Miles Mogulescu’s “Message to Bernie: Transform Your Campaign Into a Permanent Movement or Fail” suggests how Sen Sanders can make an enduring contribution to progressive long-term strategy, whether he wins the presidency or not. Mogulescu begins with a challenge made by Sanders himself:

What this campaign is about is not just electing a president, it is transforming America. To do that we need millions of people–people who have given up on the political process, people who are demoralized, people who don’t believe that government listens to them. We need to bring those people together to stand up loudly and clearly and to say ‘Enough is enough.’ This country belongs to all of us, not just wealthy campaign donors.

Mogulescu responds:

..I suggest you utilize your campaign organization to create a permanent national organization of the democratic/socialist/social democratic left, even as you campaign for the Presidency.
If you win your unlikely campaign for the presidency, such an organization will be necessary to force our politicians to enact at least some of the change that you advocate. If Hillary gets the Democratic nomination and wins the presidency, such an organization will be necessary to pressure her against her natural inclination to move to the corporate center. And if a Republican should win the presidency, it may be necessary to literally put its bodies on the line to block the dismantling of the social safety net and the initiation of new foreign wars.
Yes, I realize that running a Presidential campaign is an immense effort which leaves little time or energy for anything else. Building a permanent mass political organization parallel to a national electoral campaign is something that’s never been done before, at least in recent times. (The Populist Party in the late 19th Century and the Socialist Party under Eugene Debs and then Norman Thomas may be historical exceptions, and though neither gained national political power, they were influential in bringing the changes of the progressive era and the New Deal.)

Mogulescu notes that President Obama “effectively dismantled the movement” his campaign might have become after he became President. Apparently he had a different job to do. As a consequence, Organizing for America morphed “into an email list run by his supporters” the “sole aim” of which was “to back his cautious policies, not push him and Congress to act more forcefully.” Further, adds Mogulescu,

Obama’s failures to support an independent mass movement that could push him and Congress to go farther and faster has resulted in the disillusionment of millions who worked in his campaign and, in many cases, low voter turnout from the “Obama Coalition” of young people, minorities, women, and progressives, which disillusionment helped right-wing Republicans gain control of Congress and many states, which in turn has strengthened Washington gridlock and led to further disillusionment.

That’s a lot of blame for a President who faced the unprecedented challenges Obama had to address when he took office, including economic catastrophe, war and the most obstructionist opposition in U.S. history. Thats not to deny the urgent need for a progressive mass movement and broad-based coalition, nor that maybe Obama could have appointed someone to make OFA a more effective force.
If Sanders does get elected president, however, he will certainly inherit a better situation than did Obama, thanks to Obama’s leadership. He may have a lot more wiggle room to create the progressive mass movement Mogulescu describes. If Sanders loses, however, Mogulescu argues that “your campaign will likely be little more than a blip on the historical map like Howard Dean’s or Gary Hart’s insurgent campaigns against the Democratic establishment unless you leave behind an organized movement.” Mogulescu adds,

So Bernie, here’s my proposal: Even as you campaign for president, set up a parallel organization as the precursor to a permanent national democratic/socialist/social democratic organization that would engage in both electoral and activist politics.
Use some of your millions in small dollar donations to hire organizers in most states and many cities and towns, and/or use your fundraising list to raise separate contributions to fund the founding of a new, permanent progressive organization. Build local, city and state chapters from activists in your campaign and others. Sign up members and solicit more contributions online. Hold a national organizing convention this summer to parallel the presidential nominating conventions.

Getting down to specifics, Mogulescu has some good ideas:

…A big focus would be a grassroots campaign to drive voter turnout…If you’re the nominee, much of the work would be aimed at winning the Presidential election, as well as supporting progressive candidates nationally and locally, all while developing a program to push for if you’re elected. If Hillary is the nominee, the organization would critically back her and mobilize your base to go to the polls to prevent a takeover by reactionary Republicans. (You’re old enough to remember that in 1964, when LBJ ran against Goldwater, much of the civil rights and anti-war movement critically backed LBJ under the slogan “Part of the Way With LBJ”, mirroring LBJ’s own campaign slogan of “All the Way With LBJ”. How about “Partly Ready for Hillary”?)
After the November election, the organization would engage in both electoral and activist politics. It would train, run or back sympathetic candidates in primaries and general elections at all levels of government…it would work to move the Democratic Party to the left, even running against centrist Democrats in appropriate primaries, much as the Tea Party has moved the Republicans to the right…
It would also engage in activist politics, demonstrations, and where appropriate, even non-violent civil disobedience. It would have its own publications…It would join alliances with other sympathetic organizations and movements including the new civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and labor unions. It would hold local, state, and national conferences.

