Each day that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz fail to self-destruct as presidential candidates is a bad day for the Republican Establishment. The panic that is incipient in their ranks was expressed in a very graphic way earlier this week by New York Tiimes columnist David Brooks, who is calling for a “conspiracy” to thwart the deadly duo. I wrote about Brooks’ fears and fantasies at New York:

It’s odd enough to see Brooks identify himself as a Republican, panicked or otherwise. He typically likes to position himself far, far above the ignorant partisan armies clashing by night, a condor wheeling and soaring in broad, high-minded arcs before eventually landing on ground that happens to coincide with the short-term positions of the GOP. But it seems the present emergency is now too dire for these sort of dialectics.

Rarely has a party so passively accepted its own self-destruction. Sure, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are now riding high in some meaningless head-to-head polls against Hillary Clinton, but the odds are the nomination of either would lead to a party-decimating general election.

So what is to be done?

What’s needed is a grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism, built both online and through rallies, and gets behind a single candidate sometime in mid- to late February. In politics, if A (Trump) and B (Cruz) savage each other then the benefits often go to Candidate C. But there has to be a C, not a C, D, E, F and G.

I suppose this is an advance endorsement of the idea that whichever Establishment candidate wins that “lane” in New Hampshire — whose primary is right on the brink of “mid-February” — should have it all to himself thereafter. But who will insist on Jeb’s super-pac disgorging its money, or Kasich not holding on until Ohio, or Rubio and Bush not holding on until Florida, or Christie throwing in the towel while his ego still rages unappeased? Oh, that’s right: a “grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism,” whatever that might be. Seems it will have to be something different from the usual Republican formula:

This new movement must come to grips with two realities. First, the electorate has changed. Less-educated voters are in the middle of a tidal wave of trauma. Labor force participation is dropping, wages are sliding, suicide rates are rising, heroin addiction is rising, faith in American institutions is dissolving.
Second, the Republican Party is not as antigovernment as its elites think it is. Its members no longer fit into the same old ideological categories. Trump grabbed his lead with an ideological grab bag of gestures, some of them quite on the left. He is more Huey Long than Calvin Coolidge.

So the “Republican conspiracy” needs to preempt that appeal:

What’s needed is a coalition that combines Huey Long, Charles Colson and Theodore Roosevelt: working-class populism, religious compassion and institutional reform.

Does any of that sound like Jeb! Bush to you? Or Marco Rubio? Or Chris Christie? Or John Kasich? Will this new “grassroots movement” that’s supposed to arise in a matter of weeks recognize its hero, and will that happen to coincide with the wishes of a plurality of New Hampshire primary voters? Is there any remote chance the tepid “Reformicon” agenda Brooks alludes to in casting about for something “governing conservatives” can talk about will light fires in the electorate?
Hell if David Brooks knows. But he’s laid down his marker and will now presumably flee back to higher ground.

Damien Cave’s NYT article, “Yes, Latinos Are Rising, but So Are Latino Nonvoters” provides a good update on the potential of Latino voters to determine the outcome of the 2016 election. Here’s an excerpt:

Even though 27 million Latinos will be eligible to cast a ballot in November — an increase of 17 percent since 2012 — the Latino population is becoming more distant from the American political process, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.
Most Latinos who could vote in the last three national elections chose not to. Turnout was just under 50 percent in 2008, and fell to 48 percent in 2012. It dropped to 27 percent in the 2014 midterms, the lowest rate ever recorded for Latinos.

Cave notes further that “among Latino leaders and social scientists, there is a growing recognition, and increasing concern, that Latinos are punching beneath their weight, and may be stuck in a cycle of disconnection. The question is: Why?” Further, adds Cave:

Pew argues it’s at least partly a matter of demographics. Around 55 million Latinos live in the United States, a group that includes citizens, green-card holders and roughly 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally. In all, that’s about 17 percent of the population (Asian-Americans are about 5.5 percent of the population), but the Latino electorate skews young. Millennials make up a larger share of the Hispanic vote, at 44 percent, than the white (27 percent), black (35 percent) and Asian-American (30 percent) electorates.
Young people are less likely to vote regardless of background. And even among millennials, Hispanic turnout is weaker than that of other groups. Pew researchers found that just 37.8 percent of Latino millennials voted in 2012, compared with 47.5 percent of white millennials and 55 percent of black millennials. Only Asian-American millennials, a smaller group, voted in lower proportion, at 37.3 percent.
Latinos are also concentrated in states that are not heavily contested in presidential elections, making it harder to spur political engagement. Three states — California, New York and Texas — account for 52 percent of all eligible Latino voters, according to Pew. California and New York reliably swing Democratic, and Texas goes Republican in national elections. One exception, Florida, with a large and growing Hispanic population, could prove crucial as a battleground state.

Cave cites voter suppression, with Texas as exhibit A, as a leading reason for low Latino turnout. But there is also political apathy among younger Hispanic voters, partly as a result a sense of hopelessness. He believes that the quality of outreach urging political engagement of Latino eligible voters has been sorely lacking in nuance and quotes Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, who says “The approach has not evolved that much…It’s generally just been, ‘Say a few words in Spanish, with a message about family.’ ”
Republicans’ 2016 Hispanic voter outreach seems to be all about having a couple of Latino presidential candidates, neither one of whom offers anything substantial in the way of educational or employment opportunities. With ‘Millennials’ projected to be nearly half of eligible Latino voters in November, however, Democrats can — and must — provide a message that speaks more directly to the aspirations of young people in Hispanic communities, backed up by a well-organized turnout mobilization.

Peter Wehner’s NYT op-ed “Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump” reveals a widening wedge dividing the GOP into two basic groups: those who still harbor hopes that the Republican Party can reclaim the mantle of what they believe to be sober conservatism vs. the knee jerk rage-a-holics who just want someone, even a blustering ignoramus, to bellow at liberals.
Wehner, a ‘lifelong Republican’ who worked as a speechwriter/advisor in the white house under Reagan and both Bushes, says he could never vote for a Democrat. Further, he would consider voting for a third party, or not voting for president, if Trump is nominated. Among his reasons:

Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them. He has admitted that he doesn’t prepare for debates or study briefing books; he believes such things get in the way of a good performance. No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.
It is little surprise, then, that many of Mr. Trump’s most celebrated pronouncements and promises — to quickly and “humanely” expel 11 million illegal immigrants, to force Mexico to pay for the wall he will build on our southern border, to defeat the Islamic State “very quickly” while as a bonus taking its oil, to bar Muslims from immigrating to the United States — are nativistic pipe dreams and public relations stunts.
…Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.

Democrats should take notice of Wehner’s well-stated critique, which might come in handy in the event that Trump wins the Republican nomination. Other prominent Republicans have voiced similar concerns, though none have yet voiced their intention to vote third party or abstain. It seems reasonable to expect that more will be coming forward, should Trump get his party’s nod.
Any third party candidate who could get the votes of mainstream Republicans like Wehner would likely insure a Democratic victory, even if he/she only peels off a few points. Wehner feels, probably with good reason, that Trump’s election would be disastrous for the GOP brand. “If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party,” says Wehner, “it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one.” He adds,

I will go further: Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it.

Wehner says that he used to be the kind of Republican who always got behind his party’s nominee, regardless of his candidate preferences. But a Trump nomination, he argues, would make that impossible for self-respecting Republicans: “..Many Republicans will find themselves in a situation they once thought unimaginable: refusing to support the nominee of their party because it is the best thing that they can do for their party and their country.”
“Let’s lose one for the Gipper” may not be the most inspiring meme for the GOP in 2016. But if Wehner is right, it may be the best option for preserving the dignity and future of his party. In that event, GOP strategists would surely tweak the presidential nomination rules and procedures to help prevent further such disasters.
Many Democrats would welcome Trump’s nomination to run against their presidential candidate as their best hope for a landslide victory in November. Gone, at least for 2016, they calculate, is the possibility that the Republicans will nominate a presidential candidate who genuinely believes in bipartisanship and negotiating in good faith with Democrats.
Trump may flame out, acknowledges Wehner. If that happens, it’s unclear whether mainstream Republicans like Wehner would support Ted Cruz, another Republican bomb-thrower, who is even more reactionary than Trump on some issues, as are several other GOP presidential candidates. Another GOP insider, Michael Gerson writes in his Washington Post column “For Republicans, the only good outcome of Trump vs. Cruz is for both to lose. The future of the party as the carrier of a humane, inclusive conservatism now depends on some viable choice beyond them.” Top conservative columnist George Will wrote, “If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either.”
Republicans are not going to pay much attention to Democratic advice for them in the months ahead. But Republicans have gotten pretty good results with disciplined meme propagation. So, if Trump gets the GOP nomination, Dems can certainly help circulate Wehner’s argument, as well as those of other Republicans who share his beliefs.

