fed by the gun lobby and politicians (mostly, though not exclusively, conservatives) has wrought. And yes, it’s something that can make you angry.

Is knowing that in other countries you cannot buy military weapons at all, or if you can you will certainly be subject to extensive scrutiny, the kind of thing that makes you “proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free!”? I hope not. But the more I hear conservatives tout the Second Amendment as the guarantor of all liberties on the theory that we need to be able to prepare for the violent overthrow of the government if we don’t like what elections or court decisions produce, the more I worry about the exceptional challenges we face in dealing with violence.

There’s been a bunch of dubious coverage of the “civil war” between the congressional Republican leadership and insurgent conservatives, featuring even more dubious coverage of John Boehner’s decision to “sacrifice” his gavel, which in practical terms means a year of fun and sun in Florida followed by an extremely lucrative lobbying career. Beyond that, there’s a lot of misunderstanding of how this will all play out in Congress, as I discussed at TPMCafe:

[T]he blessings Boehner has vouchsafed Washington could turn out to be ephemeral. As the budget wizard Stan Collender has observed, the avoidance of a shutdown this week has massively increased the odds of a shutdown in December. And Ted Cruz could personally wreck the dreams of those who imagine a brief Era of Good Feelings where Boehner and House Democrats liberate all sorts of gridlocked legislation.
So does that mean congressional Republicans are doomed to perpetually refight the internal battles that led to Boehner’s resignation? No, not at all. No matter what happens in December, there will likely follow an intra-party election year truce in Congress (though probably not on the presidential nomination primary trail). And then, if Republicans win the White House and hang onto control of Congress, most of the fighting will go away as the party comes together joyfully to implement most of the conservative movement’s agenda.
This last conclusion may come as a shock to those used to hearing about various struggles for the soul of the Republican Party, or the many cries of treason aimed at congressional leaders from the Right and from the grassroots. But what must be understood is that virtually all of these conflicts revolve around arguments over strategy and tactics, not principles, goals or policies.
Every single congressional Republican is for repealing Obamacare. They all, even the most egregious RINOs, oppose the Iran Nuclear Deal. All but a very small handful favor defunding Planned Parenthood, criminalizing abortions to the maximum extent the Supreme Court allows, slashing upper-end and corporate taxes, dumping Medicaid on the states, and cutting safety net funding while boosting defense spending. The fighting has been over how to advance these goals when Republicans do not entirely control the federal government. If they do entirely control the federal government, the fighting will mostly go away, or will migrate to new ideological demands that are too extreme to contemplate just now.
The “moderation” in the GOP that conservatives attack and the MSM applauds will look very different if Republicans are no longer faced with immovable Democratic opposition at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. This should have been made plain back in the summer of 2012, when plans for a post-election conservative policy blitz utilizing the budget reconciliation process–which disposes of filibusters–were circulating on the breeze of GOP hopes that Mitt Romney would win and inherit a Republican-controlled Senate as well.
Since then the targets of such a single-party offensive have only grown: presidential executive orders on carbon emissions and immigration; Obama diplomatic efforts; the Obama “tilt” in judicial appointments; along with such hardy perennials as Obamacare, the New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs, and progressive taxation. And without question, the “treachery” of John Roberts has ensured that conservative litmus tests for the Supreme Court will be stricter and more focused on purely predictable conservative policy outcomes than ever before.
If, of course, Republicans lose a third consecutive presidential election, the current battles over strategy and tactics might reemerge with a vengeance, as conservatives grow frantic over the frightful damage being done to the America of their imagination by the free-spending, tyrannical, Muslim-loving, race-card-playing and baby-killing Democrats who somehow keep getting elected. And at that point pragmatic Republicans may become truly, not just strategically, moderate in counseling their compatriots that it’s time to stop pursuing the fever dreams of the Goldwater campaign.

It’s just another indicator that this is going to be a very, very high-stakes election in 2016.

