Thursday Open Thread [9.24.2015]

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—FOX News: Trump 26, Carson 18, Rubio 9, Fiorina 9, Cruz 8, Bush 7, Huckabee 3, Paul 2, Kasich 4, Christie 5, Santorum 0, Pataki 1, Jindal 0

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY—FOX News: Clinton 44, Sanders 30, Biden 18, O’Malley 2, Webb 1, Chafee 0

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–FOX News: Clinton 46, Trump 42

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—Morning Consult: Trump 32, Carson 12, Bush 11, Fiorina 6, Cruz 5, Rubio 5, Christie 4, Huckabee 4, Paul 3, Kasich 2, Pataki 1, Santorum 1, Jindal 1, Graham 0

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY—Morning Consult: Clinton 49, Sanders 28, O’Malley 2, Webb 1, Chafee 1

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–Morning Consult:

Clinton 45, Bush 39
Clinton 46, Rubio 38
Clinton 45, Trump 41

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—Bloomberg: Trump 21, Carson 16, Bush 13, Fiorina 11, Rubio 8, Cruz 5, Christie 4, Kasich 4, Huckabee 3, Paul 2, Jindal 1, Santorum 1, Gilmore 0, Graham 0, Pataki 0

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—Quinnipiac: Trump 25, Carson 17, Fiorina 12, Bush 10, Rubio 9, Cruz 7, Huckabee 2, Christie 2, Kasich 2, Pataki 1, Paul 1, Gilmore 0, Santorum 0, Jindal 0, Graham 0

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY—Quinnipiac: Clinton 43, Sanders 25, Biden 18, O’Malley 0, Webb 0, Chafee 0

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–CLINTON v. GOPQuinnipiac:

Clinton 45, Trump 43
Bush 44, Clinton 42
Carson 49, Clinton 42
Fiorina 44, Clinton 43

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–BIDEN v. GOPQuinnipiac:

Biden 51, Trump 40
Biden 46, Bush 41
Biden 45, Carson 45
Biden 46, Fiorina 43

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–SANDERS v. GOPQuinnipiac:

Sanders 47, Trump 42
Bush 44, Sanders 44
Carson 49, Sanders 39
Fiorina 44, Sanders 43

Here we have tons of stories on the end of Scott Walker’s campaign.

Rick Klein: “Scott Walker’s exit is a jolt to a chaotic and still churning presidential race. It also challenges some of the biggest assumptions that have governed understanding and analysis of the 2016 cycle. First, early polls really, really don’t matter. The candidate with the best six months of 2015 is gone one quarter later, without a scandal or an ‘oops’ to blame for it. Second, super PACs are overrated. Yes, they can provide critical air cover, but only if you have a real operation on the ground. Giant outside entities could save neither Walker nor Rick Perry, who struggled with hard dollars despite being established, big-state governors with national fundraising bases.”

“Finally – and most significantly – this most crowded primary in recent history could get quite a bit roomier. If the dollars don’t exist to support 17 candidates, they most likely can’t sustain 15 serious candidacies either. Walker wasn’t a candidate long enough to even file an FEC report; those reports will be scrutinized for burn rates in a few weeks, with the possibility of some flameouts even before then.

The Fix: “From the day Trump entered the race in mid-June, Walker struggled to find his footing in a race in which the “star” was no longer Jeb Bush — a relatively conventional opponent — but rather an entertainer who would say and do anything to draw attention. As Trump went from a novelty act to the star of the presidential campaign, Walker’s ‘Joe Average’-schtick began to feel like an echo of a race that was no longer being run.”

First Read: “How [did Scott Walker fail]? Look no further than the issue of immigration, which Trump ripped away from Walker — who had been basing much of his Iowa campaign on his opposition to illegal immigration (especially given Bush’s and Rubio’s views on the subject).”

More First Read: “Scott Walker and Rick Perry both learned a hard lesson this cycle: If at first you don’t succeed – you don’t get a second look anymore. There are too many other alternatives in this GOP field, and the news cycle moves too fast for all but the most skilled candidates to claw their way out of a deficit. Individual stumbles and flip-flops aside, Walker’s fatal mistake was that he tried to be all things to all conservatives. In a year when the party wants anything but a traditional politician, Walker got caught being, well, a traditional politician: Trying too hard to give answers to appease supporters; trying to be politically perfect at the expense of being fresh or defiant; trying too hard to use a state budget to make a presidential statement.”

Politico: “Several senior Republicans with knowledge of his campaign said the 47-year-old Walker… was simply too confident in his own abilities and often acted, ineptly, as his own campaign manager.”

“Walker’s campaign had been imploding for weeks, but his public low point — and one that made him vulnerable to charges of weakness — was his stumbling response to the birthright citizenship proposal, a quixotic bid to challenge the 14th Amendment guarantee that all people born in the U.S. be given citizenship rights. Over the course of seven days in August, Walker rattled out no fewer than three positions — a call to challenge the amendment, a solid “no” when asked if he planned to challenge existing laws, and a call for the status quo.”