A good many MSM journalists and headline-writers are uncorking predictable military and sports lingo in exaggerating the tone of the Democratic debate last night (transcript here). Compared to recent GOP presidential debates, however, the Democratic candidates provided sober, civil and, gasp, informative discussion of actual issues Americans care about. As for who “won,” Isaac Chotiner of Slate says Clinton, while other pundits say Sanders. It was that close.
Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders tore into Michigan Governor Rick Snyder at the end of the debate, with Sanders calling on him to resign because of his appalling negligence contributing to the lead poisoning of Flint’s drinking water. As Paul Egan describes it in the Detroit Free Press: “…As Snyder prepares to deliver his sixth State of the State address on Tuesday, his political capital has plummeted, the state is grappling with what could be a billion-dollar mistake with incalculable consequences for human lives, and his river analogy is particularly unfortunate in light of a state-appointed emergency manager’s 2014 decision to save money by temporarily drawing Flint’s drinking water from the polluted and corrosive Flint River. That move, followed by other state errors, has led to a public health crisis, allegations of a state government cover-up, and Saturday’s declaration of a federal emergency in Flint by President Barack Obama…Amid calls for his resignation, stunning vitriol directed at him through social media and protests planned outside his Ann Arbor home today and in front of the Capitol on Tuesday, Snyder will deliver one of the most closely watched State of the State addresses in Michigan history.”
In Jack Lessenberry’s “Is there a Democratic strategy for Michigan in 2016?” at Michiganradio.org, he notes that the new state Democratic Party chairman Brandon Dillon has further reason for optimism about Democratic prospects in 2016. “Dillon’s focus is on the state house of representatives, where all 110 seats are up for election…Democrats need to gain nine seats to win control, but this year, Dillon thinks his party has a real chance. Twenty-seven Republicans have to leave office because of term limits, as opposed to only eleven Democrats. Many of the open Republican seats may be vulnerable, since the departing incumbents were all first elected in the GOP landslide year of 2010…If a Democratic presidential nominee wins a landslide in Michigan this fall, Dillon hopes this will carry in a legislative majority. That’s what happened eight years ago, when President Obama badly beat John McCain.”
In “Republicans’ White, Working Class Trap: A Growing Reliance,” NPR’s Asma Khalid notes, “while white, working-class voters are now only about a third of the overall electorate, they’re about half of the Republican electorate.”
From Politico’s “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter” by Matthew MacWilliams: “…49 percent of likely Republican primary voters I surveyed score in the top quarter of the authoritarian scale–more than twice as many as Democratic voters…In a statistical analysis of the polling results, I found that Trump has already captured 43 percent of Republican primary voters who are strong authoritarians, and 37 percent of Republican authoritarians overall. A majority of Republican authoritarians in my poll also strongly supported Trump’s proposals to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, prohibit Muslims from entering the United States, shutter mosques and establish a nationwide database that track Muslims.”
Trump will be the MLK Day speaker at Liberty University. It will be interesting to see how he navigates his big pitch to the conservative evangelical community, while paying respects to Dr. King, whose economic policies have more in common with the views Sen. Sanders than any other presidential candidate.
Dale Ho, Director, Voting Rights Project, ACLU has an update on the legal challenges to voter suppression laws.
At Smithsonian.com Heather Hansman asks “Could Pop-up Social Spaces at Polls Increase Voter Turnout?” The idea is to make polling places more of a fun spot, where people can “hang out.” What could go wrong?
George Washington University professsor Henry Farrell’s “Bill O’Reilly will flee to Ireland if Sanders is elected. He’s in for a shock” at the Washington Post provides the chuckle for the day, especially for all who have ventured to Ireland and actually paid attention. As Farrell writes, “from the perspective of American conservatism, Ireland looks like a hellhole of socialism” with “a tax system which is not all that different from the U.S. tax system for top earners, and arguably a little less favorable. The effective top Irish income tax rate is a little over half of income….Police only carry arms under special circumstances. Most Irish police officers don’t even have firearms training…Gun ownership is highly restricted in Ireland. People have to apply for a license to own a gun, and are likely to be refused under many circumstances. Furthermore, there are heavy restrictions on kinds of guns that they are allowed to own…Handguns of the kind that O’Reilly could use for “self-defense” are not [allowed], let alone automatic weapons. Gun rights are not a topic of political debate in Ireland — Ireland’s most conservative party, which is now the majority party in the government, has just introduced new restrictions, without any significant public opposition.” Further, adds Farrell, Ireland has “socialized medicine on a scale which would be politically unthinkable in America. Ireland also has welfare benefits for the unemployed which are not notably generous by European standards, but are wildly permissive in comparison to their U.S. equivalents.”

