Going into every election cycle, Republicans worried about their party’s extremism and MSM types determined to maintain equivalency between the two parties on every front both engage in an attempted demonstration that Democrats are moving far to the left. Usually Bill Clinton is used as some sort of benchmark of what is not “left,” though Republicans attacked him for alleged extremism as well.
We had a particularly weak example of this meme in a New York Times op-ed by conservative policy writer and occasional intraparty critic Peter Wehner, as I noted at Washington Monthly:

Ignoring the fact that most actual lefty Democrats think Barack Obama is too much like Bill Clinton, Wehner’s case almost entirely depends on contrasting the noble centrist Big Dog (who, of course, conservatives denounced as a godless socialist when he was actually in office) with the left-bent Obama.
And it’s a really terrible argument. Exhibit one for Wehner involves Clinton’s support for three-strikes-and-you’re-out and 100,000 cops, as though they are the same thing, with Eric Holder’s de-incarceration commitment. Keep up, Pete: Clinton, along with two-thirds of the Republican presidential field, has called for a reversal of “mass incarceration” policies. It’s not an ideological move in either direction so much as a rare and belated bipartisan recognition of what does and doesn’t work.
Exhibit two is welfare reform, and aside from ignoring everything Clinton did on low-income economic policy other than signing the 1996 welfare law, Wehner blandly accepts the race-drenched lie–and he’s smart enough to know that it is indeed widely interpreted to be a lie–from the 2012 Romney campaign that Obama has “loosened welfare-to-work requirements.” Then he tries to pivot to a contrast of Clinton’s shutdown of the “welfare entitlement” with Obama’s creation of a health care entitlement–without noting that Clinton had a health care proposal that was distinctly more “liberal” than Obama’s. Pretty big omission, I’d say.
It gets worse. Wehner suggests that unlike Clinton Obama wants to boost taxes on the wealthy, which conveniently ignores Clinton’s first budget. Speaking of the budget, Obama’s fiscal record is contrasted with Clinton’s without noting that Obama inherited not only a huge deficit but the worst economy since the 1930s. Wehner makes a fact-free assertion that Obama isn’t as friendly towards U.S. allies as Clinton was. And in a telling maneuver, he suddenly shifts the contrast from Clinton-versus-Obama to Clinton-versus-Clinton in mentioning the dispute over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, where HRC has been “non-committal.” Well, the crazy lefty Barack Obama hasn’t been “non-committal,” has he? Yes, a majority of congressional Democrats oppose him on TPP. But a majority of congressional Democrats also opposed Clinton on NAFTA and GATT, and denied him “fast-track” trade negotiating authority. Plus ca change….
Nonetheless, Wehner stumbles on to his pre-fab conclusion:

The Democratic Party is now a pre-Bill Clinton party, the result of Mr. Obama’s own ideological predilections and the coalition he has built.

In the very next breath he acknowledges that on the one issue where the Democratic Party really has “moved to the left,” same-sex marriage, the country has moved with it (and the “pre-Bill Clinton” Democratic Party had to move as well). And then he leaps to the circular argument that Republicans must be better representing the “center” of public opinion, because they’re doing so well in midterms!

I suspect Wehner’s object in the op-ed was to sanitize any criticism he might have of his own party in the immediate future. Others use the meme to claim the “center” for the GOP strictly by way of comparative extremism. Either way, the facts just are no friendly to the case, and are not getting any friendlier with the passage of time.

Want to know one reason GOP presidential candidates are not rushing to participate in this year’s Iowa Republican Straw Poll, traditionally the first “scorable” event of the cycle? Other ways are emerging to “winnow” the very large field, as I discussed today at the Washington Monthly. I first quoted Craig Robinson of The Iowa Republican:

There is…another dynamic at work here that didn’t exist in previous cycles. The large field of 2016 Republican candidates is making the debate stage really crowded. Both CNN and FOX News recently said that they would limit the debate stage to the top ten candidates. This is a huge development in the presidential campaigns’ poker game.
Huckabee doesn’t have to worry about getting in the debates as he routinely polls in the top five of all national and state polls. That’s not the case for Santorum, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, or Lindsey Graham. So what would help Huckabee’s strategy to win Iowa? He needs candidates like Santorum and Jindal out of the race.
Huckabee could accomplish that in two ways. One, by beating them in something like the Straw Poll, which costs lots of money and has other risks associated with it. Or two, Huckabee could slow play it, and let the debates actually clear his main rivals for the Christian conservative votes in Iowa. Huckabee is essentially taking the conservative approach by counting on the debates to winnow the large 2016 GOP field.

