Friday Open Thread [12.18.2015]

First Read: “While our new NBC/WSJ poll shows that national security/terrorism has vaulted to become the country’s No. 1 issue, there is still a significant divide by party. According to the poll, 58% of Republicans say national security/terrorism is the top concern, versus 12% who say the economy/jobs. But among Democrats, it’s 33% economy/jobs, 26% national security/terrorism. Just something to consider as the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries continue to play out.”

Sahil Kapur: “The big question about Donald Trump is not—as an endless stream of false predictions for months would have it—will he fade in the 2016 presidential race, but whether Americans who tell pollsters they support him actually show up to vote in Republican caucuses and primaries.”

“Put another way: are past Republican voters a true measure of the current primary electorate or will Trump bring in new voters with his unconventional brand of politically incorrect nativism and bravado?”

David Axelrod says steering clear of Mein Fuhrer Trump helps you: “As The Donald has noted, those who have launched direct attacks on Trump have generally fared badly… Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the three contenders who have shown some positive movement in recent polls have been those who have tried to steer clear of Trump — Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie.”

Nate Silver on how Trump’s controversies help him: “The interesting thing, as we’ve pointed out before, is that a candidate can potentially gain in the polls in the short term by increasing his media coverage, even if he potentially hurts his favorability rating. Trump seems to realize this. So far in December — a month in which, among other things, he’s proposed to ban Muslims from entering the United States — he’s been the subject of 70 percent of media coverage of the Republican race, even higher than his long-term average of 54 percent. According to the regression, that extra media coverage is worth about 8 percentage points in the polls: almost exactly how much Trump has gained in national polls since the month began and enough to put him in the mid-30s in the polling average instead of the high 20s.”

Is Marc Rubio still the Establishment’s choice?

“And if the two frontrunners hugged it out, it’s hard to see how the debate changed the trajectory of the race as we head into a two-week hiatus for Christmas and New Year’s. If anything, the uncertainty in the race on the establishment side of the aisle is what’s new. Between a strong Christie, the immigration pile on of Rubio and Jeb’s new found life trolling Trump, it’s actually not as clear as it was 48 hours ago that Rubio is definitely going to be the establishment’s candidate. He’s still the favorite for that lane, but Christie and Bush have life.”

Cruz and Rubio expose a rift in the GOP over foreign policy: “Cruz, playing the role of foreign policy realist, said that President Obama had left America less secure by pushing for the ouster of Arab dictators, including Assad, whom Obama insists must leave power… Rubio’s full-throated support for human rights and democracy echoes, to many Republican ears, Bush’s grandiose, transform-the-Middle-East philosophy.”

Josh Marshall on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 chances:

“If he was going to do it he’d be picking up speed now. But it’s actually Hillary who has been increasing her lead. That’s shown up in the public polls and it’s also shown up in our Insight polls, which are primarily of TPM readers. So I would say his chances of winning the nomination seem remote. But I think there are other things he’s accomplishing short of the getting nominated.

Brian Beutler:

Whether or not the two attacks reflect an increase in the signal level of international jihadi terrorism, Republicans have decided that radical steps must be taken domestically to control and limit the Muslim population—and that the attacks themselves were the product not of blowback and conditions abroad, but of insufficient presidential resolve. […]

The irony, though, is that beyond the xenophobic panic now gripping the Republican Party, the candidates are putting forth no materially different strategic approaches to combating jihadist organizations like the Islamic State. This odd fact raises the crucial but uncomfortable question of what, beyond that xenophobic panic, Republicans are offering voters as a departure from the national-security status quo. […]

Fear-mongering and waving the bloody shirt are obviously nothing new to the Republican Party. They used both to great effect to preserve their control of government and foreign policy in the middle years of the Bush presidency. But fear-mongering for the sake of political power alone is a mostly untested approach, and may prove of little effect in the general election against the candidate most trusted to fight terrorism, who happens to be articulating the same vision.

The candidate most trust to fight terrorism? Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Donald Trump sounds like someone I could vote for here, if I forget about the racism, bigotry and fascism:

“We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that, frankly, if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems — our airports and all the other problems we have — we would have been a lot better off, I can tell you that right now.

We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East — we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away — and for what? It’s not like we had victory. It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the 4 trillion dollars or 5 trillion dollars. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!”

Politico’s Nick Gass reports on an interesting new poll which suggests substantial party unity among Democratic registered voters:

According to the results of the latest national Monmouth University poll out Wednesday, 59 percent of those backing Sanders for the nomination said they would be enthusiastic or satisfied with Clinton as their party’s standard bearer next November. Overall, 80 percent of Democratic voters would be fine with Clinton as their nominee, while 11 percent said they would be dissatisfied and 5 percent said they would be upset.

Andrew Prokop of Vox says the nomination of Donald Trump [or Ted Cruz] would likely be an utter disaster for the GOP.

It’s a debacle for Republicans that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of this year. Yet it’s happened so slowly, and so gradually, that the reaction from GOP elites still appears oddly muted. Even as summer stretched into fall, they kept comforting themselves by saying that it’s still early — accurately pointing to the fact that early polls have frequently been wrong in the past, and that outsider candidates like Trump have lost in the past.

Yet Tuesday night’s debate was the final GOP debate of 2015 and could well be the year’s last major campaign event. Before you know it, Christmas will be here, and New Year’s will follow soon afterward. And then we’re in January, and there’s just one month before voting begins in Iowa on February 1. So it’s definitely time for the Republican establishment to hit the panic button.

But it’s also not clear what, exactly, elites can do at this point. Their traditional tools seem to be ineffective against both Trump and Cruz — and any organized attempt to stop them could just backfire further.

Let’s be clear on the political stakes here. It is not impossible that Trump or Cruz could win a general election. But there’s ample reason to believe that a Trump or Cruz nomination makes all of the following far more likely:

* Sweeping electoral defeat for Republicans, for the presidency and in the Senate at least (some Democrats have even suggested to me that the House could be put in play)

* Either a liberal takeover of the Supreme Court or a missed chance for conservatives to pad their majority (since four of the court’s nine justices will be older than 80 when the next president is inaugurated)

* A tarnishing of the GOP’s image among Hispanics that will last a very long time. (This is obviously true for Trump, but Cruz is also far further to the right on immigration than any modern GOP nominee.)

With so many other options available, nominating either Trump or Cruz would be a tremendous risk to take for a party that has any interest in winning.