Monday Open Thread [12.14.2015]

IOWA—FOX News: Clinton 50, Sanders 36, O’Malley 5

NATIONAL—NBC/WSJ: Trump 27, Cruz 22, Rubio 15, Carson 11, Bush 7, Fiorina 5, Christie 3, Huckabee 3, Paul 2, Kasich 2
IOWA—FOX News: Cruz 28, Trump 26, Rubio 13, Carson 10, Bush 5, Paul 5, Christie 2, Fiorina 2, Huckabee 1, Kasich 1, Pataki 1
IOWA—DMR/Bloomberg: Cruz 31, Trump 21, Carson 13, Rubio 10, Bush 6, Paul 3, Christie 3, Huckabee 3, Kasich 2, Fiorina 1, Santorum 1
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Adrian Gray Consulting: Trump 21, Rubio 17, Cruz 11, Bush 8, Carson 8, Christie 7, Kasich 6, Paul 4, Fiorina 3, Huckabee 2, Santorum 1, Graham 1

Most interesting: When the sample is narrowed to Republicans who say they are “likely” to vote, Trump’s lead over Rubio shrinks to just 1 point, 19% to 18%.

Rubio makes his move in New Hampshire and Cruz in Iowa.

New York Times on Trump clearing the field for Cruz: “Mr. Trump, in this view, has taken a machete through the brush for Mr. Cruz, allowing him to rise quietly despite his own reputation for bombast, while Mr. Trump absorbs the scrutiny a front-runner attracts and eventually peters out, as Mr. Cruz has wagered.”

“At the same time, in an election season of intense outsider fervor, Mr. Cruz seems to have found, through Mr. Trump, support for his case that his own government experience — railing against leadership in both parties — should be seen as a genuine asset.”

Brokered Convention? Or will be it like 1976?

“That was the year Ronald Reagan rattled insiders with his insurgent campaign against President Gerald R. Ford, with party members arriving at the convention in Kansas City, Mo., without a clear nominee. Backroom deals and delegate swapping secured the nomination for Ford but left him bruised going into the general election, which he lost to Jimmy Carter.”

“Forty years later, the dynamics are somewhat different, but Republican fears are the same. Memos have been circulated about how down-ballot candidates should campaign in the event that Mr. Trump is the nominee, and party elders gathered this week to discuss how a floor fight could play out if the billionaire businessman’s gravity-defying poll numbers propel him through the nominating contests.”

The Hill: “Next summer could see the first brokered convention in four decades. While still unlikely, the idea got a big boost from some Republicans in Congress who are grasping for some way, any way, to deny front-runner Donald Trump the party’s presidential nomination.”

Donald Trump told Fox News that Republicans are “kidding themselves” if they think he won’t secure the GOP nomination. Said Trump: “I say, folks, you know, I’m sorry I did this to you, but you’ve got to get used to it. It’s one of those little problems in life.” He added: “I’m going to win… You know, I’m not one of these other guys that goes down. I don’t go down. I go up.”

“Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta handicapped the GOP race for 90 Democratic donors assembled at a private fundraising event… telling the crowd that he viewed Cruz as the likeliest nominee, followed by Trump, and then Marco Rubio,” Politico reports.

“Podesta’s remarks — which he made sure to say represent his own views, not an official campaign position — came after the real-estate magnate proposed a blanket ban on Muslims entering the United States, and Podesta suggested that the resulting surge of attention being paid to Trump didn’t change his belief that Cruz was the likeliest pick.”

Sen. Ted Cruz “is plotting a protracted nomination fight through Southern states that are playing bigger roles than in prior elections,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“It is a region where his antigovernment, evangelical conservative message plays well, and he has quietly been building a far-reaching political organization to take advantage of that.”

“If it works, Mr. Cruz could become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the party’s decision to hold primaries in 12 states — half in the South—on March 1. A strong showing by one candidate could provide a burst of momentum at a key moment in the race.”