It’s a challenge that fits with Sen. Sanders progressive left agenda better than President Obama’s progressive centrist focus in the early years of his presidency. As Mogulescu concludes, “Bernie, you have an historical opportunity to use your Presidential campaign — win or lose — to help birth the organized political movement you call for. Please don’t blow the chance.”

In must-read of the day for political junkies, Jim Rutenberg reports on “The New Attack on Hispanic Voting Rights” at The New York Times: “…Even now, Hispanic citizens are registering and voting at levels that are not much better than those of blacks near the end of Jim Crow — a 38.8 percent turnout in Texas in 2012, according to the Census Bureau, as opposed to more than 60 percent for both blacks and ”Anglos,” the widely used informal term for non-Hispanic whites…”
You won’t be surprised by a new WaPo/ABC News poll indicating that Americans fear “lone wolf” terrorist attacks. But I’m a little surprised that the same poll found that “regarding a specific national ban on assault weapons, 53% of Americans oppose such a policy, up from 42% in a Post/ABC poll in 2013, and the highest in Post/ABC polling since 1994.,” as David Wright reports at CNN.
At the Northern Kentucky Tribune, Col Owens, chair of the Kenton County Democratic party, has an interesting post-mortem on the recent election in that state, in which Democratic candidate for governor Jack Conway was badly beaten. Owens acknowledges the merit in some of the reasons given for Conway’s defeat, including “weak candidate, not good at schmoozing…wrong strategy, too much emphasis on fundraising, not enough on voter contact…too little of a ground game, did not reach out to our base or get out the vote,” etc.. But Owens also provides some suggestions to Dems for getting a better youth turnout in the future: “…We must look to where new converts can be won: young people. Many/most young people believe most of what we believe. But they do not affiliate, and many do not vote…They want education opportunities without huge debt…They want health care – polls show they favor keeping the Affordable Care Act…They want clean air to breathe, and safe water for drinking and for playing in…They want freedom from discrimination, intolerance and hatred…Most accept gay marriage, and believe abortion is a personal matter…They want effective transportation and communication – they want things to work…They want to be able to retire without being impoverished…They want the U.S. to be strong and to lead, but not to be engaged in endless war…When I review this list, what seems clear to me that most of these folks should be Democrats.”
More evidence that a Trump independent candidacy would doom Republicans next year.
But why should he go all indy, when trends are going his way. As conservative political analyst and InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery recently noted, “In my years of polling these presidential races for the GOP nomination I have never seen one candidate so dominate the contest for so many months in a row. That said, Mr. Trump could face his first stumbling block in Iowa. The caucus there is known for its unusual and often out-of-step results. That said, Trump’s lead in states in the Southeast is powerful and appears to be gaining speed, based on other polls OpinionSavvy conducted this week in other neighboring states…”
Why Trump’s “chaos campaign” (a former Secret Service agent agrees with Jeb Bush) is starting to look more like the Jerry Springer Show.
Philip Bump explains at The Fix, however, why “When it comes to the polls, cellphones are not Donald Trump’s friend.” — a good read before you bet the ranch on Trump winning it all.
Al Tuchfarber, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati and founder of the Ohio Poll, opines at Crystal Ball that “Trump has alienated many other Republican candidates and their followers. As second and third tier Republican candidates drop out after poor performances in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, it is unlikely that Trump will pick up many of their voters. Rather, those votes will mostly go to other top tier Republicans, both outsiders (Ted Cruz) and insiders (Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush)…Trump’s “ceiling” appears to be hovering at 25% to 30%. This is too low to do well in the winner-take-all Republican contests starting on March 15 in states like Florida and Ohio. There are several other winner-take-all contests throughout the rest of the primary season, requiring majorities or big pluralities to win significant numbers of delegates…It is nearly impossible to say now who will get the Republican nomination, but it is unlikely to be Trump…”
Bump also has a story that will keep the GOP’s climate change-denying spin-doctors busy: “For 2015 not to be the hottest year on record, December will have to be impossibly cold; It’s Not Going to Happen.”

