One of the more striking phenomena associated with the oncoming 2016 presidential cycle is the contrast between the massive enthusiasm for former Florida governor Jeb Bush in elite GOP circles and its notable absence anywhere else. But said elites are sometimes blinded by narcissism, and deafened by the puffery of their most prominent tribune, Mark Halperin (now with Bloomberg Politics), who wrote a much-mocked column on the world-historical potential of the Bush boom. I commented on this phenomenon earlier this week at Washington Monthly:

Mark Halperin is one of the most famous, and certainly one of the most richly remunerated, journalists in Christendom–yet is capable of writing graph after graph and page after page of palpable nonsense, expressing not only an indifference to but an active defiance of any objective evidence that transcends the “insider” information he purveys. But the problem here is in considering Halperin a “journalist” in the normal meaning of the term. His niche is to serve as a courtier and a vanity mirror for what Digby so aptly labeled The Village, the small group of elite beltway-centered movers and shakers who want to form the political world in their own image. He writes what Villagers want to read, and is rewarded with unequaled access to their most avaricious thoughts and intentions. And because they do matter in politics, albeit not as much as they would wish, there is a sort of “journalism” going on, but not of the sort that should be taken seriously as reflecting the broader world where activists, constituency groups, and, you know, actual voters have a little something to say about who governs them.
Back when he was flattering and pandering his way to insider influence at The Note, Halperin did a lot to popularize the concept of “the invisible primary,” the elite-dominated pre-election period when presidential candidates seek the money and influence necessary to mount a successful campaign. He remains adept at following that process, but only through the fun-house mirror of his subjects’ wildly inflated self-esteem. Republican insiders are frustrated that the GOP and the entire political system aren’t joining them in a plaintive wail for a third Bush presidency, so in a faithful reproduction of His Master’s Voice Halperin pens a column combining The Village’s ridiculously distorted idea of Jeb’s power and glory with the incredible phenomenon that America might be denied his services.

Personally, I think the acid test for Jeb Bush is whether he’s capable of looking beyond his elite support to the difficult realities of winning a presidential nomination. If he does, though, he probably won’t run.

It’s been obvious that from the elite level to the rank-and-file, Republicans have been reapplying the war paint that had begun to fade a bit during protests against various national security positions of the Obama administration. And it’s also becoming apparent that this could affect the party message and nominating process in 2016, as I noted today at the Washington Monthly.

Yes, it’s suddenly a fine time once again to be a Republican super-hawk, what with the GOP rank-and-file getting back in touch with their inner Dick Cheney, and even Rand Paul getting all macho about “destroying” IS. At that neocon fortress, the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes can’t help but gloat.

The Republican flirtation with dovish noninterventionism is over. It wasn’t much of a fling.

No, it wasn’t.
Hayes quickly warms to the idea that this new mood of joy in blowing thing up overseas as well as at home will be a big factor in 2016. And though he mentions Paul’s back-tracking and some upcoming “big” speech by Bobby Jindal on defense (presumably because his effort to be the most ferocious Christian Right figure in the campaign hasn’t much worked), Hayes has no doubt who the biggest beneficiary will be:
Not immigration reform? Just kidding.

Rubio called for dramatic increases in defense spending. He said the United States should be prepared to send ground troops to Iraq if necessary to defeat ISIS. He argued that the United States must “be able to project power into multiple theaters in the world.” He said that the United States should embrace its role as a superpower and “conduct a multifaceted foreign policy.”

For the first time, I’m seeing a glimmer of how Rubio might be able to overcome the horrendous damage he suffered among conservative activists with his advocacy of comprehensive immigration reform.

The smell of gunpowder in the air in GOP politics has gotten so strong, in fact, that Lindsey Graham is imagining himself as a 2016 presidential candidate.
That ain’t happening, but it’s a sign of the times.

One of the most frustrating recent phenomena for Democrats has been a “false equivalency” meme wherein Republican candidates have been forgiven intraparty pandering to “the base” and congratulated for general election “moves to the center” as though that’s what everybody does. This media tendency has been especially notable in this year’s Iowa Senate contest, where Republican Joni Ernst has benefited from a cynical acceptance of both her extremism and her rationalizations for abandoning it. I dissected and deplored this media vice in a TPMCafe column today:

