Friday Open Thread [2.19.16]

SOUTH CAROLINA—NBC/WSJ/Marist–Trump 28, Cruz 23, Rubio 15, Bush 13, Kasich 9, Carson 9
SOUTH CAROLINA—NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 60, Sanders 32
NATIONAL—FOX News–Trump 36, Cruz 19, Rubio 15, Carson 9, Bush 9, Kasich 8
NATIONAL—FOX News–Clinton 44, Sanders 47
NATIONAL—NBC News/WSJ–Clinton 53, Sanders 42
NATIONAL—CBS News–Trump 35, Cruz 18, Rubio 12, Kasich 11, Carson 6, Bush 4
NATIONAL—CBS News–Clinton 47, Sanders 39
SOUTH CAROLINA—Bloomberg–Clinton 53, Sanders 31
SOUTH CAROLINA—Monmouth–Clinton 59, Sanders 30
SOUTH CAROLINA—FOX News–Trump 32, Cruz 19, Rubio 15, Bush 9, Carson 9, Kasich 6
SOUTH CAROLINA—FOX News–Clinton 56, Sanders 28
SOUTH CAROLINA—ARG–Clinton 61, Sanders 32
SOUTH CAROLINA—ARG–Trump 34, Rubio 22, Kasich 14, Cruz 13, Bush 9, Carson 4
SOUTH CAROLINA—Harper–Trump 29, Cruz 17, Rubio 15, Bush 14, Kasich 13, Carson 8
SOUTH CAROLINA—SC House GOP–Trump 34, Cruz 18, Rubio 16, Bush 14, Kasich 9, Carson 5
NEVADA—Gravis–Clinton 53, Sanders 47
NEVADA—Gravis–Trump 39, Cruz 23, Rubio 19, Kasich 9, Carson 5, Bush 5

Chris Mooney on the Surprising Brain Differences Between Democrats and Republicans:

The past two weeks have seen not one but two studies published in scientific journals on the biological underpinnings of political ideology. And these studies go straight at the role of genes and the brain in shaping our views, and even our votes.

First, in the American Journal of Political Science, a team of researchers including Peter Hatemi of Penn State University and Rose McDermott of Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated tendencies to experience fear—tendencies that vary from person to person, partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes—and our political beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott carefully emphasizes, that does not mean that every conservative has a high fear disposition. “It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative,” as she puts it.

I interviewed the paper’s lead author, Peter Hatemi, about his research for my 2012 book The Republican Brain. Hatemi is both a political scientist and also a microbiologist, and as he stressed to me, “nothing is all genes, or all environment.” These forces combine to make us who we are, in incredibly intricate ways.

And if Hatemi’s and McDermott’s research blows your mind, get this: Darren Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, first performed brain scans on 82 people participating in a risky gambling task, one in which holding out for more money increases your possible rewards, but also your possible losses. Later, cross-referencing the findings with the participants’ publicly available political party registration information, Schreiber noticed something astonishing: Republicans, when they took the same gambling risk, were activating a different part of the brain than Democrats.

Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain’s threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula, involved in internal monitoring of one’s feelings. Amazingly, Schreiber and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the study subjects’ political party choices—considerably better, they note, than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation based on the affiliation of your parents.

Martin Longman on what happens when the Anti-Trump movement fails:

There’s no doubt that there’s a full-court press going on right now to try to derail Trump’s candidacy, but these people and organizations would be nothing without the Republican Party. Assuming they fail in their efforts to stop The Donald, the question is, how long will it be before they come to the Real Estate Tycoon on bended knee and offer to kiss his huge ring?

I expect this is something Trump’s ego would enjoy very much and he’d probably have little trouble being magnanimous. In exchange for a promise of complete fealty in the future, Karl Rove and the Wall Street Journal and the National Review would be forgiven for past sins and enlisted into the new Borg.

Of course, at that point, they would cease to serve any movement. They would serve only the great leader and his whims. Since they have no real alternative, what else could they do?

Longman also says the era of limited government is over:

As George W. Bush understood, and Vox explains, limited government just isn’t very popular. This is something that Donald Trump also understands:

“Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid. And we can’t do that. And it’s not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to be cut.”

When Republican governors try to adhere to their no-tax pledges without angering the people with corresponding cuts, you get the kind of fuzzy math and budget deficits that are now being reckoned with in Louisiana. […] [I]f limited government was politically palatable, Jindal wouldn’t have borrowed all that money to maintain services.