It’s become a cliche that this election cycle is breaking all sorts of precedents. But it’s true, and one could become a biggie if it persists: the disastrous failure of Team Jeb Bush’s lavish paid media strategy. I wrote about it at New York earlier this week:

Unless his campaign really starts to cook, Team Bush is on a trajectory to become one of those historic profiles in futility that influence future behavior. And it could push the already crusty and embattled theory that you win elections by dominating TV airwaves with paid advertising right off the cliff.
The latest report from NBC’s Mark Murray (based on data from the network’s ad-monitoring partner SMG Delta) on ad spending by presidential candidates not only reinforces the general story of a disconnect between money out the door and invisible-primary poll standings; it specifically draws attention to the ongoing disaster of Bush super-pac Right to Rise’s massive pro-Jeb advertising campaign in the early states. Up until now, Bush’s allies have outspent the entire remainder of the field in paid media, with $35 million already gone. Nearly half of that is in New Hampshire, where Bush is currently in sixth place according to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, with about one-fourth the level of support of front-runner Donald Trump, who has spent almost nothing on ads. But the worst could be yet to come: According to Murray, Right to Rise also has another $28 million in ads in the pipeline. Unless Team Bush has already executed some big strategic pivot without anyone knowing about it, you have to figure they are for the moment almost literally doubling down on positive ads touting Bush’s fine conservative record in Florida, at a time when GOP voters have decided they really don’t like governors.
Right to Rise’s Mike Murphy, whose reputation is on track to become one of campaign ’16’s most lurid casualties, has publicly floated the idea of using the rest of his war chest to “carpet-bomb” everyone in the field other than Donald Trump, creating a Bush-Trump battle to the finish in the smoking crater of the contest. It’s not clear whether that was a dark omen of things to come, or a head-fake, or an indication that it’s time for donors to pry Murphy’s fingers off the keys to the vault lest Jeb Bush go down in history as the man who selfishly wrecked his party’s prospects in a critical presidential year. He’s already in danger of joining Phil Gramm and Lloyd Bentsen and John Connally in the pantheon of big-spending presidential candidates voters just didn’t like.

Bush really needed the modest praise he got after Tuesday night’s debate. With that and a few million dollars, you can buy an early state ad campaign.

From Laura Meckler’s Wll St. Journal article, “How Democrats Could Win the White House Again in 2016-Report“:

To win the presidency in 2016, Democrats must climb a steep hill: persuade Americans to keep them in power for a third straight term at a time of voter frustration at the status, heightened fear of terrorism and low approval ratings for outgoing President Barack Obama.
But they have a powerful force in their favor: demographics, and the fact that the party is strongest with groups of voters that are on the ascent-racial minorities, young people, college-educated professionals and secular voters.
A new report by demographics expert Ruy Teixeira and colleagues at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, does the math and comes up with significant advantages for Democrats heading into 2016, and also some potential pitfalls.
Based on demographic shifts alone, the report finds that if the 2016 Democratic nominee performs as well as Mr. Obama did in 2012 with various voter groups, she (or he) would win by six percentage points–up from Mr. Obama’s four-point win last time.

Meckler quotes the report’s authors, who credit the Democratic Party for keeping up with the demographic transformation, “enabling the party to grow markedly at the national level.” However, add the authors, “If Democrats are to retain the presidency in 2016, they will need to successfully transfer the enthusiasm and support of the Obama coalition to a new candidate and overcome the wide belief that the party had its shot for eight years and that it is now time for a change.”
That’s an enormous challenge, which Democrats must face, regardless of how crazy things get in the Republican primary season. Meckler notes that the white voter percentage of the electorate is projected to decline to 72 percent by November of next year (down from 74 percent in 2012), and the “percentage of white working class voters–who are particularly supportive of the GOP–is falling even faster.” Meckler cautions, however,

Huge numbers of black and Hispanic voters turned out to vote in 2008 and 2012, and 81% of them voted for Mr. Obama, the nation’s first black president. Most observers think that Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, or any other nominee, would face a challenge replicating those high turnout levels and such strong levels of support. The report notes that in 2000, Vice President Al Gore won 77% of the minority vote, and in 2004, Democrat John Kerry took just 74%. Both lost (though Mr. Gore won the popular vote).