[Democratic nominee Bruce] Braley has gamely stuck to issues, primarily by hammering Ernst for very unpopular right-wing positions on the minimum wage and Social Security. But he’s also used issues to raise his own “character” issue: the claim that this mild-mannered hog-castrating war veteran woman in the soft-focused ads is actually an extremist. And in that pursuit he’s found plenty of ammunition in Ernst’s record in the Iowa legislature and on the campaign trail, particularly early in the 2014 cycle when she was looking for wingnut traction.
Ernst is crying “unfair,” most notably in an exchange in their first debate last Sunday. Braley criticized her for sponsoring in the legislature a state constitutional amendment establishing prenatal “personhood” from the moment of fertilization, which he accurately said would outlaw now only the very earliest abortions but also IV fertility clinics and several types of contraception. This was Ernst’s response:

“The amendment that is being referenced by the congressman would not do any of the things that you stated it would do,” Ernst said. “That amendment is simply a statement that I support life.”

That’s true in a highly technical sense — perhaps using the reasoning of a trial lawyer — insofar as constitutional amendments don’t inherently create the laws they rule out or demand, but in a more basic sense, it’s just a lie, as Ernst and her campaign surely know. “Personhood” amendments are so extreme they have been routinely trounced when placed on the ballot (twice in Colorado and once in Mississippi). And if sponsoring one of them is a “statement” of anything, it’s a statement of absolute submission to Iowa’s powerful antichoice lobby, in the sense of ruling out any of those weasely “exceptions” to a total abortion (and “abortifacient”) ban.

Ernst’s efforts to escape accountability are more egregious, believe it or not, on other issues:

Democrats [are] calling attention to Ernst’s multiple passionate statements subscribing to the insane, John Birch Society-inspired conspiracy theory that the United Nations is behind land-use regulations of every kind. [But that] is treated as the equivalent of Republicans howling about Braley’s “chicken suit.” The reason, I suppose, is that you can’t criticize a pol for pandering to “the base” during primaries and then “moving to the center” in general elections. It’s just what you do.
I’m sorry, I just don’t buy it. Extremism is, or should be, a “character” issue. And so, too, should be flip-flopping. Personally, I respect “personhood” advocates for taking a dangerous position based on the logical extension of strongly-held if exotic ideas about human development. I don’t respect those like Cory Gardner and Joni Ernst who try to weasel out of such positions the moment they become inconvenient.
As for Agenda 21, anyone who talks seriously about this twisted hoax should be drummed out of electoral politics for good. But just as bad is Joni Ernst’s excuse for why she’s not talking about it now:

“I don’t think that the U.N. Agenda 21 is a threat to Iowa farmers,” Ernst said in an interview in her Urbandale campaign office. “I think there are a lot of people that follow that issue in Iowa. It may be something that is very important to them, but I think Iowans are very smart and that we have a great legislature here, we have a very intelligent governor, and I think that we will protect Iowans.”

In other words, the conspiracy to ban golfing and force people out of their cars onto bike trails is real, but Iowa Republicans are so vigilant about it that the conspirators have moved elsewhere.

Democrats can and should call Republicans on this kind of crap, but the MSM should pitch in, too, and if they don’t, they deserve the abuse they so often get for cynical enabling of political vices.

Like everyone else in political journalism, I’ve spent months obsessing about the struggle for control of the Senate, and without question it matters a lot. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that if there was just one contest you could choose that might send the right message to the GOP, it’s the Kansas governor’s race, where incumbent Sam Brownback is in big trouble. Here’s how I put it today at the Washington Monthly.

If the Republican governor of a very Republican state loses for undertaking a conservative political and policy revolution, complete with a purge of party “moderates” and reactionary legislation on just about every front imaginable, it may remind Republicans everywhere that there are limits to a meta-strategy of moving to the right, polarizing the electorate, and then winning on money and pure dumb luck. As a huge bonus, among the injured in a Brownback loss would be the Koch Brothers, right there in their Wichita lair….
Brownback has very publicly made his state a conservative “experiment station” and sought to stamp out any dissent in his party, all in the pursuit of a sort of intellectual rogue’s gallery of bad ideas, from supply-side economics to the harshest attacks in the country on reproductive rights. He not only deserve to lose, but his regime needs to be remembered with fear and trembling by Republicans everywhere.

If this sounds like a prayer as much as political analysis, so be it.