I still have a bad taste in my memory from watching last night’s FBN Republican candidates’ debate from South Carolina. It was more prominent last night when I wrote about the debate at New York:

The Fox Business Network moderators led the Republican presidential candidates exactly where they wanted to go in Thursday night’s long debate by framing it as a response to the president’s relatively upbeat assessment of America in the State of the Union address. They begged to differ, and differed from each other (with one exception, which I’ll get to in a moment) mainly in their assessment of their qualifications to deal with a country besieged by immigrant-terrorists, refugee-terrorists, and rampant criminals; teetering on the edge of economic collapse; humiliated hourly by mocking, strutting enemies; and led by virtual traitors.
Ted Cruz, whose candidacy was already staked to the premise that conservatives can win the presidency without a single concession to anyone else, managed to ratchet up the high-pitched chattering whine of ideological extremism in his rhetoric via a closing statement that focused on Benghazi!, a pseudo-scandal that everyone other than the Faithful have written off for many months. Marco Rubio, his voice raised to a new stridency, is now routinely joining Ben Carson in blowing a Bircher dog whistle about Barack Obama aiming at a “fundamental change” in the nature of the country. He’s also now rationalizing his crabwise changes on immigration policy as a response to ISIS. Chris Christie, himself the target of attacks for being too much like Obama, suggested that massively expanded NSA surveillance could solve the problem of identifying “radical Islamists,” and sounded so much like a 1960s law-and-order candidate that you half expected him to attack the Earl Warren Court for taking the handcuffs off the criminals and putting them on the police. Even Jeb Bush, the only candidate to offer a real objection to Trump’s Islamophobia, seemed to suggest his rivals were mere paper tigers in assaulting the godless liberals.
A lot of the other exchanges — over Cruz’s qualifications to be president, and over his classic red-state demagoguery about “New York values;” and the Rubio-Cruz fracas over tax policy that seemed to revolve around the suspicion that a VAT tax was “European” — canceled themselves out or just reinforced the impression that these men had exotic preoccupations.
John Kasich shined a light on the dark landscape of America depicted by the debaters simply by coming across as a boring, standard-brand conservative. His suggestion that protesters against police excesses might have a point stood out like a Bernie Sanders protester (though Kasich’s mockery of Sanders’s electability might draw attention to the fact that no pollster has taken Kasich seriously enough to test him against Bernie!). We’ll see if this approach gives him an angle on a crucial slice of moderate voters in New Hampshire, or simply confirms him as the Jon Huntsman of this cycle.
In the end, the domination of the endless debate time by everything other than the basic economic issues you might expect from a business network showed how far into the fever swamps the GOP contest has strayed. When Donald Trump responded to the attack from host-state Governor Nikki Haley on “the angriest voices” by saying “I will gladly welcome the mantle of anger,” he did not stand out at all.

