Wednesday Open Thread [12.9.2015]

NATIONAL—USA Today/Suffolk: Clinton 56, Sanders 29, O’Malley 4
IOWA—Monmouth: Clinton 55, Sanders 33, O’Malley 6
NORTH CAROLINA—PPP: Clinton 60, Sanders 21, O’Malley 10

NATIONAL—USA Today/Suffolk: Trump 27, Cruz 17, Rubio 16, Carson 10, Bush 4, Christie 2, Kasich 2, Paul 2, Fiorina 1,Huckabee 1, Santorum 1
NEW HAMPSHIRE–CNN/WMUR: Trump 32, Rubio 14, Christie 9, Bush 8, Kasich 7,Cruz 6, Carson 5, Fiorina 5, Paul 2, Huckabee 1, Graham 1
NORTH CAROLINA—PPP: Trump 33, Cruz 16, Carson 14, Rubio 14, Bush 5, Christie 4, Kasich 3, Fiorina 2, Huckabee 2, Paul 2, Graham 1, Santorum 1

NATIONAL—USA Today/Suffolk: Clinton 48, Trump 44 | Clinton 47, Cruz 45 | Rubio 48, Clinton 45 | Clinton 46, Carson 44

Former president Jimmy Carter announced on Sunday at a Sunday School class he teaches in Plains, Georgia that his cancer was gone, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Back in August, the 91-year-old Carter revealed that doctors had found four melanoma lesions on his brain, but following drug treatments and radiation therapy, his doctors told him last week that his latest scan showed that he was now cancer-free. According to Carter-friend Jill Stuckey, who was at Maranatha Baptist Church when Carter made the announcement, “The church, everybody here, just erupted in applause.”

Charlie Cook notes that “even most of these professed independents don’t actually behave, well, independently.”

“The American National Election Studies are a series of national surveys immediately before and after presidential elections, led by political scientists at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. In 2012, it found that 87 percent of independents who, when pushed, conceded they feel closer to the Democratic Party wound up voting for Obama. The same percentage of independents who admitted a soft spot for Republicans went for Romney. In 2008, Obama’s hope-and-change campaign drew a whopping 91 percent of Democratic-leaning independents, while McCain won 82 percent of independents who leaned Republican. Simply put, many of the people who self-identify as political independents are, for electoral purposes, partisans. They vote almost as predictably as Americans who simply label themselves as a Democrat or a Republican.”

“True independents, who don’t lean toward either party, made up only 5 percent of the 2012 electorate, according to the ANES survey.”

The Washington Post says that Donald Trump’s polling is all about less educated whites. Yep. The White Trash among us are the basis of Trump’s support.

Today, workers at the top of the education and income scales face some increasingly well-documented competition from well-educated immigrant workers and workers abroad. But it’s Americans at the bottom who tend to face job competition most intensely.

Here’s why: The majority of immigrant workers in the United States today arrived with limited education and can perform the same tasks as American workers who do not have college degrees or specialized training. And even some immigrants with training in medicine, the sciences, engineering and other fields can not readily practice their profession in the United States without significant time and money to invest in education, training and testing in the United States. So immigrant workers are clustered in manual labor jobs, service industry work and some factory and retail positions. These are, of course, jobs largely held by American-born people of color and whites with limited education.

So immigrants get resented. And because they are uneducated, that resentment turns into racism. And that fear, that racism leads them to Nazism.

Politico: “For the first time since we began tracking this question last spring, a majority of Iowa GOP insiders say Cruz, the conservative Texas senator, would be the top vote-getter if the state’s caucuses were held today.”

Pollster Ann Selzer: “A key question I often get from the press these days is: When will Iowans finally make up their minds? Based on the astonishing number of candidates still under consideration in the Republican field, my answer is: Late, very late.”

“History shows that even in an normal year, Iowans rarely settle on a final decision until the last possible moment. In past election cycles, the final four-day poll conducted just before the caucuses shows how much turbulence remains late in the race.”

Ed Kilgore on Mein Fuhrer Trump’s next policy step:

On the outside chance that Trump is elected president, we should all pray this is his last stop on the road to a very different America where religious tests are suddenly constitutional and huge categories of people are treated as presumptive terrorists. He’s already called for a database of all Muslims and for monitoring and perhaps shutting down mosques. More generally, he’s already promising to do everything within his power to alienate allied countries with significant Muslim populations, while ignoring the suffering of the Muslims who are the primary victims of ISIS and their ilk. But one can theoretically imagine the next Trump step: maybe expulsions of Muslims already here; maybe the compulsory wearing of yellow crescents; and maybe something worse we have yet to imagine.

I have heard some objections to the comparison of Trump to Hitler. The objection holds that Trump has not killed 8 million Muslims and thus he has committed no Holocaust, and therefore to to compare him to Hitler cheapens the Holocaust. My rejoinder to that is “yet.” He is most definitely following down the path of Hitler. So we must stop him now lest he commit a second Holocaust.

Americans are safer than they have been in decades, even with the mass shootings that seem like a constant plague, even with the threat of a lone wolf ISIS threat. Vox:

In fact, since 1991, the murder rate, along with all violent crime, has plummeted in the US, making this one of the safer periods in American history.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship say the GOP is on the Eve of Destruction.

Just four-and-a-half years ago, Washington mainstays Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein shocked the inside-the-Beltway establishment (especially the press, with its silent pact to speak no evil of wrongdoers lest they deny you an interview) when they published their book, It’s Even Worse than It Looks. The two esteemed political scientists wrote, “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

In the years since, an ugly situation has only gotten increasingly dire, with right-wing radicals whipped into a frenzy by a Republican establishment that thought it could use their rage, only to find it running amok and beyond their control. In a recent interview with Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg View, Norman Ornstein said, “The future still looks pretty grim.” And Thomas Mann noted, “The burden is on the GOP because they are currently the major source of our political dysfunction. No happy talk about bipartisanship can obscure that reality. Unless other voices and movements arise within the Republican Party to changes its character and course, our dysfunctional politics will continue.”

Politico says the GOP is worried that Donald Trump will harm the majorities the party has in Congress. And they should be. With Trump as their nominee, the Republican Party will lose control of both the Senate and the House.

“With the Iowa caucuses just 55 days away, Republicans are beginning to see Trump as a dire threat to their majorities on Capitol Hill. And they’re warning that the GOP poll leader, who this week called for a ban on Muslims entering the country, will cause irreparable harm to the party.”

“From vulnerable senators to top party officials, the fear is palpable and bursting into public view. Congressional Republicans face a tough 2016 landscape even without Trump. Senate Republicans are clinging to a four-seat majority as they defend 24 seats versus just 10 for Democrats. And House Republicans are expecting to lose roughly a dozen seats in 2016. Trump’s rhetoric, they fear, could cause those losses to grow substantially.”

Sen. Ted Cruz “has taken his evangelicals-focused Iowa playbook to South Carolina — and conservative leaders in the state say that it’s starting to work,” Politico reports.

“Now, there are signs that the same Christian conservatives-focused approach Cruz used to surge in Iowa, largely at Carson’s expense, is making him a formidable candidate in South Carolina as well, a state in which 65 percent of Republican primary voters in 2012 identified themselves in exit polls as “born-again or evangelical Christians.” Evangelicals are particularly concentrated here in the deeply religious Upstate region.”

Cruz will win South Carolina.