Sometimes you read some overseas news and it seems exceptionally relevant to U.S. politics, if not now then in the near future. That’s how I reacted to news from Spain about a sudden about-face on abortion policy, as I discussed today at TPMCafe:

A political party with close ties to religious conservatives wins a national election thanks to unhappiness with the ruling center-left party’s economic and financial performance. Challenged to redeem its platform promising a major reversal of landmark laws making abortion generally legal, the conservative party promulgates a law banning the procedure, with exceptions for rape, incest, and threats to the physical and mental health of the mother. Protests appear and spread as women object to the turning back of the clock. Public opinion surveys show 70 to 80 percent opposition to the new law. And finally, the conservative party’s prime minister relents, puts off implementation of the abortion ban on grounds that it would be reversed at the next change of party control, and instead proposes a face-saving measure providing for parental approval of abortions by minors. Anti-choicers and religious officials are very, very displeased and the governing party could be heading toward disarray.
In case you missed it, that’s what just happened in Spain. And it’s an omen for what might happen if U.S. Republicans regain power in 2016 thanks to general unhappiness with the Obama administration and the results of its economic policies. A long-overdue debt — sort of a balloon payment on an old mortgage — would reach maturity, and the GOP would be hard-pressed not to take some dramatic action on hot-button cultural issues, especially abortion. And the required gesture could be politically toxic. The Spanish law is significantly more liberal than what the national GOP has long been committed to; aside from the significant number of Republicans who oppose rape and incest exceptions to a hypothetical abortion ban, a health exception has long been anathema, and a mental health exception even more so (recall the sarcastic air quotes John McCain used for “health exceptions” in the 2008 presidential debate at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church).

Even if Republicans dodge a confrontation between public opinion and their longstanding commitments to the antichoice movement, the same dynamic applies to other hot-button issues:

The bottom line is that a Republican Party — which like the anti-choice movement itself has long been Janus-faced, publicly focusing on rare and unpopular late-term abortions while never moving an inch from support from a total abortion ban with rare exceptions — would be forced by actual power to choose between a final betrayal of its “base” and an implicit mandate to ignore all that cultural stuff. Even if it’s abundantly clear to all the pundits that a triumphal GOP has gained control of the federal government for reasons that have zero to do with rolling back abortion rights — or GLBT rights, or a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants — there’s also zero reason to assume that President Christie or Bush or Paul or Cruz might not find himself in exactly the position of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy this week: admitting a big chunk of the party platform is quite simply too hot to handle. If it comes to that, a lot of conservative activists may lose their final illusions.

It’s another way of saying you can’t have it both ways forever.

There are a lot of obnoxious Republican candidates running for high office this November. But none of them bug me as much as Tom Cotton of Arkansas. I explained why at Washington Monthly yesterday, after reading a long profile of the man from Molly Ball of The Atlantic:

Cotton’s special status as the not-so-secret superstar of the GOP’s future isn’t just attributable to the resume or to his intellectual or political talents (the latter, in fact, are suspect when it comes to actual voters). A lot of it is about the way in which he manages to be a True Believer in the most important tenets of all the crucial Republican factions. He’s adored by Neocons, the Republican Establishment, the Tea Folk, the Christian Right, and most of all by the Con-Con cognoscenti that draw from both these last two categories. He will immediately be a national leader if he’s elected to the Senate, perhaps succeeding Jim DeMint as the guy who is in charge of keeping the pressure on the party to move steadily right on every front. (One might think Ted Cruz performs that function, but he’s a bit too clearly self-serving).
Ball puts a lot of emphasis on what we can learn about Cotton from his college thesis, which he gained access to in an exclusive. I’d say it most confirms what we already know: the man believes America has drifted from an inflexibly perfect ideology down the road to serfdom and conquest via the willingness of politicians to follow rather than lead the greedy masses who look to government to compensate for their moral weaknesses.

[The thesis] is in keeping with the rigidly idealistic persona, and the starkly moralistic worldview, he has exhibited since he was an undergraduate. It is a harsh, unyielding, judgmental political philosophy, one that makes little allowance for compassion or human weakness.

It’s especially revealing that this Man of Principle is campaigning in Arkansas as a generic Republican, counting on the partisan leanings of the state and midterm turnout patterns to give him a Senate seat that a more candid presentation of his views might endanger, even in such a conservative state. I don’t know that it would matter to most Arkansans that they have the power to make or break Cotton’s career as a smarter version of Jim DeMint, but they do.

And if it doesn’t matter to Arkansans, it does to the rest of us who might otherwise have to deal with his self-righteousness for Lord knows how long.