Sure enough, Fox News is limiting participation in the first debate on August 6 (just two days before the straw poll) to its estimation of the top ten candidates in public opinion surveys. And if you look at the latest national Fox poll, Rick Perry’s 11th, Rick Santorum’s 12th, and Bobby Jindal is 14th. If you figure candidates not tested (e.g., Donald Trump and John Kasich) might later make the top ten, and take seriously my suggestion that the whole GOP is going to conspire to boost Carly Fiorina’s standing to get her on that stage, then it’s already white-knuckle time for the Ricks and for Bobby. That not only confirms Robinson’s point about Huckabee letting the debates do the winnowing, but also indicates the endangered candidates might decide to devote their resources to whatever it takes to get them into the national polling Top Ten rather than screwing around with chartering buses to Boone….
In any event, the high likelihood that debates using polling data may serve as a winnower of the field resolves one debate we’ve all been having: for Republicans, at least, and this year, at least, early horse-race polls really do matter.

So don’t be surprised if hardly anybody decides to deal with the Straw Poll–or if some of the stragglers say or do some outrageous things to boost their visibility and poll numbers just enough to qualify for the debates.

It arrives every four years, so long as there is any chance of a competitive nominating process: the primaries could be inconclusive and we could have a Brokered Convention! With that phrase comes an array of more distinct fantasies, mostly from fictionalized or dimly remembered conventions of the past when multiple ballots or smoke-filled rooms full of deal-makers or wild gyrations on the floor between rival coalitions produced a dramatic outcome. It’s kind of important, however, to get real about “brokered conventions,” particularly in a year when the odds of it happening seem higher, as I discussed at the Washington Monthly with respect to the GOP:

So far as I know, Taegan Goddard’s the first to raise this specter for 2016, and he actually makes a decent case that if it’s ever going to happen, the circumstances are favorable. There’s no real front-runner. There are enough candidates that the lesser-of-two-evils dynamic that produces an early winner may not kick in for a good while. And Super-PACs may make it possible for candidates whose campaigns would have starved to death in the past to survive later into the process.
Goddard could have added that changes in the calendar designed to end the nomination process earlier could backfire by reducing opportunities for a horrified party to avoid a “brokered convention.” And it’s also interesting that the closest thing to a Party Elite favorite, Jeb Bush, appears to be pursuing not a clinch-it-early strategy, but a win-it-in-the-late-innings approach.
Still, let’s review the record: there hasn’t been a convention which began with significant doubt about the identity of the nominee since the GOP event in 1976. The last multi-ballot convention was in 1952, when Democrats took three ballots to nominate Adlai Stevenson. The main reason for this shift away from deliberative–or if you wish, “brokered”–conventions was the rise of a primary system that all but eliminated undecided delegates and favorite-son or stalking-horse candidacies. So it requires really, really special circumstances even to get within shouting distance of a convention where someone hasn’t locked up the nomination long before the balloons are inflated. And even if that perfect storm occurs, in 2016 or some other year, the word “brokered” is probably off, as I noted in a TNR column on the subject in 2012:

As…Jonathan Bernstein, has noted, a “brokered convention” depends on “brokers.” Party leaders have a lot of ways to influence the selection of delegates in the primaries, but beyond that, their powers are limited. In the extremely unlikely event no winner heads to Tampa with a majority of delegates, we are looking not at a “brokered” convention, but a “deadlock” where the actual delegates, once their legal and moral commitments are discharged, can do what they want. “Brokering” is much too tame a metaphor for what would take place in that scenario. It would be a lot more like herding feral cats. Fortunately, it probably won’t–no, it definitely won’t–come to that.

But we can dream, at least this far out.

It’s probably a dream, however, caused by eating something strange just before bedtime, or maybe a pundit’s deadline that arrives too soon.