My New York colleague Jonathan Chait agreed:

Months ago, during the Summer of Trump, Republicans looked at the appearance of this gross, comic, orange interloper among them with a mix of shock and disdain. Fox News tried to discredit him as a serious candidate; nobody else onstage knew quite what to do with him. Since then, Trump has created facts on the ground, making himself an indispensable element of the party. He now seems completely normal.

And that is not a good sign for the GOP.

From “Callused Hands: The Shrinking Working Class White Vote” by Keith Gaddie and Kirby Godel at HuffPo:

SO HOW ARE WHITE WORKING CLASS VOTERS DIFFERENT? We used a technique called OLS regression to introduce statistical controls for several white voter features, including party identification, ideology, education, income, age, and sex, so we could isolate the effect of being self-identified white working class, and living in a union household, to compare working class whites to other whites on attitudes towards government, the role of government in the economy, and race issues.
Attitudes Toward Government: Whites in the working class are more distrustful of government than other Americans…Working class whites express greater cynicism toward government than the middle or upper class. However, these differences are not larger now than 40 years ago.
Attitudes Toward Equalitarian Values and Government Spending: A major controversy about working class whites is that they vote against their economic interests because of social issues – ‘what’s the matter with Kansas’ argument popularized by Thomas Frank. Data from ANES show working class white support for government jobs, government spending for services, and equalitarian values are unchanged since before the Reagan Revolution.
Working class whites are more supportive of government guaranteeing jobs and income and, in general, of equalitarian values than other whites. They are not, however, more supportive of government spending on services in general, probably because it is hard to tell what target groups would benefit from this spending.
One way of interpreting these results is to say that self-identified working class whites should be receptive to populist arguments for a more active federal government. But, that support is conditioned on government activity being aimed at improving the wages and employment opportunities available to white working class people.
Racial Attitudes: Does race matter? There has always been a racial subtext to the white working class…The working class whites support for greater economic equality does not translate into support for race-based policies…This primarily reflects differences between working class southern whites and all other whites more generally…
…Our initial look into the political world of working class whites afforded few surprises. We see a political world of the white working class that is less efficacious, less trusting, and finds government less responsive. This world is open to government action on jobs, but not on programmatic poverty spending. It is a world that is skeptical about aid to minorities, especially among southern working class whites.
…Government is an acceptable actor to intervene in the economy if it does so to create employment. But, when government acts to assist through programs or other policies that do not promote employment or wages, the working class reacts with skepticism. And, it is skeptical of assistance to blacks, especially the southern white working class.
These are not surprising findings. But, these results describe a political world where the white working class is increasingly hunkered down. They confront a political environment where they are divided from other whites based on education, economics, and expectations. And, they are divided from working people of color by both different political worldviews but also skepticism regarding how government engages race policies. And, they have become smaller as a political force and have less economic clout and security in this era than at any time in the last 80 years.

If the authors are right, Democrats may be able to increase their share of the white working class vote by emphasizing their support for government action that promotes economic uplift and jobs for all races. Even a small increase in Democratic share of this still-large, though shrinking demographic entity could secure a stable majority for decades.

For a good while, Democrats have wondered how far back the rightward trend in the GOP would take Republicans. There are signs, as I discussed earlier this week at New York, that they are arriving at 1964 in their wayback machine:

For Republicans with a sense of history, chills might have gone down their spines at this passage from a Jonathan Martin piece in the New York Times about big donors warming to Ted Cruz:

What is more striking, and will cause deep consternation among Republican strategists, is that … donors are beginning to embrace Mr. Cruz’s argument that he can win a general election by motivating core conservatives to come to the polls rather than by appealing to swing voters.
Andrew Puzder, chief executive of the conglomerate that owns Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., supported both of Mr. Romney’s campaigns and has contributed to a number of “super PACs” and candidates this year, including Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. But after spending a couple of hours eating brisket with Mr. Cruz on Sunday at his campaign headquarters, Mr. Puzder said he was “very seriously considering” getting behind him, in part because of his appeal to the conservative base.
“I’ve become a one-issue voter,” Mr. Puzder said. “My one issue is whether somebody is going to win. My big question is: What is your path to a general election victory?”
Unhappily recalling that Mr. Romney won among self-described independents but still was soundly defeated by President Obama, Mr. Puzder said, “Part of the reason was that the base didn’t turn out to vote, and Senator Cruz understands that needs to happen.”