But Dems do have some wiggle room, notes Meckler, with the rapid demographic transformation, plus a possible uptick in support from white women if Clinton wins the Democratic presidential nomination. If Sanders is nominated, he could also increase pro-Democratic turnout by certain segments of the electorate.
The report identified Ohio and Wisconsin as potential problem areas for Democrats. But Meckler quotes Teixeira’s colleague William Frey as putting Nevada, which has experienced rapid growth in Latino voters, is now likely a “safe” state for Dems.

Politico’s Nick Gass reports on an interesting new poll which suggests substantial party unity among Democratic registered voters:

According to the results of the latest national Monmouth University poll out Wednesday, 59 percent of those backing Sanders for the nomination said they would be enthusiastic or satisfied with Clinton as their party’s standard bearer next November. Overall, 80 percent of Democratic voters would be fine with Clinton as their nominee, while 11 percent said they would be dissatisfied and 5 percent said they would be upset.

Gass adds that Clinton still has a formidable lead over Sen. Sanders, 59 percent to 26 percent, while former MD Gov. Martin O’Malley increased his share to 4 percent, with 8 percent undecided. The poll had a small sample (374 self i.d. Demi/Independents), so all conclusions drawn from it should be considered in light of the 5.1 m.o.e.
Debates between Clinton, Sanders and O’Malley have thus far been remarkably free of the insults and put-downs which have characterized the G.O.P.’s demolition derby. While supporters of all three candidates still argue passionately for their respective candidates, internecine acrimony has remained extraordinarily low-key, compared to previous Democratic primary seasons.
U.S. Democrats are still a long way from the level of solidarity recently demonstrated by the French left, which pulled some Socialist candidates out of recent regional elections in order to cross lines and defeat nativist leader Marine Le Pen and the Front National. But perhaps we can hope that the stirrings of greater Democratic solidarity have begun, even if it is based on the shared realization that the Republicans are flirting with equally-dangerous forms of nativist bigotry and repression.

Whatever else can be said about the Republicans Las Vegas fearfest, it certainly failed to present a convincing meme that they are the party best-prepared to keep us ‘safe and secure.’
Some Democratic responses to last night’s GOP’s debate in Las Vegas:
Alex Seitz-Wald notes at MSNBC.com: “The pro-Clinton super PAC Correct the Record, which coordinates directly with the official Clinton campaign, pointed out one flaw with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s plan to work closer with King Hussein of Jordan – the king has been dead for 16 years.”
As for Sanders and O’Malley, Seitz-Wald adds:

After taking heat all month for resisting talking about ISIS, Sanders sought to flip the tables on the GOP. “Like the first [debate], not one word about income inequality, climate change, or racial justice,” Sanders tweeted. His campaign also criticized Republicans for talking about sending more American soldiers into combat, while failing to discuss how to better help veterans who return with PTSD or traumatic brain injury.
Long-shot candidate Martin O’Malley’s campaign stayed mostly quiet during the debate. “Not one Republican presidential candidate on stage showed the thoughtfulness and leadership we need. Instead, we saw a cattle call of fear mongers more eager to stir up uncertainty than serve responsibly as Commander in Chief,” he said in a statement after the debate.