Jonathan Chait:

The Republican presidential race has appeared to take the form of a kind of reverse meritocracy, in which the candidates with real political accomplishments (Walker and, before him, former Texas governor Rick Perry) are driven out, and novices with strong television skills rise to the top. The reality, however, does not quite match the appearance. The GOP has faced a coordination problem — it has too many acceptable, Establishment-friendly candidates in the race. Any number of viable options presented themselves as vehicles for the agenda of the Republican donor class: Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Walker, not to mention riskier choices like Carly Fiorina, Perry, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, or even Rand Paul. If the Republican elite coalesced around any of these candidates, they could defeat Trump, or Ben Carson. The party needed some of these candidates to fall by the wayside more quickly. But even a few weeks ago, nobody would have guessed that Walker would have been one of the first to go.

Ed Kilgore:

…What made Walker exciting to a lot of conservatives earlier this year was that unlike Bush and Rubio he offered a plausible electability argument that depended on the party moving hard right and confronting its enemies with the full power of its base’s hatred rather than compromising or “reaching out” to this or that constituency of looters and loafers. This is something conservatives badly want to believe in. But as the Invisible Primary proceeded, other candidates emerged who offered competing and more viscerally appealing models for winning a general election without compromise…

…Walker became exposed as a career politician (he has indeed been in public office since he was 24) whose heroic story of standing up to the unions grew smaller and smaller as other candidates made the contest about an apocalyptic challenge to all the godless liberals and all of those people, and also to the hated GOP Establishment that kept compromising with the former and sucking up to the latter.

Stephen Stromberg:

…It would be a mistake to just blame Trump for Walker’s political demise. Even the relatively mild scrutiny applied to Walker’s run revealed him for what he really is: a man who has not thought much outside of his narrow experience and who fumbled when reporters asked him to do so. The result was a candidate who was intellectually and strategically adrift. He didn’t seem to know how he felt on a range of issues, and, in the absence of sincere positions, he didn’t seem to know how far right he wanted to run. All of this made his bluster about being a “fighter” who is “unintimidated” seem embarrassingly inappropriate…Walker didn’t need Trump to fail. He didn’t just have bad luck. He couldn’t be any more than he is: walking proof that a combative style, a hard ideological edge and identity-based pandering can’t always make up for cluelessness.

Kyle Kondik:

Walker did not have any out-and-out terrible moments: There isn’t a Rick Perry “oops” on his presidential scorecard or, for our older readers, an equivalent of George Romney’s “brainwashing” on Vietnam in the 1968 Republican contest. Rather, it’s been death by a thousand cuts for Walker…Earlier in the cycle, we thought the best-case scenario for Walker would be that he could unite both the conservative grassroots and the establishment, becoming an outsider-insider candidate, or “a consensus choice whose nomination would avert a GOP identity crisis,” as we described it in August 2013. Unfortunately for Walker, there does seem to now be a consensus among both GOP insiders and outsiders: Walker didn’t suit either camp.

…Still, running as an outsider might have been a decent approach for Walker, particularly if he could have won Iowa, where he was leading the polls into the summer. But then: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina happened. Walker could claim to be an outsider against the likes of a Jeb Bush, but that trio of candidates with zero elected experience made him seem like an insider by comparison, given that he’s spent almost his entire adult life in elective politics at the local and state levels.

Peter Wehner:

It’s still early – more than four months before the first vote is cast – but the Republican Party is showing signs it is intent on kicking away a very winnable election in 2016.
It’s doing so by presenting a picture of the party to the American people that is intolerant, bigoted and nativist…

The message being sent to voters is this: The Republican Party is led by people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the changing (and inevitable) demographic nature of our nation. The GOP is longing to return to the past and is fearful of the future. It is a party that is characterized by resentments and grievances, by distress and dismay, by the belief that America is irredeemably corrupt and past the point of no return. “The American dream is dead,” in the emphatic words of Mr. Trump.

This is all quite troubling to those of us who are Republicans and find these attitudes repellant.

Chris Cillizza:

Wehner, whose honesty and insight about his party and its prospects I’ve praised before in this space, nails a sentiment I’ve heard expressed by countless Republicans in the summer of Trump. The concern is that a candidate like Trump is running a campaign based on the 1980 electorate, not the 2016 one.

Sure, appealing to white voters with a message that things aren’t as good as they used to be — the boiled-down appeal that Trump represents — might work in a Republican primary. But, there is NO mystery or debate that the changing demographic face of the country makes an appeal to the “old ways” an almost-certain electoral loser.

Dave Weigel:

And more and more conservatives have settled on the Trump line — that the questions about Obama’s citizenship were so slimy that they obviously came from the Clinton camp. “The whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 against Barack Obama,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) confidently told Yahoo News this summer.

The problem: This is simply not true. Clinton’s campaign, one of the most thoroughly dissected in modern history, never raised questions about the future president’s citizenship. The idea that it did is based largely on a series of disconnected actions by supporters of Clinton, mostly in the months between Obama’s reaction to the Jeremiah Wright story and the Democratic National Convention. I know, because I spent/wasted quite a lot of time covering this stuff.

The GOP never lets the truth get in its way.