Saturday Open Thread [12.12.2015]

NATIONAL—Reuters/Ipsos: Trump 35, Carson 12, Cruz 10, Bush 10
NEW HAMPSHIRE—WBUR/MassINC: Trump 27, Christie 12, Rubio 11, Cruz 10, Bush 8, Kasich 7, Carson 6, Fiorina 3, Paul 2, Huckabee 1
GEORGIA—WSB/Landmark: Trump 43, Cruz 16, Rubio 11, Carson 7, Bush 5, Fiorina 2, Huckabee 2, Kasich 2, Paul 1

So which measures to reduce income inequality attract the most support? Suzy Khimm reports at The New Republic: “A recent study conducted by economists from Princeton, Harvard, and University of California, Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez–one of the most prominent researchers on inequality–put the political challenges of the issue in sharper relief. Based on a survey of 10,000 Americans, the study found that those who received more information about inequality were more likely to believe that economic disparity was a problem. At the same time, “they show no more appetite for many government interventions to reduce inequality”–such as an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and food stamps–“with the notable exceptions of increasing the estate tax and the minimum wage…The study hypothesizes that Americans are more comfortable with government solutions when they’re narrowly targeted or otherwise limit government involvement. That suggests that any kind of broad government intervention will be a hard sell to the broader public, even if the public believes the scales are unfairly tipped because of government policies.”

Taegen Goddard on gaming out the different scenarios in the Republican Primary:

Donald Trump wins Iowa: If Trump wins in Iowa, he becomes the clear favorite in New Hampshire and probably for the Republican nomination as well.

Ted Cruz wins Iowa: Many GOP insiders think Cruz will ultimately prevail because he’s the best organized. If so, he can probably afford not to win in New Hampshire and focus most of his efforts on South Carolina. If Cruz can win in New Hampshire, however, expect many establishment figures to grudgingly begin backing him.

Marco Rubio does well in Iowa: Rubio has scaled back his visits to Iowa in recent weeks, but if he does better than expectations — perhaps a strong second place finish — he’ll be set up as the true establishment candidate many want him to be. It would also set up an all-out war with Trump in New Hampshire. If Rubio wins in Iowa, he could be headed for the nomination.

A split decision: It’s very possible to see Cruz winning in Iowa, Trump winning in New Hampshire and Rubio winning in South Carolina. This is the protracted battle for the nomination that Republicans hoped to avoid and could go on for months, perhaps even to the convention.

Robert Costa and Tom Hamburger says the GOP is preparing for contested convention.

Republican officials and leading figures in the party’s establishment are now preparing for the possibility of a brokered convention as Donald Trump continues sit atop the polls and the presidential race.

More than 20 of them convened Monday for a dinner held by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, where the prospect of Trump nearing next year’s nominating convention in Cleveland with a significant number of delegates dominated the discussion, according to five people familiar with the meeting.

“I watched him find that sweet spot of compromise on immigration reform, but then he broke down like a cheap shotgun the minute the right started chewing on his rear end.” — Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), on how Sen. Marco Rubio backed away from his own immigration reform proposal.

Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post who takes on Donald Trump’s “pitchfork populism”:

The blustery billionaire’s “us” is nowhere near a majority of the U.S. electorate, but it might be enough to win him the Republican nomination for president. And even if he falls short, the forces he has loosed will not easily be tamped down. […]

Trump’s audience in Mount Pleasant appeared to be overwhelmingly white. If it mirrored his support base in the polls, it was also older and less educated than the Republican electorate as a whole. A vastly wealthy tycoon who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and lives in a Manhattan penthouse has somehow become the unlikely spokesman for a segment of voters who feel most threatened by what the nation has become. […]

Trump gives unfiltered voice to the anger and frustration some Americans feel. When he says he refuses to be “politically correct,” what he means is that he rejects the traditional constraints of public discourse. He doesn’t chastise his supporters for racism, nativism or religious bigotry; instead, he validates such views, bringing them out of the closet where they had been hiding.

David Ignatius:

But the judgment of history should matter to other Republicans. Historians will look harshly on those who, for reasons of cowardice or opportunism, kept silent when Trump’s tirades put our constitutional values and the safety of Americans at risk — not to mention the political future of the GOP. […]

How will history judge other prominent Republicans who have been onlookers and even cheerleaders as the Trump car wreck has ensued? Can Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) really continue to waffle on anti-Muslim statements? Is this former Supreme Court law clerk really so clueless about the Constitution? How about Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.)? Does he have the backbone to take on the demagogue? All we can say is that historical reputations will be made and lost over the next few weeks.

Matthew Continetti says a Trump nomination would forever destroy the Republican Party. Excellent.