Republicans have gotten a little lucky this month as two potential presidential candidates (Rick Snyder and John Bolton) decided against running. But that still leaves a large number of candidates and proto-candidates, and some real problems when it comes to deciding how many of them can be herded onto a debate stage without encouraging clown-car metaphors. I wrote about this Wednesday at the Washington Monthly:

To make a long story short, traditional “screens” where the top ten candidates in national primary polls make the stage would not only lop off six or more candidates, but might very well include some (Donald Trump!) party poohbahs would love to discard while bumping others (most importantly Carly Fiorina, the only woman in the field and the sanctioned Safe Hillary Basher) they desperately want to keep around. On top of all that, there’s the fear someone excluded (e.g., Bobby Jindal) could make it a viable campaign issue, and the certainty that excluding a congressional power (e.g., Lindsey Graham) would come with its own set of consequences for party elites. So GOPers are toying with some unorthodox screens [as reported by the Washington Post‘s Matea Gold]:

Among the novel ideas that have been floated to determine a candidate’s strength is the amount of money raised by his or her campaign committee, according to people with knowledge of the talks. But many candidates will not file an initial fundraising report until mid-October. So what about money raised to support them through independent super PACs, which this year are largely functioning as extensions of the official campaigns? (That concept has gotten little traction.)

Probably not, since when you are being attacked as the Party of Plutocrats which has corrupted American politics to the core via championship of unlimited and sometimes secret campaign contributions, you probably don’t want to give big donors more say over the nominating process than they already have.
If I were them I’d just bite the bullet and say that in this day and age, with dozens of men in the running, no presidential primary debate is complete without a woman on the stage. But horrors!–that might look like Affirmative Action.

I don’t think it’s too cynical to assume that all the lavish praise Fiorina has been getting from Republicans in the early stages of the Invisible Primary is intended to make her credible enough to include in debates. But that may take 2% of the vote in some polls, and she’s probably not close to that just yet.

Here at TDS, we do not deny there are plenty of debatable differences of opinion among Democrats but do like to explode the phony “struggles for the soul of the party” that grow like mushrooms in poor light. And there was a big one published today by the New York Times Magazine. I took it on at some length at Washington Monthly:

The New York Times Magazine‘s’ Robert Draper, who last drew major attention for speculating that Rand Paul’s presidential campaign might create a “libertarian moment,” swings for the fences again in a “Democrats in Disarray” piece for the ages. I don’t know if his essay completely justifies the headline: “The Great Democratic Crack-Up of 2016”. But he sure does show that if you look at the 2014 elections strictly from the perspective of Democrats who want to make apocalyptic claims about the plight of the party and then refuse to acknowledge any alternative explanation, then yeah, it looks pretty bad.
Maybe I’m prejudiced because I wrote a whole book–not a long book, but still a book–about 2014 without once considering the argument that Democrats lost because they were in the grip of mad lefty hippies, or because they had sold their souls to Wall Street.
Yes, I was aware there was a sizable and vocal group of people who subscribed to each proposition, but let myself be seduced by political scientists and other dispassionate people that things like turnout patterns, the economy, the electoral landscape, and the long history of second-term midterm disasters for the party controlling the White House, probably mattered more than the struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party some have been waging for decades.

Robert Draper sure didn’t go that way. He treats 2014 as an inscrutable disaster probably attributable to Democratic divisions and/or to the people on the wrong (i.e., left) side of the Democratic barricades being too much in charge. And then he plunges on into the current cycle, where he treats the Democratic Senate primary in Maryland as a microcosm of the party’s irrepressible conflicts and the suicidal impulses of progressives. Throughout the essay, the intra-Democratic debate is described as though the Progressive Change Campaign and Third Way speak for everybody.
Like any healthy political party, Democrats have a lot to debate on policy, political tactics and strategy, and occasionally, basic goals and values. Part of what bugs me most about the Draper piece is that it indirectly suggests that debate invites political disaster. It can, if divisions are taken too far. But 2016 is about as likely to become the occasion of a “Great Democratic Crack-Up” as it is of a “libertarian moment:” not much at all.