This is, of course, an argument a certain kind of conservative has been making for decades, back to and beyond Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign based on the idea of offering (to use the title of the pro-Goldwater campaign book written by a young right-wing activist named Phyllis Schlafly) “a choice, not an echo,” in repudiation of the Republican Establishment’s perpetual idea of “moving to the center” to win swing voters.
The cataclysmic defeat incurred by Goldwater drove this conviction underground for a while, and even the Goldwater veteran Ronald Reagan ran a conventional swing-voter-oriented “referendum on the incumbent” campaign in 1980. This hasn’t kept his hagiographers from remembering it differently, and so there has been a regular debate within the GOP over base versus swing-voter strategies ever since. Sometimes campaigns blurred the strategies, as in 2004, when George W. Bush’s reelection effort focused to a considerable extent on base mobilization, but only after four years of careful and systematic swing-voter pandering via Karl Rove’s famous initiatives targeted to married women (No Child Left Behind), seniors (Rx Drug Benefit), and Latinos (comprehensive immigration reform) — initiatives conservatives are still deploring to this day….
Cruz is the first viable candidate in a while who has gone wall-to-wall with a path to the nomination and an electability argument founded entirely on the theory that, when united and energized, conservatives can win the presidency on their own. Sometimes he strains his credibility even with true believers by talking of many tens of millions of conservative Evangelicals waiting to be called to arms as Christian soldiers by someone like his own self. Nonetheless, the quite factual decline in the number of swing voters and various theories of “missing white voters” have made the old-time religion of ideological mobilization tantalizing if not entirely convincing. Perhaps today’s conservatives think that a reincarnation of Barry Goldwater could win today and that the vast rollback of New Deal and early Great Society programs Goldwater demanded is still possible.
In any event, big donors and Republican Establishment opinion-leaders used to exist in order to refute such dangerous talk. If they are beginning to buy it instead, this could be a fascinating and dangerous year for the GOP even if Donald Trump is vanquished and then domesticated.

If Cruz’s campaign adopts the slogan: “In your heart, you know he’s right,” then we’ll know the half-century regression is complete.

Thomas B. Edsall’s “The Republican Party’s 50-State Solution” delves deep into the Republican edge in state politics. It’s a sobering read for Democrats, and Edsall’s insights could prove invaluable, if Democrats refine and implement a more effective strategy to challenge the GOP’s domination at the state level. Here’s a couple of his more interesting observations:

Seven years ago, Democrats had a commanding lead in state legislatures, controlling both legislative chambers in 27 states, nearly double the 14 controlled by Republicans. They held 4082 state senate and house seats, compared to the Republicans’ 3223.
Sweeping Republican victories at the state level in 2010 and 2014 transformed the political landscape.
By 2015, there were Republican majorities in 70 percent — 68 of 98 — of the nation’s partisan state houses and senates, the highest number in the party’s history. (Nebraska isn’t counted in because it has a non-partisan, unicameral legislature.) Republicans controlled the legislature and governorship in 23 states, more than triple the seven under full Democratic control.

One of the keys, adds Edsall, is a new way of financing state campaigns:

“What’s changed seems to be the result of the relatively recent nationalization of state campaign financing,” Morgan Kousser, a professor of history at Caltech (and, as it happens, Thad Kousser’s father), wrote in an email:
The Koch brothers understand the importance of controlling state legislatures; George Soros doesn’t. I’m not sure why this should be the case, but since we’re really talking about a relatively small number of mega-donors who have caused this, it’s a rather restricted question.
Liberal foundations, in the view of Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America foundation, “have for a long time got perpetually distracted by fads and short-term metrics, whereas conservative foundations were willing to invest much more in long-term organizational capacity.”
“How the Right Trounced Liberals in the States,” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol, in the Winter edition of the journal Democracy, documents the failure of the left to keep pace with the substantial investments by the right in building local organizations.
Liberals, according to Hertel-Fernandez, a graduate student at Harvard, and Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology there, “have left behind little more than a litany of abandoned acronyms.”

