Tuesday Open Thread [12.8.2015]

NATIONAL—IBD/TIPP: Clinton 51, Sanders 33, O’Malley 1
IOWA—CNN/ORC: Clinton 54, Sanders 36, O’Malley 4

NATIONAL—IBD/TIPP: Trump 27, Carson 15, Rubio 14, Cruz 13, Bush 3, Fiorina 3, Christie 2, Kasich 2, Huckabee 2, Paul 2
IOWA—CNN/ORC: Trump 33, Cruz 20, Carson 16, Rubio 11, Bush 4, Paul 3, Fiorina 3, Christie 2, Huckabee 2, Kasich 1, Santorum 1
IOWA—Monmouth: Cruz 24, Trump 19, Rubio 17, Carson 13, Bush 6, Paul 4, Fiorina 3, Kasich 3, Christie 2, Huckabee 2, Santorum 1

Cruz will win Iowa.

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NEW HAMPSHIRE—PPP: Clinton 47, Trump 41 | Clinton 47, Cruz 39 | Clinton 44, Rubio 43 | Clinton 45, Carson 43 | Clinton 43, Bush 41 | Sanders 49, Trump 40 | Sanders 48, Cruz 38 | Sanders 45, Rubio 41 | Sanders 46, Carson 41 | Sanders 47, Bush 38

“The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned away a challenge by gun rights activists to an ordinance enacted by a Chicago suburb that bans assault weapons and large-capacity magazines,” Reuters reports.

“The refusal by the nine justices to hear the case, coming at a time of fierce debate over the nation’s gun laws following a series of mass shootings, means that the 2013 ordinance passed by the city of Highland Park, Illinois remains in effect.”

A new Monkey Cage poll in Iowa finds that non-voters may be driving Donald Trump’s popularity.

“To build a sample, we began with the list of registered voters in Iowa and stratified our sample by factors like age and sex. Other pollsters have done something similar. However, what we did — but other have not — is stratify the sample based on another factor: Whether or not people had voted in at least one primary election since 2006.”

The results: Ben Carson led with 27%, followed by Marco Rubio at 17% and Donald Trump at 15%. What’s more, only 37% of Trump’s supporters say they probably or definitely will caucus on election night. If that holds, Trump is heading for a humiliating defeat that will spirit him from the race quickly.

If you support Trump, you are a Nazi. Simple as that. If you treat his appearances, his rantings, his jokes, and his campaign with anything other than derision and contempt, you are a Nazi appeaser. Finally, newspapers across the country are finally finally waking up to our own Hitler.

The Economist:

Mr Trump’s long success says something troubling and revealing about the conservative movement, parts of which have become a fever swamp of xenophobia and a plague-on-them-all rage. More conventional Republicans gripe that Mr Trump is not a proper conservative at all, citing his past support for state-run healthcare, higher taxes on private-equity-fund bosses and other apostasies. But they cannot wish away the quarter to a third of self-declared Republican voters who cheer when they hear Mr Trump vow to deport 11m people who lack legal papers to stay in America, promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico (while accusing Mexico of sending rapists and criminals over as migrants) and suggest that Muslims should be registered on a government database. […]

Perhaps Mr Trump has finally gone too far, not just by proposing to close America to a whole religion, but with his snarling assertions on Monday night that many Muslims are lying about their loyalties, and preying on the naivety of a “stupid” America. Perhaps; though the press and establishment Republicans have predicted doom for Mr Trump before and been wrong each time.

After months of shadow-boxing between the candidates, actual Republican voters will have a say on February 1st at the Iowa caucus, followed by the New Hampshire primary on February 9th. For the sake of Republicans, and indeed America’s ability to forge alliances with the Muslim world, hope that early-state voters reject Mr Trump’s nativism. Sadly, even if they do rebuff the businessman, lasting damage has already been done.

Nate Silver:

Republican reluctance to criticize Trump stems from a surfeit of short-term thinking — combined with a possible misreading of the polls. Several times so far in the campaign, we’ve witnessed the following cycle:

1. Trump says something offensive or ludicrous.
2. Some pundits loudly proclaim that it could bring about the end of Trump’s campaign.
3. Instead, Trump’s position remains steady or even improved in ballot-test polls.
4. The same pundits therefore conclude that Trump is indestructible and impervious to criticism.

This is not a ridiculous interpretation. But there are some potential problems with it.

One is that most Republicans are still not paying all that much attention to the campaign. Some controversies that garner wall-to-wall coverage from the political press may only reach one-quarter to one-fifth of Americans at home. That mutes the impact of most things the candidates are doing. And any actual effects can easily be overwhelmed by noise in the polling, making it hard to make inferences about causality.

