Saturday Open Thread [1.16.2016]

Josh Green points to the crosstabs from the new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll in Iowa for the key to the Caucus:

Definitely caucusing: Clinton 45%, Sanders 36%
Probably caucusing: Sanders 47%, Clinton 37%.

That poll showed a Clinton lead of 42-40. A similar poll by NBC/Survey Monkey shows this:

So for in order for Sanders to win, his young first time probably voters need to show up. It happened in 2008. It did not happen in 2004.

A pretty good ad by Jeb Bush. It’s just too bad it is too late and Jeb Bush is a horrible candidate way past his time to run, which would have been in 2000, if only had had won in 1994. But he didn’t, so his brother took his place in 2000, was disastrous, meaning he could not possibly run as his immediate successor in 2008, meaning he had to wait a full 16 years past his time. It’s sad, but sometimes that’s the breaks.

Fascism. You know, Donald, there have been other “leaders” who have had kids sing about crushing their enemies.

A new Gallup survey finds that Democrats really hate Donald Trump. He “has by far the worst image of any major Republican candidate among Democrats and independents.” Trump has a net favorable rating of -70 among Democrats. The next GOP candidates rated most negatively among Democrats are Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee, with net favorable ratings of -37 and -34, respectively. You see, that is the missing element that the media and some scaredy-cat Democrats are missing here, but the GOP Establishment knows it and why they are scared to death. And that missing element is that Donald Trump will have negative coattails. He will motivate Democrats to vote, probably in numbers exceeding what came out for Obama in 2008.

The National Review says South Carolina is wide open: “Unlike Iowa and New Hampshire, where a consensus among insiders has started to cement projecting Cruz and Trump victories, South Carolina remains an electoral enigma. The Palmetto State is more unpredictable than in past cycles due to a host of factors, including a larger and more ideologically fragmented field.”

“But Republicans say four candidates have both the money and organization to survive until the February 20 primary, and all four have competitive claims in the state: Trump sits atop the polls; Cruz has the most enthusiastic followers; Rubio boasts the most experienced organization; and Bush enjoys the deepest reservoir of donor loyalty. Yet none possess traditional x-factors, such as deep southern roots or military experience, that would make them a natural favorite.”

Jonathan Chait asks if Republicans have given up on fighting Trump: “Part of it is that Trump has gotten better, more polished. His cartoonish facial gestures come less frequently. He is less outrageous (and less funny). He seems to control his tone more effectively. But mainly, Republicans have decided to start treating him as a regular candidate and a member of their party in good standing, rather than an imposter who has hijacked it on a lark.”

Trump has been relying on the Bandwagon Effect. And it is how he will lose.

Brendan Nyhan: “Donald Trump misses no opportunity to remind us that he’s ahead in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination… But he may also be trying to generate a bandwagon effect, a well-documented phenomenon in political science but one that may leave him vulnerable to future disruptions.”

“Research shows that expectations of success are strongly associated with which candidates people support in primaries, especially among less informed voters. In this way, Mr. Trump’s initial success may have helped attract more support, creating a positive feedback dynamic that helped fuel his monthslong ascent in the polls. At this point, his lead in the polls has almost become a rationale for his campaign.”

“But if those expectations of success change as a result of, say, a surprising primary or caucus defeat, Mr. Trump’s supporters may shift their support to another candidate.”

First Read: “Turning to the Democratic race, Sunday night brings us the final Dem debate before the Iowa caucuses… and it promises to be a doozy. Not only do we have a neck-and-neck race in Iowa, but we have a true fight over the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”

“Do Democrats go with the candidate essentially running on continuity with President Obama (Hillary Clinton), or do they back the candidate promising revolution (Bernie Sanders)? Should their nominee be another Clinton? Or should it be a self-avowed democratic socialist who hasn’t been a member of the party until now? We’ve spent so much time looking at the establishment-vs.-insurgent divide inside the Republican Party, but don’t dismiss the equally compelling fight within the Democratic Party over where it should be entering Year 8 of the Obama presidency.”

Jonathan Cohn:

This isn’t to say a Clinton and Sanders administration would be devoid of meaningful distinctions over policy and politics — or that spirited debates over substance lack value. Sanders seems more inclined to appoint more aggressive watchdogs in the agencies regulating the financial industry, for example, while investing more political resources into building the Democratic Party at the grassroots. On foreign policy, where presidents have so much unilateral power, their substantive differences could be even more consequential. But even on national security, the gap separating Clinton and Sanders simply doesn’t compare in scale to the gulf that would divide either Democrat from leaders in the Republican Party. […] Here in 2016, it’s another story altogether. Barring a crisis that turns the political world upside down, it will be the sharp divergence between Democrats and Republicans, not the comparatively mild disagreements among Democrats, on which history turns in the next four years.

Philip Rucker and Robert Costa:

As the presidential primary moves into a more urgent and combative phase, there is growing acceptance among Republicans, including the Washington and financial elite, that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are the two candidates most likely to become the party’s nominee.

Their commanding performances at the sixth debate — along with their continued dominance in national and early state polls — has solidified the conclusion of many Republicans that the campaign is becoming a two-person contest.

Brian Beutler with more on the healthcare debate between Sanders and Clinton:

Sanders is going to have a harder time than he thinks picking a fight with Hillary over single payer, despite the concept’s popularity among rank and file Democrats. The difficulty enacting, then implementing Obamacare made a lasting impression on people at all levels of the party. Many of those same people like Obama quite a lot, are proud of Obamacare, and don’t want to devote themselves to a quixotic project of repealing and replacing it, even if it’s with a health system that’s superior to Obamacare in the abstract.

If Sanders proposes expanding Medicare to everybody (eliminating the private insurance system) without intervening steps, it’ll be perfectly fair for Clinton to point out that when Obamacare led to the cancelation of a tiny percentage of health plans nationwide, it was a political disaster, which the administration was forced to take dubious steps to mitigate. (Chelsea Clinton made an exaggerated and misleading version of this argument this week.) If Sanders instead proposes Medicare-for-all with a private market option, I imagine he’d have to be prepared to spend away a bunch of the savings a straight single-payer system would generate.

The way for Sanders to avoid these pitfalls is as it was back in 2009: propose a Medicare-powered public insurance option that consumers under 65 can buy into, and that’s robust enough that consumers will flock to it, while the private market adapts or withers on the vine over time. But if Sanders proposed something like that, I don’t think he and Clinton would have much to fight about anymore. The political beauty of the public option was its power to unite the incrementalists and the single-payer people in consensus. I don’t see why that appeal doesn’t still exist.