Democrats can actually use one of Bush’s zingers targeting Trump. As NYT columnist Frank Bruni described it, “…Bush more than anyone in any of these debates effectively called Trump out for his galling recklessness…’He’s a chaos candidate,’ Bush said when asked to elaborate on a tweet in which he’d called Trump “unhinged.” ‘And he’ll be a chaos president. He would not be the commander in chief we need to keep our country safe.'”
To give them a little credit for consistency, you could see the message discipline in that all of the candidates performed a ritual-bashing of the Obama Administration, alleging without any specifics, that it has somehow failed to keep us “safe.” Every candidate did this, in addition to attacking each other.
Part of their problem was that Rand Paul kept reminding them that Republicans got the U.S. into the mideast mess in the first place. Many of the GOP wannabes still have an interventionist proclivity for “regime change,” which, not so incidentally for the party that purports to be the champion of fiscal rectitude, is very expensive.
But potentially the most important thing that happened last night for Democratic strategy came after the debate. In their New York Times article on the debate, Jonathan Martin and Patrick Healey report that Trump was “unambiguous” about an independent candidacy in his post-debate CNN interview: “Yes, I’m a Republican, and I’m going to be a Republican,” he said. “I’m not going to be doing a third-party.”
No one is going to bet much on Trump keeping his word. But Dems should prepare for the possibility that he may endorse the Republican nominee after all.
The GOP’s winner-take-all primary season hits high gear in March. Trump’s teflon is already wearing thin, but he keeps reviving in polls. A Clnton-Trump match may not happen, and a Clnton vs. a united Republican Party election just might happen. In any case, Dems should focus on creating the best possible GOTV operation, and not worry too much about which Republican will be the front-man.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
If you’re like most ordinary Americans, you’re not thrilled that ever since George W. Bush came into office 15 years ago your income has flat lined.
It probably doesn’t make much sense to you that CEO pay and Wall Street bonuses have exploded while most Americans can’t keep up with the rising cost of living.
Bush came into office with a mandate from the CEO class to change the rules of the economic game, and ever since ordinary people have paid the price while Wall Street banks, big corporations, CEOs and billionaires have wallowed in their increasing wealth.
Well if you didn’t like the way the CEO class used their huge political donations and fleet of lobbyists to manipulate the economic rules last time, wait until you see what they’ve cooked up now.
An outfit called the “Center for Individual Rights” — which is a front group for the notorious Koch Brothers financial network and other mega-wealthy right wing CEOs — has filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to substantially weaken the ability of working people to negotiate together for better wages and working conditions.
The case will be argued in January. If the court rules in favor of the corporate CEOs, it will turbo-charge their efforts to divert an even greater portion of the country’s income into higher pay and bigger bonuses for them and billionaire investors like the Koch’s.
It’s really quite astonishing when you take a step back and think about it. The CEO and billionaire class has already been so successful in changing the economic rules that they have managed to siphon off virtually all of America’s economic growth over the last 15 years. But that just isn’t enough. Their greed seems insatiable.
Now they want to make things even worse for ordinary people by making it harder for them to negotiate together to raise their pay.
The case before the court is called Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.
The law stipulates that when the majority of people vote to form a union, the union is required to represent everyone in the workplace, whether an employee is a union member or not.
It is also settled law that anyone who decides they don’t want to be part of the union (a right that all employees have), but who benefits from the agreement on wages and benefits the union negotiates, should contribute their fair share of the cost of negotiating and administering that agreement.
And it is important to know that no one is required to join a union, and therefore no one is required to contribute to the political or lobbying program of a union. Those who elect not be a member only need to pay the cost of the negotiations on their behalf.
Seems only fair, right?
But the Center for Individual Rights, and their corporate CEO backers, want to take away this basic right of working people — to come together and negotiate as a group in order to secure safe working conditions, and wages and benefits that allow them to support a family.
That basic right benefits the entire community, since if ordinary people have money in their pockets, they turn around and spend it at stores and shops and buy products that create more jobs.
Right now the case is restricted to “public employees,” but if they win on this case, you know what’s next — the same restrictions on the rights of workers for all employees.
The lawsuit has been brought for one and only one reason. The Koch Brothers and the other CEOs want to weaken — and ultimately eliminate — the rights of workers to band together into unions and negotiate over wages and working conditions. Then the CEO gang would have unlimited power to pay their workers as little as the market will bear, while keeping as much as possible for themselves.
After all, they know that in an increasingly global economy, if they don’t have to negotiate with their employees over wages and working conditions, they can drive wages lower and lower.
They know that if they make yet another change in the rules governing the economic game, they can make our economy even more unbalanced than they have made it over the last 15 years.