Ouch. Edsall goes into much more detail explaining the mechanics behind the conservative takeover of most states and credits the GOP with “the most effective gerrymandering of legislative and congressional districts in the nation’s history.” He concludes that “the right has institutionalized a dangerous power vacuum on the left.”
Read the entire article here.

The following article by William A. Galston is cross-posted from Brookings:
Something is stirring among Iowa Democrats. In the four surveys of likely Democratic caucus-goers conducted between December 7th and December 21st, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by an average of 13 points, 50 to 37. In the four surveys of likely caucus-attenders taken between the 2nd and 10th of January, the race is a dead heat.
This trend echoes the contrasting results of two Quinnipiac polls, one conducted in early December, the other released at noon today. The former gave Clinton a 51-40 lead; the latter gave the edge to Sanders, 49 to 44. Fortunately, Quinnipiac releases a number of key cross-tabulations, so we can see the key building-blocks of Sanders’ lead and to some extent, what’s driving the shift between early December and now.
To begin, there is a huge gender gap: men back Sanders by 61-30, while women break for Clinton, 55-39. In December, by comparison, Sanders’ lead among men was only 52-39, so Sanders has gained 9 points among men in less than a month, with Clinton losing the same number. During the same period, he has cut into Clinton’s lead among women, which was 27 points a month ago but only 16 points today. He has also reduced Clinton’s lead among Democrats with college degrees from 17 points to 4 while turning her 4-point edge among non-college Democrats into a 10-point deficit.
There has been no change in the issues Democrats care most about. In both December and January, 35 percent of likely caucus-goers named jobs and the economy as the most important issue, 15 percent selected health care, and 11 percent climate change. In each of these issues, however, Sanders has improved his standing at Clinton’s expense.

Read more…

The Nikki Haley response to President Obama’s SOTU continues to reverberate as a rebuttal to Trumpism, not the President.
“For one moment, at least,” writes WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. about Haley’s SOTU response, “Obama had realized his dream: A part of red America came together with his blue America to share responsibility for the nation’s frustrations.”
TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore notes at New York News & Politics that Haley “certainly did no harm to her veep prospects unless Trump is the nominee or Trump has a veto over the second spot on the ticket (not an implausible thought). And indeed, conservative opinion-leader Erick Erickson said she had become “the only logical choice for vice presidential nominee of the GOP” (it should be noted Erickson was an early supporter of Haley’s 2010 Republican gubernatorial candidacy, back when she was mainly known as a hard-core, movement conservative disciple of Mark Sanford).”
“There has been a debate within the party — and the political class — about whether Republicans need to diversify to win or whether it just needs to attract more of its core constituencies. So far in 2016, led by Cruz and Donald Trump, the election has moved decisively toward the latter. The exceptions, such as Jeb Bush and Lindsey O. Graham, are either out of the race or on the edges of it.” — From “Republican hopefuls agree: The key to the White House is working-class whites” by Phillip Rucker and Robert Costa. The authors note, further, “the urgent imperative of Republicans — historically the party of business, money and power — to broaden their coalition with many more white working-class voters. As the nation diversifies and the GOP struggles to adapt, the presidential hopefuls see this demographic bloc as the key to taking back the White House.”
GOP hatin’ on Wall St.? If you buy that, you probably believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.
Too bad about Al Jazeera America folding. Hey wealthy Democratic sugar daddies and mommas, how about a “Working America” progressive TV Network?
In her article, “Snyder legacy will be Flint water crisis,” The Freep’s Rochelle Riley goes medieval on Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder, and with good reason.
The ‘low-information voter’ thing may be more of a BFD than we thought. According to “Poll Reveals Voters are Uninformed About Major Issues” by James Agresti at Just Facts, “The poll consisted of 23 questions about education, healthcare, taxes, government spending, global warming, Social Security, energy, hunger, pollution, and the national debt…Overall, the majority of voters gave the correct answer to only six of the 23 questions. This indicates that many voters may be casting ballots based on false views of reality.”
So here come the Republicans with filibuster finagling.
Just when you thought the GOP presidential candidates demolition derby couldn’t get much tackier, here’s Jeb Bush with a “Short People” diss of Rubio.