The second big problem is that in a field that still has 14 candidates, more media coverage — even negative media coverage — potentially helps a candidate to differentiate himself and thereby improve his position on the ballot test. In general, there has been a strong correlation between how well a candidate is performing on the ballot test and how much media coverage he’s receiving, although the causality is hard to determine. Trump seems to understand this; indeed, he seems to issue his most controversial remarks and proposals precisely at moments of perceived vulnerability.4

Put another way, the media’s obsession over the daily fluctuations in the polls — even when the polls don’t predict very much about voter behavior and don’t necessarily reflect people who are actually likely to vote — may help enable Trump. Republicans are afraid to criticize Trump in part because it rarely produces instant gratification in a “win-the-morning” political culture that keeps score based on polls.5 Without seeing any repercussions, Trump goes farther out on a limb, shifting the window of acceptable discourse along with him and making it harder to rebuke him the next time around.

Josh Voorhees at Slate:

For starters, Trump has already suggested the government may need to shutter U.S. mosques and create a mandatory registry to track Muslims in the United States. While many of his rivals took issue with those remarks, they don’t sound all that different from him on the stump. Many have called for the same type of no-Muslims religious test for Syrian refugees looking to resettle in the United States. Ben Carson has proposed a similar test for future presidents (while also likening Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs”). And Ted Cruz has vowed to “shut down the broken immigration system that is letting jihadists into our country.” The common conservative refrain on the campaign trail, meanwhile, has long been that the first step in fighting ISIS is to define it as “radical Islamic terrorism.” (Republicans feel noticeably differently, however, about terrorist attacks committed by Christians.) The GOP field, then, is already on the record that they believe the Islamic faith itself poses a threat to the United States. Trump’s proposal is the logical conclusion to the type of illogical belligerence that Republicans have increasingly directed at Muslims in the wake of last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris and last week’s massacre in San Bernardino, California.

John Cassidy at The New Yorker:

Mockery of the political establishment. an “us versus them” attitude, the myth of national regeneration: all of these things have long been associated with political movements of the far right, course, and among the commentariat there is now a lively debate about whether or not Trump can be regarded as fascist or proto-fascist. Since there is no generally agreed-upon definition of fascism, this discussion is unlikely to be resolved. What can be said without fear of contradiction is that Trump represents a long-standing and deep-rooted strain of American nativism and parochialism, which, in earlier eras, was exploited by such figures as Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace.

How far can Trump push it? To repeat, the polls suggest that his support is limited, however vocal it may be. And unlike Marine Le Pen, he doesn’t have a separate political party behind him. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, formed the National Front in 1972, and it has spent more than four decades agitating and building up its presence at the local level. But it wasn’t until the telegenic Marine took over as the Party’s leader, in 2011, and set out to “de-demonize” its public image that the National Front became a serious threat to the mainstream parties.

Jonathan Chait: “Parliamentary systems channel far-right nationalistic movements of the sort Trump is leading into splinter parties. The American winner-take-all system creates two blocs that absorb far-right movements into the mainstream. Rubio, like all the Republican contenders, has promised to endorse Trump if he wins the nomination, a constraint that limits their ability to denounce him. You can’t call a man a fascist while promising to support him if he collects the requisite delegates. Unless Republican elites are willing to actually cleave the GOP in two — and they have displayed no such inclination — they are going to live with the reality that they are part of an entity that is substantially, if not entirely, a party of Trump.”

First Read: “If Republicans — including the RNC — condemn Trump too hard, does that drive him and his supporters away from the GOP?”

GOP strategists say that Donald Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims from entering the U.S. “won’t destroy his candidacy—but would severely threaten the party’s chance at the White House in 2016 if he’s the nominee.”

“His plan ignited a firestorm among rival Republicans, Democrats, and party chairpeople in the three states that will hold the first nomination votes next year. But GOP voters’ antipathy toward Islam and frustration with President Barack Obama, plus competitors’ inability to outmuscle Trump so far, suggest this won’t be the uproar that finally ends his bid and clears the way for stronger nominee to face Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic standard-bearer.”

Politico reports that Hillary Clinton’s super PAC is preparing for three possible general election opponents — Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.

“Though they say they’ll be ready for any outcome of the GOP primaries, they are looking most closely at three scenarios that could unfold in the new year — that Trump is, indeed, as strong as his poll numbers would indicate; that Rubio manages to break through as the reasonable establishment choice; and, lately and with greater focus, that Cruz consolidates the conservative Christian vote, and combines it with the angry-outsider voters who eventually dismiss Trump, to become his party’s nominee.”

Harry Enten notes that the GOP establishment may need religious voters to stop Donald Trump from marching to the Republican presidential nomination. And to that end, they will have to embrace a man they despise: Ted Cruz.

“To beat Trump, the establishment may have to defeat him in Iowa, but recently, the Iowa caucuses have been unwelcoming to establishment-approved candidates. Still, there’s a way to square that circle. The GOP establishment doesn’t need to win Iowa — it just needs Trump to lose. And the establishment may have to rely on an old frenemy to make that happen: born-again and evangelical Christians.”

Cruz is leading Iowa now because he has taken away evangelical Christians from Ben Carson. It is time for the Establishment to embrace Ted Cruz. Hahahaha. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.