We’re all going to be treated to an orgy of inside baseball over the weekend about the genesis of House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation, and lots of weepy stuff about his sacrifice in the national interest. Indeed, some hands are wringing over the terrible weakness of the contemporary Speakership, as though that is some hallowed Washington Institution.
Asked by Politico to comment on that dire possibility today, here’s what I said:

I’m afraid I have to challenge the premise of a Politico question again. The Boehner resignation didn’t show the demise of the Speakership, but its abiding strength. Think about it: Congress avoided (more than likely) a federal government shutdown; angry conservatives got a scalp; and Boehner himself got the clock ticking early on the one-year lobbying ban that’s the only thing standing between him and vast wealth. Everybody wins!

More fundamentally, the problems with the House since 2010 have less to do with the power or powerlessness of the Speaker than with the inability of certain Members–and the radicalized conservative movement they represent–to recognize the limitations of the House as an institution in an era of divided government. Many conservatives became furious at Boehner and the GOP Establishment for failing to keep promises they had no business making. If everybody stops pretending a House majority can tell a president of another party what to do, the House and the speakership will be healthier institutions.

To put it another way, the problem that led to Boehner’s resignation isn’t going away other than temporarily, even with a different personality holding the gavel. What’s required is an end to the ideological delusion that leads conservatives to believe they are destined to have their way.

This presidential nominating cycle, certainly on the Republican side, is not following any sort of rulebook. And so it’s inevitable the bible of the nominating process from a political science point of view is coming under fresh scrutiny, as I explained today at the Washington Monthly:

Regular readers know I enjoy expressing irreverent thoughts about The Party Decides, the 2008 tome by political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller that is often quoted like Holy Writ by academicians and even some journalists as the final work on presidential nominating contests. That’s not because I don’t respect the authors and the scholarship involved in this book, or doubt that it captures some important insights about the interplay of party elites, candidates and primary voters. It’s more that I think the small sample involved, the close cases treated as not so close at all, and above all, some of the simplistic interpretations being made of the data make the book and its expositors valuable but not definitive. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the usages of the book (I won’t attribute it to the authors) is the insistence on bean-counting elected official endorsements as the be-all and end-all of who’s where in the Invisible Primary and who’s going to win once voting begins. I know a lot of political practitioners, and none of them place that high a value on accumulating such endorsements unless they happen in an early primary or caucus state.
But now comes Vox‘s Andrew Prokop with a skilled deconstruction of the idea party elites control presidential nominations, which is obviously looking pretty dubious this year as three candidates virtually no elected officials or organized constituency groups are going to endorse–Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina–continue to dominate the field. Not only have party elites failed to get behind a single candidate; they have so far signally failed to veto a candidate they have clearly and mightily sought to destroy, namely Trump.
Prokop backtracks to earlier nomination contests and concludes the domination of party elites is mostly clear in cycles when the nominee was pretty obvious, and that voters may have independently played a stronger role than later acknowledged in breaking ties. The party as defined by elites did not, after all, “decide” the Democratic nomination in 2004 and 2008, and arguably not the 2008 GOP nomination either. And there have been a significant number of cases–the 1984 Hart challenge to Mondale, the 2000 Bradley challenge to Gore, and even the 2012 Santorum challenge to Romney–where some relatively small changes in single-state primary outcomes might have changed everything, regardless of what “the establishment” wanted.
In defense of the “party decider” faction, they do generally adopt a definition of “elites” that’s broader than what journalists tend to assume; they include organized constituency and ideological groups like the antichoicers and the Club for Growth on the Republican side and unions on the Democratic side. And it’s possible their basic theories will be confirmed by this year’s Democratic contest, where Hillary Clinton is rolling up indicia of elite support rare for a non-incumbent, or even the GOP contest, where a late decision by elites to get behind a single candidate like Rubio or Bush could still have a big impact.

But it doesn’t look like one of those years where any analyst, academic or journalistic, ought to feel very smug in making predictions.