Read more…

It looks like strategic voting by the French left has dashed Front National leader Marine Le Pen’s hopes for the presidency, report AP’s Elaine Ganley and Angelina Charlton.
Waleed Shahid, political director of Pennsylvania Working Families Party, has a perceptive post on “Donald Trump and the Disaffected, White, Working Class Voter” at Colorlines. Shahid observes, “Today the political poles are again moving farther and farther apart. An angry base of White, working and middle class voters emboldened by the Tea Party movement, Fox News and Trump are pulling Republicans in the direction of xenophobia and racism which Millennial movements for racial and economic justice and immigrant and LGBTQ rights are pushing Democrats toward a more inclusive society. Just like before the Civil War, these differences concern central, competing ideas about the heart of the United States. They explain why common sense reforms on gun violence, immigration, welfare, policing and finance have virtually no chance in passing in our broken system.”
Apparently the “back room deal” trial balloon of the GOP establishment isn’t playing so well.
Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball sketches “The Down-Ballot Outlook as 2016 Approaches,” noting that “The upcoming battle for the Senate depends to a large extent on the presidential race; Democrats should gain House seats but not truly threaten the GOP’s big lower chamber majority; and Republicans are positioned to add to their already-substantial majority of governorships. That’s the early line on next year’s down-ballot contests…”
At Demos Policy Shop Sean McElwee reports on a new study “by political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and Brian Schaffner, the most comprehensive examination of voters and nonvoters that has ever been performed,” reveals serious problems regarding voter turnout and the data behind it, including: “…Very few Americans vote regularly, in fact, only 25% of Americans voted in all four elections. A whopping 37% voted in none of the elections. The other 39% of the population participated with varying frequency: 13% voted in only one election (generally Presidential), 12% in two, and 14% voted in three (most missed a single midterm)…Ansolabehere and Schaffner find that a stunning 63% of those who did not actually vote in 2010 reported that they did vote on CCES.”
“In 2008 only 8.1 percent of voters reported voting for a different party than in 2004. In 2012, it hit an all-time low, with only 5.2 percent of Americans voting for a different major-party nominee,” reports Peter Grier in his Monitor cover story, “Why swing voters are vanishing from US politics.” Grier adds, “Meanwhile, the percentage of “standpatters” – people who vote for the same party over a series of consecutive elections – has risen correspondingly and is now approaching 60 percent of Americans of voting age. (Nonvoters and periodic voters account for the rest.).”
GOP voter suppressers on a roll in Michigan.
WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains why “Trump should be no match for the moderate majority.” Dione says “We have heard the words “Trump leads in the polls” for so long, you’d think he had taken the entire country by storm. In fact, Trump is not broadly popular. He leads only in a minority subset of the population — depending on the survey, projected Republican primary voters or Republicans combined with Republican-leaning independents. Neither of these groups represents a majority of Americans…But it also matters that Republican primary voters constituted only 38 percent of those interviewed by the Times/CBS pollsters. If you take 35 percent of 38 percent, you are talking about 13 percent of Americans. This is almost exactly the same percentage that George Wallace, who ran a racist-populist third-party presidential campaign, won in 1968 against Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey….Was the Wallace campaign important? Yes. Did Wallace speak for anywhere close to a majority of Americans? No. The same is true of Trump.”
National Journal’s Jake Flanagin explains why “Ted Cruz Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump”: Flanagin notes, “The thing is, Cruz isn’t merely a toned-down ver­sion of Trump. He’s just as con­ser­vat­ive, just as volat­ile, though prob­ably a little less er­rat­ic. And this makes him all the more dan­ger­ous, from a pro­gress­ive point of view…Es­sen­tially, he matches Trump tit-for-tat on most every con­ser­vat­ive idea­lo­gic­al mark­er. But un­like Trump, Cruz is ut­terly and com­pletely de­voted to a pur­ist, con­ser­vat­ive cause. And his abil­ity to mask zealotry with polit­ic­al rhet­or­ic renders him an ex­po­nen­tially more po­tent can­did­ate.”