With a majority of prognosticators (but not all of them) still predicting enough Republican gains to produce a change of control, it’s a good a time as any to look at some of the factors that could turn the trajectory around. I discussed several at TPMCafe yesterday:

What should prudent Republicans fear?
Money. You may find it shocking to learn that Democrats actually appear to have a national money and advertising advantage, at least in Senate races. But it’s true. Here’s how Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report puts it in his National Journal column:

Perhaps the biggest untold story of this election is how so many Republican and conservative donors, at least those whose last name isn’t Koch, have kept their checkbooks relatively closed. In many cases, GOP candidates are not enjoying nearly the same financial largesse that existed in 2012, and in some races, they are well behind Democrats …
Many Republican and conservative donors appear to be somewhat demoralized after 2012. They feel that they were misled about the GOP’s chances in both the presidential and senatorial races that year, and/or their money was not well spent. In short, they are giving less if at all, and it has put Republican candidates in a bind in a number of places.

As for the Kochs, they haven’t outgunned Democrats as they expected either, as the Washington Post‘s Matea Gold explains:

Led by a quartet of longtime political strategists with close ties to Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Majority PAC has elbowed out other pro-Democratic groups and been on the leading edge of attacks against conservative donors Charles and David Koch. The group has become a fixed center of gravity in the left’s expanding constellation of super PACs and interest groups.
Perhaps most notably, the super PAC has held its own on the air against Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group that is the primary political organ of a network backed by the Koch brothers and other wealthy donors on the right. By the end of the summer, the two groups had run nearly the same volume of television ads nationwide, according to Kantar Media/CMAG data analyzed by the Wesleyan Media Project.
The “Republicans will get all the breaks down the home stretch” assumption a lot of folks are making could be based on mistaken ideas of GOP financial supremacy.

Turnout. We’ll soon know if the much-discussed $60 million Bannock Street Project of the DSCC, aimed at applying the targeted voter outreach efforts of the 2012 Obama campaign to the enormously critical task of reducing the party’s “midterm falloff problem,” is a myth or a miracle, or (more likely) something in-between. My own guess is that it’s likely to have the greatest impact in states with a previously under-mobilized minority vote (e.g., Arkansas and Georgia), or with an exceptionally strong pre-existing GOTV infrastructure (e.g., Iowa). Polling this year is generally showing a “likely voter” boost for Republicans that’s substantial but not as large as in 2010; reducing it even more — perhaps beneath the polling radar — is the Bannock Street Project’s goal.
Misinformation. It’s alway possible that the impression of a big year for Republicans is based on inadequate information, including spotty or inaccurate polls. That, of course, can cut both ways. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver suggested this week that polling in Alaska over the last several cycles has consistently over-estimated Democratic performance. But on the other hand, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey giving Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidates in Georgia a small lead among likely voters estimated the African-American percentage of the electorate at 24 percent, significantly lower than in 2010, which seems, well, very unlikely. There’s also a very recent polling trend in Colorado, North Carolina, Iowa, and Michigan suggesting that these states may not look as good for Republicans as before, calling into question a general impression of a uniform pro-GOP drift.
Kansas. Nobody handicapping 2014 races as recently as three weeks ago factored in the possibility that Kansas, of all places, might become a sudden GOP sinkhole. Now Sen. Pat Roberts is in real and consistent trouble against independent candidate Greg Orman, as part of what appears to be a self-conscious revolt of moderate Republican voters who are also threatening to throw Gov. (and former Sen.) Sam Brownback out of office. Even if a national GOP intervention saves the Kansas ticket, this is money and effort that was supposed to be expended somewhere else.
And the sudden emergence of Kansas as a battleground raises on other possibility pre-triumphal Republicans should ponder:
Candidate Error. While Republicans avoided nominating a Christine O’Donnell or a Ken Buck this year (Senate nominees who were obviously weaker in a general election than their primary rivals), it’s not clear yet they didn’t unconsciously nominate another Todd Aiken or Richard Mourdock (purveyors of siliver-bullet-disaster gaffes) or Sharron Angle (someone with a rich record of extremist positions that negative ads could exploit). While Iowa Democrat Bruce Braley probably committed the most damaging single gaffe (his remark to Texas lawyers about an “Iowa farmer” chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee in the event of a GOP takeover) of the cycle so far, his opponent, Joni Ernst, seems capable of something just as bad, and also has Angle’s problem of telling wingnuts exactly what they wanted to hear for too long. And until Braley dissed Chuck Grassley, the most gaffe-prone Senate candidate in the country was probably Georgia’s David Perdue, who’s hardly out of the woods himself.

The tendency of Republicans to proclaim victory prematurely may turn modest gains into disappointment, if they aren’t careful.

