Saturday Open Thread [2.27.16]

NATIONAL–NBC News/Survey Monkey–Clinton 52, Sanders 41
NATIONAL–NBC News/Survey Monkey–Trump 39, Rubio 21, Cruz 19, Carson 8, Kasich 8
VIRGINIA—Roanoke College–Trump 38, Cruz 15, Rubio 13, Kasich 8, Carson 8
VIRGINIA—Roanoke College–Clinton 50, Sanders 33
FLORIDA—Quinnipiac–Clinton 59, Sanders 33
MICHIGAN—Target Insyght–Trump 41, Rubio 17, Cruz 14, Kasich 12, Carson 8
ILLINOIS—WeAskAmerica–Trump 38, Rubio 21, Cruz 16, Kasich 9, Carson 4
ILLINOIS—WeAskAmerica–Clinton 57, Sanders 28
SOUTH CAROLINA—Emerson–Clinton 60, Sanders 37
SOUTH CAROLINA—Clemson–Clinton 64, Sanders 14
ALABAMA—Opinion Savvy–Trump 36, Rubio 23, Cruz 16, Carson 11, Kasich 8

Rich Lowry: “The anti-Trump onslaught is coming. Perhaps within weeks. Just not necessarily from Republicans. Almost as soon as Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee — which may be as early as March 15 — Democrats will surely start to churn out their negative ads. They will attack Trump’s credentials as a tribune of the little guy… they will use decades-worth of controversial statements to portray him as racist and sexist.

“This will all be in the tradition of the early Democratic ad campaigns that successfully knee-capped Republican nominees in 1996 and 2012 (Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, respectively). A Democratic campaign to disqualify Trump would seek to make his unfavorable rating (already 60 percent with the general public) not merely alarming, but completely radioactive.”

“Conservative donors have engaged a major GOP consulting firm in Florida to research the feasibility of mounting a late, independent run for president amid growing fears that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination,” Politico reports.

Senator Lindsey Graham had some of the best lines from last night’s Press Club Dinner. From NBC News:

Sen. Lindsey Graham mocked all of his former rivals in the Republican race to replace President Barack Obama on Thursday night, joking that his “party has gone batshit crazy.”

Speaking at the Washington Press Club Foundation Dinner, Graham had the harshest words for Sen. Ted Cruz. “If you kill Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you,” he quipped.

Ryan Lizza: “The historic nature of a Trump victory can hardly be overstated. He could very well stand at a lectern in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention, in July, accepting the nomination of a party whose top elected officials—governors, congressmen, and senators—have either refused to support him or actively opposed his nomination. Yes, there are some cracks. This week, two House members endorsed Trump, and other elected officials [like Christie and LePage, who endorsed Trump after Lizza’s piece] will surely jump aboard, especially those representing Trump strongholds.”

“But Trump represents such a radical break with the Republican consensus on important issues that a significant segment of the Party will never back him.”

First Read now sees only two possible outcomes for the Republican presidential race: 1) Donald Trump will be the nominee or 2) A contested convention.

Trump currently has a 64-delegate lead over his nearest competition: Trump 81, Cruz 17, Rubio 17, Kasich 8, Carson 5

Trump could emerge with 100-plus delegate lead after Super Tuesday: Trump 289, Rubio 184, Cruz 154, Kasich 53, Carson 41 (assuming a Trump 35%, Rubio 28%, Cruz 23%, Kasich 8%, Carson 6% proportional split of delegates)

If Trump win Florida and Ohio, he’s more than halfway to nomination: And if Trump wins the winner-take-all states of Florida and Ohio on March 15, he’s at 650 delegates — more than half of the 1,237 needed to win the GOP nomination (That assumes Trump wins 35% of the delegates up for grabs in the March 5-12 contests, as well as 35% of the proportional states on March 15.) Trump 650, Rubio 340, Cruz 278.

If Rubio wins Florida and Ohio, he’ll have a small lead over Trump: But if Rubio wins winner-take-all Florida AND Ohio, Rubio emerges with a *slight* overall delegate lead: Rubio 505, Trump 485, Cruz 278.

If Kasich wins Ohio, Trump will have slight lead: But if Kasich wins Ohio and Rubio wins Florida, it’s Trump 485, Rubio 439, Cruz 278, Kasich 148

Nate Silver says Chris Christie’s endorsement of Trump makes sense.

My view is that it’s not quite as shocking as it might seem. We noticed during the campaign that Christie was strangely reluctant to go after Trump, even after Trump spread mistruths about Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the Sept. 11 terror attacks. This seemed to us like a poor strategic choice for Christie, whose campaign slogan was “telling it like it is” and whose alpha-male personality gave him the chance to break out of the “establishment lane” and compete for Trump voters.