Government services are popular. Not providing them is not popular.

Brian Beutler wonders if Mitch McConnell blew it:

How could McConnell, whose central purpose for the past decade has been to become majority leader, draft his members into a fight that might knock his party into the minority? Zoom out enough, and you can see the logic.

Start by distinguishing between political and ideological objectives. The ideological argument for foreclosing confirmation at the outset is obvious and incontestable. If Obama’s nominee is confirmed, Scalia’s seat—and along with it the ideological bearing of the full Court—will fall into liberal hands. Waiting Obama out keeps hope alive for conservatives that a Republican will win the presidency and restore the prior balance. In a political vacuum, the impulse to fight rather than surrender makes perfect sense.

Even outside a political vacuum, McConnell’s red(dish) line makes some sense. In the near-term, by telegraphing his intention to deny Obama’s nominee a fair hearing, he shields vulnerable members from pressure to compromise, and thus from the threat of right-wing primary challenges.

But beyond the near term, this political logic collapses. If the line does hold, McConnell will have effectively nationalized these same Senate races—races Republicans need to win to preserve their majority—and provoked a turnout-driven crisis in a presidential election. Republicans have an existential interest in keeping turnout low, but Democrats will use the Senate’s obstinacy and the threat of another arch-conservative justice to bring out voters in November. And if Republicans lose the presidency, of course, they don’t just lose Scalia’s seat, but possibly one or two more.

Frank Rich:

Obama could inflict more damage on [Ohio Republican Senator Rob] Portman and other vulnerable Senate incumbents — and on the GOP’s national ticket — by nominating a qualified justice who by definition will further highlight the party’s knee-jerk hostility toward immigrants, women, black people, gay individuals, and Hispanics. James Hohmann of the Post cites the potential nominee Monica Márquez, the first Latina and first openly gay justice of the Colorado Supreme Court. Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast proposes Tino Cuellar, an associate justice in the California Supreme Court who was born in Mexico and became a naturalized citizen before earning degrees at Harvard, Yale Law, and Stanford. Cuellar’s wife, Lucy Koh, is another contender: America’s first female Korean-American district judge, confirmed by a 90-to-0 vote in the Senate when Obama nominated her for the post in 2010 but sure to be rejected now by the same Republican senators who voted for her then.

How exactly does this end well for the GOP in an election year? By refusing to act on the Scalia vacancy, the party will once again brand itself as the party of obstructionism, government dysfunction, and animosity toward the growing majority of Americans who do not fit its predominantly white male demographic.

Who has the most to lose in South Carolina? “It is not yet clear which Republican presidential candidate will emerge from Saturday’s South Carolina primary with the biggest boost. But it is becoming increasingly apparent which two would suffer most from a disappointing performance,” the New York Times reports.

“South Carolina will render a brutal and perhaps final verdict on Jeb Bush’s campaign if he does not at least finish close to Sen. Marco Rubio… Among the hard-line conservatives in the race, Sen. Ted Cruz will face new questions about the potential of his campaign if he is unable to broaden his appeal and continues to allow Donald Trump, the heavy favorite here, to cut into his support from evangelical Christians.”

Could Rubio and Bush push Kasich out of the race? Amy Walter: “What Rubio needs more than anything, however, is a solid victory over his “establishment” rivals Jeb Bush and John Kasich. A solid showing in South Carolina by Rubio would put intense pressure on both, but especially Bush, to drop out. Should Rubio fail to get past Bush by a significant margin it would suggest that: 1. endorsements are meaningless these days; and 2. Rubio has deeper, more fundamental problems than just Bush and Kasich standing in his way.”

Tim Alberta: “To be clear: Rubio’s expectations are rightfully high here not just because he has these three influential state Republicans in his corner, but because his campaign has deep roots in South Carolina and always viewed it as Rubio’s best chance to score an early-state victory.”

Donald Trump was caught in a lie on live television.

“For months, Donald Trump has claimed that he opposed the Iraq War before the invasion began — as an example of his great judgment on foreign policy issues,” BuzzFeed reports. “But in a 2002 interview with Howard Stern, Donald Trump said he supported an Iraq invasion.”

Watch him squirm on CNN when confronted with his lies.