Huffington Post asks whether Mitt Romney will play Kingmaker in New Hampshire by endorsing Rubio or some other Establishment candidate: “The GOP race in New Hampshire, where all of the establishment-backed candidates are making their do-or-die stands has become — for now, at least — a battle for second place among a half-dozen contenders left in the front-runner’s dust. Trump has held a comfortable and consistent lead in New Hampshire since July. But a Suffolk poll last month showed that if Romney himself were a candidate, he would have a 2-to-1 lead over Trump in New Hampshire — where the former Massachusetts governor maintains a lakeside home and cruised to an easy victory in the 2012 primary.

“If Romney were to take that goodwill and back one of the establishment-friendly GOP contenders, Republican powerbrokers agree, it would upend the race’s dynamic and, in turn, reverberate far beyond the Granite State. But it’s less clear which candidate Romney would be inclined to get behind.”

A new Gallup survey finds Donald Trump vies with Hillary Clinton as the presidential race’s best-known candidate, but he is by far the least-liked of the field, with 59% viewing him unfavorably and 32% favorably, yielding a net favorable score of -27.

John Dickerson on the coming Cruz v. Trump fight:

Cruz is trying to avoid a fight. He doesn’t want to alienate Trump’s voters, who he thinks will largely come his way eventually. (Polls show there is something to this.) He’s also hoping to reframe all inevitable future conflict between the two of them as a gift to the GOP establishment. He’s battling Trump to be the anti-establishment tribune, so this is both an attack and a shield. He’s not going to give in to the establishment the way the Donald is by getting into a public fight. Should Trump continue to attack Cruz, the senator hopes it will be seen as a gift to the establishment.

The strategy is one Cruz articulated in that same fundraiser. “My approach, much to the frustration of media, is to bear-hug both of them and smother them with love,” Cruz said. “I believe that gravity will bring both of those candidates down. I think the lion share of their supporters will come to us.” Cruz will lay down like a lamb to get what’s coming to the lion.

In sticking to this strategy, Cruz has demonstrated a protracted display of tactical restraint. He has relentlessly embraced Trump and avoided opportunities to attack him. Normally, Cruz is not shy about calling out apostates. He’s done it on the Senate floor and at countless conservative gatherings. He’s made a career of it. Were he running against Sen. Trump and not Front-Runner With Lots of Money Trump, Cruz, it’s not hard to imagine, would be fileting Trump for his shifting positions on issues from taxes to abortion. (He’s doing a version of that now to Sen. Marco Rubio.) Cruz also likes to debate, and when he does, he doesn’t simply speak to the beauty of his arguments alone. He also dismantles the positions and questions the motivations of his opponents.

Meanwhile, Vox’s Andrew Prokop says Marco Rubio’s strategy is baffling.

There’s something odd about Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign: He hasn’t been doing all that much, er, campaigning in the early states.

Unlike most recent presidential nomination winners, who have invested serious time and effort into campaigning and building organizations in at least one of either Iowa or New Hampshire, Rubio has taken a positively relaxed approach to both. He doesn’t show up very often, doesn’t do much campaigning when he is around, and doesn’t seem to be building very impressive field operations.

And it’s raising eyebrows. James Pindell of the Boston Globe wrote last week that Rubio’s New Hampshire surge was “riddled with doubts,” and that GOP insiders are bemoaning his “lack of staff” and “activity.” National Review’s Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson reported Wednesday that Rubio’s “weak ground game” was angering Iowa Republicans. And the New Hampshire Union Leader wrote an editorial headlined, “Marco? Marco? Where’s Rubio?”

For a candidate who’s so often deemed “The Republican Barack Obama,” it sure seems like Rubio has missed some key lessons from the president’s historic 2008 campaign. And this isn’t good optics for a candidate who’s already been criticized (somewhat unfairly) for missing lots of Senate votes, either.

He’s like some rich kid who expects everything to just fall into his lap, because so far it has.

Ed Kilgore says the GOP Establishment is the gang that couldn’t conspire straight.

[After 2014,] the party elders appeared to have finally gained the upper hand in their battle with angry tea-party conservatives. They largely avoided the rash of primary defeats to unelectable wingnuts that cost them the Senate in 2010 and 2012, and even got candidates to attend special training sessions where they learned not to stumble into stupid comments about things like “legitimate rape.” The RNC’s 2013 “autopsy report” on the 2012 presidential loss that stressed the demographic importance of not offending Latinos, women, and young people had become the conventional wisdom. And in sharp contrast to 2012, it appeared the party would have a large and deep 2016 presidential field, led by candidates with impressive federal and state experience like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and John Kasich.

