Wednesday Open Thread [9.2.15]

Paul Krugman notes that while Donald Trump “doesn’t exude presidential dignity, he’s seeking the nomination of a party that once considered it a great idea to put George W. Bush in a flight suit and have him land on an aircraft carrier.”

“The point is that those predicting Mr. Trump’s imminent political demise are ignoring the lessons of recent history, which tell us that poseurs with a knack for public relations can con the public for a very long time. Someday The Donald will have his Katrina moment, when voters see him for who he really is. But don’t count on it happening any time soon.”

National Journal: “Bernie Sanders has rapidly gained support in the first-in-the-nation voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, creeping up on Hillary Clinton and raising the possibility of mounting a real challenge to the Democrats’ primary front-runner. But in Nevada, the third state on Democratic primary calendar, Sanders faces a challenge that thus far has been the principal sticking point of his campaign: moving past a core supporter base that is largely white, and winning favor among minority voters.”

“Unlike the first two states on the map, in Nevada, minority voters are poised to play a major role in picking the Democrats’ winner. Nonwhite voters make up just less than half of the state’s population, while white voters are much more dominant in New Hampshire (92 percent) and Iowa (88 percent).”

Byron York on Trump: “First Donald Trump antagonized the Republican establishment with his proposals on immigration. Then he irritated some with his stands on trade and Social Security. Now Trump is preparing a tax proposal that will again set him far apart from the party’s powers-that-be.”

“The problem for the establishment is that Trump’s positions on all three issues are more in line with the majority of American voters than the establishment’s preferred policies. By using his popularity to force outside-the-GOP-box ideas into the Republican presidential debate, Trump is displaying an uncanny sense of the divisions between voters and the GOP power structure.”

First Read: “During the last three presidential cycles (2004, 2008, 2012), the winners of August didn’t go on to capture the presidential nomination. In 2004, the undisputed winner of the summer was Howard Dean, who ultimately finished third in Iowa and won only his home state of Vermont in the 2004 primaries. In 2008, Hillary Clinton was crushing Barack Obama in the August before the nominating contests, while John McCain was essentially given up for dead during that summer. And in 2012, the August winners were Michele Bachmann (who won the Iowa Straw Poll) and Rick Perry (who soared in the polls after his presidential launch).”

Rick Klein: “The retired neurosurgeon has none of Donald Trump’s showmanship, and he isn’t even a middle-of-the-night attack-Tweeter. But he is in a strong second place in Iowa, just five points behind Trump in the new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll, eclipsing the support of Ted Cruz and Scott Walker combined. A whopping 79 percent of likely GOP caucus-goers view Carson favorably, with only 8 percent (!) viewing him unfavorably.”

“That suggests tremendous upside for a man who is every bit the outsider Trump is, only with, arguably, a more compelling personal story and, inarguably, a less abrasive personal style. The anti-establishment fervor that’s driving Trump has more than enough left over for Carson, evidently. And he’s running stronger than Trump among women and evangelicals in the new poll, too.”
“Now if Trump/Carson/Sanders end winning in February and capture their party’s nomination, we’ll look back on this August as the turning points for them. But if they don’t, they’ll join Dean, Hillary, Romney, Rudy, Bachmann, and Perry.”

John Sides on whether Trump’s poll numbers are all about media coverage and hype:

C[ranky] R[eader]: Wait, are you suggesting that Trump’s appeal is all about news coverage? I mean, isn’t there more to it? I thought it was his unique appeal to conservatives or the tea party. Or maybe it’s that his hostility to immigration combined with his support for popular entitlement programs appeals to big chunks of Republican voters.

Or maybe it’s just that voters are mad. I mean, Frank Luntz did a focus group with Trump supporters and found that they were “mad as hell,” and after it was over, Luntz said his “legs were shaking.” I mean, that means something. FRANK LUNTZ’S LEGS WERE SHAKING.

Me: I think there are three problems with these interpretations. First, Trump doesn’t uniquely appeal to conservatives. There’s little correlation between ideology and support for Trump. He’s not a tea party favorite, either. (Update: What I mean by that last statement is that Republicans who are Tea Party supporters are not necessarily more likely to support Trump than other Republicans. His support is not a Tea Party phenomenon. See, for example, this Quinnipiac poll.)

Second, it’s far from clear that voters really have a lot of knowledge about Trump’s positions on issues, or any candidate’s positions. It’s possible that it’s more about personality.

Third, as voters, we can always provide “reasons” for our choices. But some research suggests that the reasons we give for liking or disliking candidates are often rationalizations of choices we’ve made for other reasons — like, perhaps, the fact that a candidate is in the news all the time.
I think the simplest counterfactual is this: Imagine if Trump’s candidacy had been covered like, I dunno, Jim Gilmore’s. Then would we be talking about Trump’s unique appeal to white nationalists or angry voters or whatever?

Rick Klein: “Jeb Bush’s decision to open a direct line of attack on Donald Trump may have minimal risk on its face. He’s getting attacked by Trump anyway, so why not try to score some blows that help Bush himself establish his conservative bona fides? What’s remarkable, though, is that Bush is on the attack from a position of relative weakness. He’s slipping in the polls, of course. His standing among conservatives in particular is suffering even in comparison to Donald Trump.”

“This trend is troubling to a Bush campaign that never anticipated the Trump surge to last this long. More troubling, though, is the potential that Trump isn’t just convincing conservatives to support him but changing conservatives’ beliefs on what it means to be conservative. Bush can’t compete with Trump on his malleability, but he also can’t match his economic populism or his disassociation with a political establishment that’s defined in part by the Bush name.”