The biggest news from yesterday’s elections in the United Kingdom was the achievement of a parliamentary majority by the Conservative Party. The second biggest news was that the entire polling industry predicted a different result.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight had a succinct summary of why this seems to be happening lately, not just in the UK but in the Scottish Independence Referendum, the Israeli elections, the 2014 U.S. midterms and even the 2012 U.S. presidential election:

Voters are becoming harder to contact, especially on landline telephones. Online polls have become commonplace, but some eschew probability sampling, historically the bedrock of polling methodology. And in the U.S., some pollsters have been caught withholding results when they differ from other surveys, “herding” toward a false consensus about a race instead of behaving independently.

But I added this comment at Washington Monthly:

All these are big and legitimate concerns. But probably the bigger problem is that such issues will be seized upon by anti-data zealots and “game-change” journalists–think of them as like the old-fart baseball scouts in Moneyball who knew a good player when they saw one–to seek to discredit any objective measurements of public opinion or any analysis based upon them. After all, polls are “wrong,” right? So let’s just wing it with our instincts, prejudices, snail’s-eye observations from the campaign trail (or bar), insider opinions, and of course, first-person anecdotal takes on the mood of the electorate.

The solution to flawed data is better data, not less data and certainly not data-free reporting and analysis. Keep that in mind next time someone tells you to “ignore the polls.”

I don’t have to remind TDS readers that Democrats have been agonizing about what to do to appeal to non-college educated white voters–a.k.a. the “white working class”–ever since their current tilt towards the GOP became evident. But with Democratic “populism” on the rise, it’s now Republicans who are finally having to worry about this demographic, with some even attempting their own “populist” appeals at each other’s expense. I wrote about this at TPMCafe in the context of Mike Huckabee’s campaign launch:

What’s been missing for a good long while in the GOP is any serious effort to do what Nixon did: make Republican economic policies working-class-friendly. But now, as Democrats have more or less in concert decided to struggle towards a “populist” economic message that can win back some of these voters, Republicans are waking up to the same necessity.
The disconnect between the economic policies of the GOP and the interests of their most reliable voters has been a recurring theme for the self-styled “Reform Conservatives,” who often borrowed Tim Pawlenty’s line that the GOP needed to become the party of “Sam’s Club,” not just the country club. But as the Reformicons’ influence has grown, their demands have been watered down: the budget plan recently unveiled by Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, supposedly a new acme of Reformicon thinking, buys off traditional Republicans with the elimination of taxes on investment and inherited income before timorously cutting in the “Sam’s Club” voters with an enhanced child tax credit (plus an enhanced EITC for the working poor).
Some libertarian-oriented Republicans also claim to be promoting a new right-wing economic populism via attacks on corporate subsidies or “crony capitalism.” But again, this is at best a syncretic approach, since these self-same “populists” are avid to reduce or eliminate taxes on or even regulation of the corporations they are savaging as fascistic leeches.
But at least two prospective GOP candidates for president in 2016 seem inclined to take an edgier approach to the task of appealing to the economic views of working-class conservatives — both of them candidates who have experienced considerable success in the past appealing to their cultural resentments.
Rick Santorum’s distinctive pitch so far in the 2016 invisible primary has been to match rhetorical appeals to white working class voters with a very specific hostility to legal as well as illegal immigration as the alleged reason for underemployment and wage stagnation. It’s sort of like an AFL-CIO argument circa 1990 with everything other than one subject blotted out.
But Mike Huckabee shows signs of going significantly further. He got a lot of credit in 2008 for being a “populist” initially because he refused to go along with GOP cheerleading over the George W. Bush economy, and subsequently because he feuded with fiscal hardliners — especially the Club for Growth (which Huckabee called the “Club for Greed”) — over his record in Arkansas. This time around he’s earning the “populist” label by criticizing two shibboleths of contemporary conservatism: free trade and “entitlement reform.”
In both cases, he’s mining grass-roots conservative disgruntlement with Republican orthodoxy. Moreover, he’s linking these economic complaints about the agenda of conservative business elites to his longstanding and more-pointed-than-ever attacks on the cultural agenda of liberal elites.
It will be interesting to see if he seeks and gains attention for being (most likely) the only candidate in a huge presidential field to take issue with the Republican congressional leadership’s push to win approval for Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. More importantly, the heavy, heavy investment of Republican politicians in budget schemes that depend on reductions in Social Security and Medicare spending will give Huckabee constant opportunities to tout his newly stated opposition to such cuts as a betrayal of promises made to middle-class workers who’ve been contributing payroll taxes their entire lives. Beyond that, two candidates — Chris Christie and Jeb Bush — are already on record favoring reductions in retirement benefits that go beyond the highly indirect voucher schemes associated with Paul Ryan.
Now it’s not entirely clear Huckabee can be an effective spokesman for a working-class-oriented “populist” faction in the GOP. He’s vulnerable to counter-attacks based on his record of supporting tax hikes as governor of Arkansas. Speaking of taxes, he’s very identified with the “Fair Tax” scheme of replacing the income tax with a national consumption tax, which has a superficial appeal to “populists” as a way to kill the IRS, but would massively shift the federal tax burden from the wealthy to the middle and lower classes. Huckabee’s commitment to culture war issues may be too much for many non-conservative-evangelical white working class voters, much as the non-economic views of the politician who introduced the whole concept of culture war, Pat Buchanan, made him unattractive to people who shared his disdain for free trade and liberalized immigration and foreign aid. Huckabee’s questionable organizational and fundraising skills are also handicaps.
But it is possible Huckabee (and perhaps Santorum, and maybe other opportunistic candidates down the road) could succeed in scaring away others from those economic positions of the Wall Street Journal editorial board that actual Republican voters do not like. And short of that, if something a bit closer to real “populism” than the token gestures of Reformicons and libertarians is crushed by party elites, the GOP could be exposed to some dangerous inroads from Democrats, who look to be far less reluctant to offend wealthy donors this cycle.