Assessing the end of the primary season at TPMCafe this week, I noted seven distinct advantages Republicans will carry into November:

With the primaries concluded, political junkies may now devote themselves to a general election in which the overall battleground is tilted towards the GOP thanks to at least seven separate factors: (1) a wildly favorable Senate landscape with seven Democratic seats up in states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012; (2) a House majority entrenched by redistricting, incumbency, and superior Republican “efficiency” in voter distribution; (3) a Democratic “midterm falloff” problem based on eternally lower participation rates in non-presidential years by younger and minority voters; (4) a long history of second-term midterm struggles by parties holding the White House; (5) relatively low presidential approval ratings; (6) an economy perceived by most voters as not-yet-recovering from the Great Recession; and (7) a host of international problems the president will be held accountable for not instantly resolving.

That’s not what you’ll hear after the election, though:

If Republicans meet or exceed expectations, of course, most will cite none of these factors and will instead claim a “mandate” on issues ranging from health care to immigration to “entitlement reform,” and vindication of their conspiratorial accusations about Benghazi! and the IRS. By then, however, we will have fully entered a presidential cycle, and a whole new ball game with many arrows immediately shifting to an opposite direction. So the true legacy of this cycle will only be determined when its influence over the next one is fully absorbed.

That could take us right up to the next election day.

There was good news today from a federal judge in Ohio who halted an effort by the GOP Secretary of State, Jon Husted, to cut back on early voting opportunities. This is the same judge and the same Secretary of State who battled in 2012 when Judge Peter Economus wouldn’t let Husted implement early voting restrictions just prior to the presidential election. But while the results are temporarily the same, the shift in the battleground over early voting may not be positive, as I noted today at Washington Monthly:

In [2012], the state had proposed special provisions to let certain voters (as cynics suggested, Republican-leaning voters like active military personnel) cast ballots early, so it was reasonably easy to label the changes as discriminatory violations of both equal protection requirements and the Voting Rights Act.
The new no-exemptions cutback in early voting is a different matter, and as Ari Berman notes at The Nation, Economus’ ruling enters some uncharted territory:

[T]he courts are split over how to interpret the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act in the wake of the Supreme Court gutting a key part of the law last June. This is the first time a court has struck down limits on early voting under Section 2 of the VRA. A Bush-appointed judge recently denied a preliminary injunction to block North Carolina’s cuts to early voting and the elimination of same-day registration, a lawsuit similar to the one in Ohio. A Wisconsin judged blocked the state’s voter ID law under Section 2, while a similar trial is currently underway in Texas.

Indeed, as Rick Hasen notes at Election Law Blog, it’s unclear whether the courts can insist on Ohio preserving its previous early voting rules when some states–most notably New York–don’t allow early voting at all. Barring an intervention by the Supreme Court–which no friend of voting rights should welcome–it appears we will get through the coming election with different standards for different states.
The problem could be resolved, of course, if there existed a Congress willing to (a) repair the Voting Rights Act that was largely disabled by the Supremes in their Shelby County decision last year; and/or (b) set minimum national standards to improve ballot access, as suggested by a bipartisan commission report the political world has already forgotten about.

Occasional wins in the courts aren’t enough absent a national re-commitment to voting rights, and an expectation that states and localities will treat participation in elections as a good thing to be actively encouraged.

It’s natural for people taking a national look at this year’s big political contests to think in terms of battlegrounds for categories of offices, like Senate, House, governors and so on. But when you start laying the various maps on top of each other, it becomes plain that there aren’t an enormous number of places where efficiencies can be obtained by benefiting from the same investments.
I noticed yesterday at Washington Monthly the slight overlap between Senate and House battlegrounds:

When you stare at lists of competitive House races, what stands out most is how little overlap there is with states holding competitive Senate races. The Cook Political Report currently has 38 House seats as highly competitive (either tossups or leans). A grand total of one of them–IA-03–is in a state with one of the barnburner Senate contests. So the money pouring into Senate races is unlikely to have much effect on the balance of power in the House.

Add in highly competitive gubernatorial and control-of-state-legislature contests, and you can find a few states with multiple contests of national interest. Iowa, again, has a state legislative chamber fight. Arkansas has a relatively close gubernatorial race in addition to its pivotal Senate race. Illinois has a close governor’s race and four reasonably competitive House races. Colorado has a close governor’s race to go with its Senate race and possibly a state legislative battle. If New Hampshire’s Senate race tightened up, it could make the Granite State, with two competitive House races and a fight for control of the State House, interesting. And strangest of all, Kansas could wind up with two competitive statewide races (Senate and governor).
Still, when everybody gets around to writing up their November 4 “races to watch” memos, there will be a lot of states listed, and relatively few places where the deal will definitively go down.