Fast-forward to the waning days of 2015 and of the invisible primary before the presidential nominating process gets very real and very fast. Far from debating the best vehicle for minority outreach, the GOP presidential field is being driven into a nativist, Islamophobic frenzy by a candidate nobody thought would even run. Establishment favorite Jeb Bush appears to be trying to decide whether to crawl off to (politically) die or instead use his super-pac to damage every other candidate not named Donald Trump in order to lift himself above a desolate landscape. The most viable alternative to Trump at present may be a harshly right-wing freshman senator despised by his colleagues who is stopping just short of embracing the entire Trump agenda.

It’s all gotten so bad that Republican pooh-bahs (including RNC chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) convened a “secret” dinner to plot a strategy to block Trump at the convention if his success continues into the voting phase of the nomination contest. This development was instantly leaked to the Washington Post, presumably by someone believing it would send a “help’s on the way!” message to Republicans worried about a party veering out of control.

Except of course, the meeting was leaked, prompting outrage from Trump, Carson and Paul. Nice work.

Matthew Yglesias says Establishment Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for Trump.

Republican leaders sweated as the Summer of Trump became the Autumn of Trump, and now are in full panic as we enter the Winter of Trump. But this year of Trump is the direct result of their own preferred political strategy — by refusing to tack to the center on either taxes or immigration, they are left with an amped-up form of white identity politics as the preferred path to a majority.

On one level, yes, Trump is an outlier. BuzzFeed’s editor in chief sent a memo to his staff temporarily suspending the conventions of View From Nowhere journalism to say it’s perfectly okay to call Trump a “mendacious racist” because “there’s nothing partisan about accurately describing Donald Trump.”

Smith’s point is true in the most literal possible sense. Republican Party leaders would be angry if you called Jeb Bush’s tax cut pitch dishonest but at this point have no qualms about the media bashing Trump — a figure they fear and can’t control. But while Trump is now despised by DC conservative leaders, Trumpism reflects a deeply mainstream tendency within conservatism movement thinking.

As Brian Beutler put it in July, Trump is frightening Republicans in part because he’s “showing them what it takes” to run and win as the party of disaffected white people in an increasingly nonwhite country. They don’t like what they see, but as a movement they’ve committed to the kind of political strategy that he was pursuing — a strategy built around the notion that the 2012 election featured a pile of “missing” white voters who could be activated to push the GOP to victory without it needing to do anything to broaden its demographic appeal.

When this idea was initially being debated inside right-of-center circles, the smartest conservative thinkers specifically warned that attempting the “missing white voter” strategy without meaningful gestures of economic moderation would lead to something ugly. There has been no meaningful move to the center on economics, and — as predicted — the results are ugly.

Republicans always like to say President Obama is the most divisive President in all history. Really? Project much? Nancy LaTourneau:

Karl [Rove] is the one who suggested that it is a good strategy to go after your opponent’s strongest point. I’ve been thinking about that as we watch Republicans:

* Insist that we blame all Muslims for the actions of the radical few,
* Consider the idea of rounding up 11 million undocumented people and deport them,
* Blame BlackLivesMatter for a made-up “war on cops,”
* Spread lies about Planned Parenthood selling “baby parts” and fail to acknowledge that it led to a shooting spree at a clinic in Colorado Springs, and
* Attend rallies with people who suggest that homosexuals should be killed.

Those are simply a few of the highlights we’ve witnessed so far during this 2016 presidential primary. It all reminds me of another Rovian strategy the Republican Party has embraced…one that Steve Benen documented so thoroughly back when he was writing at the Washington Monthly:

Karl Rove has a special, some might call it “pathological,” quality as a political pundit. More than anyone I’ve ever seen or heard of, Rove identifies some of his own ugliest, most malicious, most pernicious qualities, and then projects them onto those he hates most.

In other words, the people who are accusing President Obama of being divisive are doing everything they can to divide us.

The only things the President has done to be “divisive” in Republican eyes is be black and a Democrat.