So Democrats should watch these conservative lurches in the direction of “populism”–and the quite possibly savage reaction they could produce–with great interest.

It sometimes seems that political observers are divided between those who treat polling data, no matter how early or ephemeral, as Gospel Truth, and those who want to dismiss polling data, or even all data, out of hand, either for some period prior to real votes or forever.
At Washington Monthly this week, I discussed the issue in response to a sound but in my opinion misleading post from an observer whose work I admire:

At the Upshot today, Nate Cohn has a good primer on what you should ignore in all the early GOP nomination contest horse-race polls, but goes over the brink into one of those general injunctions to ignore early polls, presumably because he thinks readers are sure to misinterpret them. But then he makes a questionable assertion about how we should view the field:

Some might say that Mr. Rubio and Mr. Cruz’s support is enough to put them alongside Mr. Bush or Mr. Walker, the two candidates who have led the polls and have often been described as front-runners for the nomination. But Mr. Bush and Mr. Walker are front-runners in spite of their standing in the polls, not because of it.
They’re front-runners because the other candidates do not appear to have enough support from party elites to sustain a national campaign. Those other candidates do not have natural factional bases — like moderates for Mr. Bush, and conservatives for Mr. Walker — that give them clear opportunities to win early contests, or do not have the potential to build broad enough coalitions to win the nomination.

But how do we know Bush and Walker have these “natural factional bases.” You could say we know this about Jebbie because of rumors of fabulous fundraising numbers and all the blind quotes from Establishment types expressing their adoration for him. But until all this turns into reported contributions or public endorsements, it remains speculative, doesn’t it? I’d say a big reason for the Jeb the Frontrunner assumption is that his putative rival for that “factional base,” Chris Christie, is drawing terrible numbers in the early polls. And by that I don’t necessarily mean his horse-race standing, but his favorable/unfavorable ratios and the distribution of what little support he has. Similarly, we know Scott Walker is formidable not because of money or endorsements (he has little of either so far) but because early polls consistently show him with decisively strong support among conservative ideologues, and clear potential for growth in the rest of the primary electorate. And we know Marco Rubio has the potential to become a top-tier candidate because of his consistently strong approval ratios–again, in the early polls.
So I would amend Nate’s advice by saying it’s wise to ignore the order of candidates in early horse-race polling, which, as he points out, changes constantly (as it did in 2012 when even Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain led such polls at one point in the cycle), but do pay attention to the internals. And to stress a point where I may be just about alone in the punditocracy: even early general election trial-heat numbers may matter for candidates whose appeal in their own party is attributable to their claims of electability.
This is already a real problem for Jeb Bush, since the Establishment’s reported belief that he’s the strongest candidate to send up against Hillary Clinton isn’t born about in polling of these two extremely well-known polls; and it’s a potential asset for Rand Paul, whose otherwise unlikely candidacy has been strengthened by consistently stronger showings than anyone else in trial heats against HRC.
There’s a couple of other things about Nate Cohn’s take that give me pause. He concludes:

At some point, Mr. Walker, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio will need to take the lead in the polls, particularly in Iowa and New Hampshire. But now, it’s better to focus on the fundamentals — whether the candidates appear to hold the support from party elites necessary to win the nomination, whether they are broadly appealing throughout the party, and whether they seem capable of building support in the early states.

First of all, I just have to groan when I see yet another meaning assigned to the term “fundamentals,” by which some people mean GDP numbers alone, while others would add other economic statistics, presidential approval ratings, characteristics of the cycle, and landscape. And second of all, where do we find these fundamentals this early in the contest, particularly such criteria as “whether they are broadly appealing throughout the party, and whether they seem capable of building support in the early states”? That’s right: early polls, properly interpreted.
So: turns out there is gold to glean from early polls, so long as you know where to spot the fool’s gold.

Up until now, it was generally assumed the 2016 elections would revolve around some of the same issues discussed in 2012 and 2014: economic stagnation and inequality, immigration, national security challenges, and maybe executive powers and culture-war issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
But there’s been one too many incident of racially-tinged collisions between police and the communities they are supposed to protect to assume that any more. I wrote about that this week for TPMCafe.

[T]he riots in Baltimore this week brought back a lot of memories for Baby Boomers who remember Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, Cleveland in 1966, Detroit and Newark and Cambridge in 1967, and cities across the country in 1968, including Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Some may or may not remember the extent to which police brutality charges and/or habitual racial profiling in arrests were major issues in many of these cities back then. But in any event, what seems like a growing drumbeat of incidents of black men being killed by police (or by would-be police like George Zimmerman), illuminating long-suppressed complaints about brutality and racial profiling, is interrupting this election cycle, supposedly focused on economic inequality and national security threats, like one of those special bulletins of yore….
For some pols this old/new challenge may appear to be the very last thing they need. That’s likely the case for former Baltimore mayor and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who cut short his pre-presidential campaign overseas trip to rush back to address a crisis he no longer has any power to control. He will immediately face claims that “zero-tolerance” policies he put into place as mayor contributed to the deterioration of police-community relations, thanks to a rising tide of arrests for minor offenses that ruined the employment prospects of many young black men (also a major factor in some of the 1960s “race riots”). This is not the kind of allegation someone seeking to cast himself as the Fighting Progressive candidate for president can easily overcome.
If the Baltimore saga is an existential challenge for O’Malley, it may serve as a devilish temptation for his successor as governor, Republican Larry Hogan. Being from an old political family, Hogan is surely aware that one of his Republican predecessors began an unlikely ascent to the vice presidency after Richard Nixon noticed with pleasure his tough talk towards protesters on the Eastern Shore (in 1967) and in Baltimore itself (in 1968). Indeed, had Mr. Law-and-Order Spiro T. Agnew not shown his contempt for the law by taking bribes as part of an arrangement that went back to his tenure as Baltimore county executive, he would have almost certainly become the 38th president of the United States. Did Larry Hogan think about that when he talked tough towards protesters in Baltimore this week?
More generally, Republicans everywhere may be tempted to exploit the reflexive support for police officers among white citizens that is beginning to exhibit itself everywhere black protests arise. As John Judis observed at National Journal this week, the likely election of Dan Donovan–the prosecutor who appeared to work hard to avoid any grand jury indictment of the cops who killed Eric Garner–to Congress in Staten Island next Tuesday may signal a new era of racial backlash, battening on conservative anxieties already aroused by the years of attacks on Obama and manufactured fears of his supposed mania for “redistribution.”
If there is a supply of backlash voters, there will certainly be a demand, if only among the crowded GOP presidential field where the candidates will soon run out of ways to demonstrate their True Conservatism. The more historically minded of them may realize that St. Ronald Reagan himself built his California political career on a foundation of backlash to rioters, albeit student radicals more than African-Americans per se.
Worse yet, if Republicans begin to return to backlash politics, some Democrats may get happy feet and return to their old habit of reflexively supporting aggressive police tactics and tougher sentencing in order to preserve their appeal to the shrinking minority of white voters willing to support them. All in all, it’s rational to fear that the rarest of phenomena, the bipartisan trend towards criminal justice reform, could be interrupted by polarization over police behavior, before it’s reached fruition. And in the long run, nothing would be more certain to perpetuate the oppressive fears of African-Americans for whom regular politics is sometimes little more than an interruption of lives spent under the gun.