John Fund on the gap between insiders and voters: “One factor that has sustained and elevated the rise of Trump and Sanders is a gap between what political insiders think and the views of the broader electorate. Insiders in both parties believe Trump would be a weak general-election candidate. For example, the Quinnipiac poll shows him winning only 17 percent of Hispanics, a full ten points below Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing. Ditto with Bernie Sanders. Despite a more favorable attitude toward socialism among young people, the general public is not likely to warm to a radical once the implications of his views are known. Remember, Bernie hasn’t had a single negative ad run against him from the right.”

“But the general public doesn’t share the insider view. In the Quinnipiac poll, a full 78 percent of Republicans believe Donald Trump “would have a good chance” of winning in November. Among Democrats, 69 percent believe the same thing about Bernie Sanders.”

And boy are both in for a shock.

Steve Benen on why Trump’s fight with the Pope matters. A presidential candidate is fighting with the Pope. What a time to be alive.

I saw some suggestions yesterday that this might be politically problematic for Trump, ahead in the polls with just one day remaining before the South Carolina primary. The Republican frontrunner has picked plenty of fights over the last several months, but maybe an offensive against the pope will cost Trump votes?

It’s possible, but I wouldn’t count on it. At least in the short term, South Carolina Republicans are dominated by evangelical Protestants, who have little use for Francis’ thoughts on immigration.

What’s more, from a slightly broader perspective, it’s easy to imagine yesterday’s back and forth actually helping Trump: it kept him in the spotlight the day after the state Republican establishment rallied behind Marco Rubio, knocking the senator off front pages, and it reminded far-right voters in South Carolina that Trump is an unyielding supporter of a border wall, a controversial position they support.

Zach Beaukamp agrees, it may not matter:

We’ve known well before Kaczynski and McDermott’s scoop that Trump was lying about his public opposition to the Iraq war; fact checker after fact checker looked into it and found zero evidence that it actually happened. As The Atlantic’s James Fallows put it, in a piece written four days before the Buzzfeed audio discovery: “Trump. Is. Lying. About. Having. Publicly. Opposed. The. Iraq. War.”

Trump has been lying throughout the campaign, both about his issues and his own past record. But the problem is that Trump can just get away with brazenly lying. By virtue of his status in the polls, news outlets are forced to give Trump airtime, and it is very hard to disprove a dedicated serial liar on air if they just commit to their falsehoods. My colleague Dylan Matthews summed up this dynamic well:

Producers know that when you put someone who’s likely to spew falsehoods and who’s impervious to all attempts to correct them on the air, that person is going to get a lot of opportunities to repeat his falsehoods, and it’ll be very hard if not impossible to debunk him. Viewers will get a healthy sampling of lies, and undoing that damage in the space allowed will be nigh impossible.

Matthews was writing in November, but so far nothing has changed. Trump hasn’t stopped lying, and there’s no evidence that negative press coverage has damaged his campaign.

So while Kaczynski and McDermott have done an extraordinary job finding hard evidence that Trump supported the Iraq, there’s a very good chance it won’t end up mattering. It’s always possible, of course, that this could be the lie that voters finally take notice of. But it would be surprising indeed if Trump finally lost Republican voters because he supported George W. Bush’s war.

Here is a thought: if you know someone is going to lie, don’t give them airtime. I know, I know, that would require an ethical media interested not in ratings but in the public good.

Rick Klein: “Ted Cruz isn’t making friends. That’s no headline – though that doesn’t take away from the epic press conference he held Wednesday to try to refocus scattered storylines that are threatening his campaign. Cruz laid out the case against his opponents like a prosecutor, even urging Donald Trump to file his lawsuit so Cruz could take his deposition personally. Cruz isn’t alone in arguing that Trump isn’t a true conservative. That may not ultimately matter, if South Carolina polls are to be believed.”

“But Cruz, once again, is showing an inclination to meet Trump’s showmanship with his own brand of the same. If he and Trump wind up being among the finalists for the nomination, all their world’s a stage, and the Donald may have met a worthy match.”

First Read: “Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have plenty on the line here in Nevada. A Clinton loss — in a state where she held the early organizational and demographic advantages — would launch another week’s worth of negative headlines for her campaign, hardly the momentum it wants going into South Carolina.”

“So it would be painful loss. But as we wrote earlier this week, a Sanders loss could even be more impactful because it would set up Hillary Clinton to start running the table over the next two weeks in South Carolina and the southern March 1 states. And if that’s the case, come March 2, she might have a delegate lead that’s impossible to catch up to given the proportional nature of all of the Democratic races. So Sanders needs a win to keep the pressure on Clinton, and Clinton needs a win to finally start pulling away.”