Whether Trump wins or loses a general election against Hillary Clinton is less important in this analysis than the effect his nomination would have on the composition and philosophy of the Republican Party. That effect would be profound.

Political parties are not static. They are born, they grow and change, they shrink and die. There is no Mosaic commandment stipulating that a party must hold to one platform over another, no natural law governing the ideology to which the party subscribes. A party is a reflection of its membership. And when the identities or character of that membership is altered, the party is too. The clearest sign that such a transformation has occurred is in the selection of a party’s nominee. […]

It’s possible we are at the beginning of another political recalibration based on national identity. Already center-right parties in Japan and Russia and Israel have lurched in a nationalist direction. And where nationalists do not enjoy outright control, as in Hungary and Poland, they split the center-right coalition, as in France, the U.K., and Germany. […]

Trump’s nationalism has far more in common with the conservatism of Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, than with the conservatism of Ronald Reagan. Support for a “Muslim ban” is par for the course among European nationalists—by calling for it here all Trump has done is confirm how closely American politics resembles European politics. Reagan was an immigration advocate who signed the 1986 amnesty law.

Indeed, Republican nominees since Ronald Reagan have been internationalist in outlook. They have been pro-free trade and pro-immigration, have supported American leadership in global institutions, and have argued for market solutions and traditional values. A Republican Party under Donald Trump would broadly reject this attitude. It would emphasize protection in all its forms—immigration restriction, trade duties, a fortress America approach to international relations, and activist government to address health care and veterans’ care. Paeans to freedom and opportunity and equality and small government would give way to admonishments to strive, to fight, to win, to profit.

David Wasserman says Trump’s landslide loss to President Hillary Rodham Clinton will not necessarily give the Dems the House: “Given Trump’s unpopularity with the electorate overall, there’s a possibility he could end an era of very close and competitive presidential elections and suffer a landslide defeat (by modern standards). But what would that mean down-ballot? If Trump becomes his own radioactive island, GOP candidates in swing districts would have no choice but to renounce him and run far away for cover.”

“The challenge in assessing their odds for survival in such a scenario is that there hasn’t been a blowout presidential election in a very long time. However, history is on the GOP’s side.”

“Since 1960, there have only been three elections in which one candidate prevailed by a double-digit margin in a presidential race… Despite the predictable outcome of each of the three landslides, there is scant evidence the losing side’s demoralized voters stayed home in huge numbers or bolted their party en masse down-ballot compared to the previous presidential cycle.”

Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012, tells the Washington Post that he thinks Donald Trump will finish fourth in Iowa, “with Cruz winning and Rubio and Carson in second or third, pick ’em.”

“Trump’s entire definition is based around ‘winning.’ So if he doesn’t win Iowa he has lost Iowa and that makes him a…loser, that dreaded word in the Trump lexicon. So Loser Trump comes out of Iowa and goes into New Hampshire. When is the last time the first-place Republican candidate in New Hampshire spent less time campaigning in the state than the second or third place? New Hampshire voters want to be loved and demand great amounts of personal commitment. If you can win by flying in and out and holding a rally, New Hampshire becomes just another Tarmac Campaign State.”

Paul Krugman says the Republican Party made Donald Trump.

The GOP “hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s ‘southern strategy,’ and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes.”

“But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.”

“Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel — especially because these days much of the party’s leadership seems inbred and out of touch. They seem, for example, to imagine that the base supports cuts to Social Security and Medicare, an elite priority that has nothing to do with the reasons working-class whites vote Republican.”

David Dayen on one theory as to why the right wing as risen on the state and local level and in Congress since 2010:

Open up your pundit suggestion box and you can pull out a panoply of rationales for this unprecedented misery: Backlash against an historically anomalous president. Low turnout in midterm elections when left-leaning constituencies stay home in disproportionate numbers. Sophisticated GOP voter-suppression techniques supporting that low-turnout strategy. The post-Citizens United power of Big Money. Democrats fear these combined factors translate to a protracted period of political doom. But what if it all can be explained with simply one fact: America suffered a financial crisis?

That’s one conclusion to infer from a new study by three German researchers on the political aftermath of global financial crises. Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch looked at 20 advanced democracies and more than 800 elections dating back to the 1870s. They found that elections following a financial crisis almost always benefit the far right, resulting in increasing political polarization. In other words, the rise of the Tea Party right could be merely a normal response to a banking meltdown.

The common assumption has been that major crises lift all fringe parties, whether on the left or the right, as people become disillusioned with failed institutions. But in the five-year period after a financial crisis, far-right votes increase by one-third, according to the study, while far-left votes rise only slightly. The most severe financial crises, like the Great Depression or the 2008 crash, produce even greater boosts for the far right. This data was consistent throughout the 140 years of study, even after controlling for different voting systems.