We’re far enough into the 2016 election cycle to hear the sound of a few myths exploding. A notable one is the idea that governors are inherently better presidential candidates. I took a jaundiced look at that one at TPMCafe this week:

This ancient trope is based partly on statistics, notes Five Thirty Eight‘s Nate Silver:

Throughout American history, about twice as many governors as senators have been chosen to be standard bearers by the major parties, even though at any given moment there are only half as many sitting governors as sitting senators.

Statistics aside, it’s plausible that executives are a more natural fit for Chief Executive than career legislators. And in an era of raging anti-Washington sentiment, it makes sense that a record free of complicity with the federal government’s deeds and misdeeds could be an advantage.
All these factors were supposed to make the rich bumper crop of GOP governors and former governors in the field this year the collective frontrunners. But in case after case, their records back home are undermining their credibility or even threatening their freedom.
Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal are both suffering from calamitously bad approval ratings in the states they govern. Christie’s is at 38/56 according to a new Quinnipiac poll. Jindal was at 27/63 in a March poll, and with a frightful state budget situation, it looks as though he hasn’t hit bottom. And the otherwise high-flying Scott Walker’s popularity in Wisconsin has recently hit a very bad patch, with the famously objective Marquette Law School poll just last week showing him at 41/56, and worse yet, trailing Hillary Clinton by double digits. Walker’s most recent budget is also getting panned by big majorities of Wisconsin voters. This is a particularly unfortunate development for a candidate whose entire “electability” argument is based on his popularity in Wisconsin, a state that Obama has carried twice but Walker has won three times (in lower-turnout nonpresidential elections, to be sure).
Rick Perry has left office, but is under indictment for alleged abuses of power as governor. Christie and Walker also have to worry about prosecutorial footsteps, though experts differ on the risk of the hoosegow either faces.
Jeb Bush, for whom the statute of limitations has probably tolled on any violations of law he might have committed, is suffering from some gubernatorial blowback. His Florida rival Marco Rubio is reportedly setting up a superPAC to be lavishly funded by a billionaire who is still angry about a 2004 Bush veto of an appropriation to benefit a cancer research project set up in his sister-in-law’s name.
We already know from what they did to him in 2008 that Mike Huckabee’s nemesis, the Club for Growth (or as he has called it, the “Club for Greed”) is undoubtedly waiting in the weeds with another recitation of his tax-raising behavior as Arkansas governor.
And then there’s Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a might-have-been presidential candidate whose national viability was atomized almost overnight by his clumsy handling of a “religious liberty” bill, which wound up offending just about everybody while making him look like a deer in the culture-war headlights.
The exception to the rule that gubernatorial service has been at least a mixed blessing in the GOP field is the barely-visible John Kasich of Ohio, but even in his case gubernatorial duties have caused him to mosey up to the starting gate of a potential presidential candidacy with an unimpressive lack of dispatch or focus.
(Perhaps the gubernatorial sins of Jim Gilmore and George Pataki will come back to haunt them if anyone notices their presence on the campaign trail. For now they are operating safely under the radar screen.)
Even on the Democratic side, Martin O’Malley’s two terms as governor of Maryland have become an unexpected millstone in a possible presidential run, as his tax policies have drawn some blame for the shocking November 2014 loss by his intended successor, Anthony Brown.

All in all, it’s not that bad to be one of those despised Washingtonians in 2016. I’m reasonably sure Bobby Jindal wishes he had never returned to Louisiana to run for governor.