Looking back at the last year, it really hit me that the fabled Republican Establishment has taken a very good hand and played itself into a big hole. I summed it all up at New York:

The Republican Party emerged from the 2014 midterm elections in fine fettle. Analysts competed to describe exactly how long it had been since the GOP had the kind of power it would exert in Congress and in the several states — pretty much everywhere other than the White House. And the White House itself, with Barack Obama about to leave office with poor job-approval ratings, a meh economy, and overseas crises growing like Topsy, seemed an overripe fruit ready to fall.
Best of all, the party elders appeared to have finally gained the upper hand in their battle with angry tea-party conservatives.They largely avoided the rash of primary defeats to unelectable wingnuts that cost them the Senate in 2010 and 2012, and even got candidates to attend special training sessions where they learned not to stumble into stupid comments about things like “legitimate rape.” The RNC’s 2013 “autopsy report” on the 2012 presidential loss that stressed the demographic importance of not offending Latinos, women, and young people had become the conventional wisdom. And in sharp contrast to 2012, it appeared the party would have a large and deep 2016 presidential field, led by candidates with impressive federal and state experience like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and John Kasich.
Fast-forward to the waning days of 2015 and of the invisible primary before the presidential nominating process gets very real and very fast. Far from debating the best vehicle for minority outreach, the GOP presidential field is being driven into a nativist, Islamophobic frenzy by a candidate nobody thought would even run. Establishment favorite Jeb Bush appears to be trying to decide whether to crawl off to (politically) die or instead use his super-pac to damage every other candidate not named Donald Trump in order to lift himself above a desolate landscape. The most viable alternative to Trump at present may be a harshly right-wing freshman senator despised by his colleagues who is stopping just short of embracing the entire Trump agenda.
It’s all gotten so bad that Republican pooh-bahs (including RNC chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) convened a “secret” dinner to plot a strategy to block Trump at the convention if his success continues into the voting phase of the nomination contest. This development was instantly leaked to the Washington Post, presumably by someone believing it would send a “help’s on the way!” message to Republicans worried about a party veering out of control. Instead, it produced this reaction (as reported by Talking Points Memo):

If Republican party bosses continue meeting to discuss how to derail Donald Trump at the convention, Trump won’t be the only one to turn his back on the GOP. Now, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson says he’ll leave too.
“If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning.
“If this was the beginning of a plan to subvert the will of the voters and replaces it with the will of the political elite, I assure you Donald Trump will not be the only one leaving the party.
“I pray that the report in the Post this morning was incorrect. If it is correct, every voter who is standing for change must know they are being betrayed. I won’t stand for it.
“This process is the one played out by our party. If the powerful try to manipulate it, the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next summer may be the last convention.”

So what was intended as a quiet session to explore ways to block Trump without giving him an excuse to run as an independent is already spurring anti-Establishment revolt that will feed the paranoia of “angry outsiders” while generating an open invitation to an indie Trump run from another candidate.

Can it get worse for these people? I cannot wait to find out.

According to Politico’s “weekly bipartisan survey of the top strategists, activists and operatives in the four early-nominating states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada,” Republicans will lose the 2016 presidential election if Trump runs an independent candidacy. As Steven Shepard reports,

Roughly 4 in 5 GOP insiders, 79 percent, said it would be either “impossible” or “very difficult” for the Republican nominee to win the general election if Trump launches a third-party bid, based on electoral math and a general inability for the party’s nominee to focus on the Democratic competitor…”Impossible is a strong but appropriate word,” said a New Hampshire Republican.

Shepard quotes an unnamed Iowa Republican, who put it succinctly: “The current electoral path to the White House for the eventual Republican is so narrow that any third- or no-party candidate with the ability to peel away conservative and anti-Washington independent voters spells certain defeat for any Republican nominee.”
Shepard notes that 84 percent of Democratic insiders also agree that an independent Trump run would likely doom the GOP’s 2016 White House bid. The ‘insiders’ did not speculate on Trump’s chances, should he get the GOP nomination, a prospect many Democrats would no doubt welcome.
Shepard notes, however, that other “insiders” believe that an independent run by Trump would also fail. Trump may indeed be bluffing with his independent candidacy saber-rattling, in order to tone down criticism from his GOP competition. If so, it appears to be working to some extent.
In any case, it would be folly for Dems to count on either development — Trump winning the GOP nomination or his going rogue. Rather Dems should be prepared for both possibilities, plus a scenario in which a different Republican wins their party’s nomination and gets Trump’s endorsement.