There’s a lot that ties Christie and Trump together, however. Christie and Trump have a close personal relationship. Trump has long done business in Atlantic City and is quite popular among New Jersey Republicans. Neither Christie nor Trump is especially conservative, and they’re certainly not small-government conservatives. Both can rankle their fellow Republicans, as Christie did with his self-serving convention speech and embrace of President Obama during the 2012 campaign.

Some of this may also be plain old opportunism. Trump is the most likely Republican nominee, after all. (Or at least one of the two most likely if you’re feeling very generous to Marco Rubio.) If nominated, Trump will have to pick a running mate. And if he’s elected president, he’ll have to appoint a Cabinet. Vice President Christie or Attorney General Christie ain’t all that far-fetched.

Christie also replicates many of Trump’s weaknesses, however. Like Trump, Christie is very unpopular with general election voters. Like Trump, he has been accused of cronyism and corruption. Like Trump, he can come across as a bully. So Rubio and Ted Cruz won’t have to change their messaging all that much.

Still, the Christie endorsement steps on Rubio’s buzz after a strong debate Thursday night and once again proves how easily Trump can control the news cycle. Christie, long a favorite subject of political reporters, will also be an effective surrogate for Trump.

Former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman (R) said she’s planning to vote for Hillary Clinton if Donald Trump gets the nomination, the Newark Star Ledger reports. Said Whitman: “You’ll see a lot of Republicans do that. We don’t want to. But I know I won’t vote for Trump.”

Donald Trump is now against the First Amendment protections for a free press: “We’re going to open up those libel laws. So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”

Once more into the Fascist breach.

Ezra Klein, after the Christie endorsement, says this is how Trump takes over the GOP:

The news that Chris Christie is endorsing Donald Trump is being absorbed by the Republican establishment as a kind of death knell, and indeed it may be. It suggests that, among some politicians at least, the idea of what the Republican establishment is — and, indeed, what the Republican Party is — is changing.

Trump was the insurgent, the pollutant, the parasite the host would eventually reject. Now he’s becoming the power. And that changes everything.

This Chris Christie endorsement of Trump is real signal to GOP establishment that they had better begin thinking about Trump as the future

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) February 26, 2016

The Republican Party is facing a severe collective-action problem. It’s not clear Republicans can stop Trump at this point, but if they have any chance, it will take a tremendous mobilization — a coordinated, all-points assault like nothing a political party has managed in the modern era.

At the same time, though, the overwhelming incentive for any individual Republican power player is to defect to Trump’s side while the defection will still mean something. Endorsing Trump at a moment when Trump still needs endorsements might net you a job, a kickback, a call of appreciation, something. Endorsing Trump once he’s already the nominee is meaningless. Then you’re just a pathetic follower. A weakling. A loser.

I am glad you are here with me, Samwise: Here, at the end of all things.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) February 26, 2016

Martin Longman on how the Conservative Movement collapsed long before Trump, and that is why Trump is winning:

People are focusing on the Frankenstein monster element of this, which is basically that the Republicans made promises that they couldn’t keep. They made promises that they had no intention of keeping. They waged doomed battles simply to boost their email lists and to raise money. They stoked fear and paranoia and hatred and anti-intellectualism.

That’s all true. But that alone doesn’t fully explain Trump’s success.

What the Republicans failed to do is to adjust to losing in 2008 and 2012 and come up with a new kind of conservatism that could win where McCain and Romney had lost.

And that left a giant opening for someone like Trump to walk right through and begin denouncing everyone on the right as dopes and idiots and ineffectual morons.

One of the reasons that the Republican Establishment has no answer for Trump is that their alternatives (basically, now down to Marco Rubio at this point) have never had an answer for how they could make the modern brand of conservatism a winner on the presidential level.

If you are definitely not electable, then you can’t convince people to vote against Trump because he’s unelectable.

So, it’s true that Trump is tapping into pathologies that the right has been nurturing for years and especially during the Obama presidency, but that only explains half of his success. It doesn’t explain why Trump can denigrate every important conservative and conservative institution in the country and still win the support of Republican primary and caucus goers.

In other words, the Conservative Movement collapsed before Trump, not because of him.

Brian Beutler:

What Rubio and Cruz demonstrated Thursday night (and what Rubio continued demonstrating, somewhat haltingly, today) is that the secret to getting under Trump’s skin isn’t to call him a liberal but to mock him, or call him a crook, and to not stop (as Jeb Bush did so frequently) after a single pop to the nose.

The downside of this revelation, though, is that it leaves open the question of how a crooked, risible demagogue managed to commandeer the Republican Party, almost without trying.

Some conservatives no doubt criticize Trump’s heterodoxies because they believe in orthodox conservatism. But others have cottoned to the Trump-is-liberal line because it absolves the movement of responsibility for creating him. Much like civil-rights movement revisionism—pretending Republicans are the true and rightful heirs to Martin Luther King’s legacy—this narrative is often spun to absolve the right of its complicity in structural racism.

Accusing Trump of being a liberal isn’t effective, but it serves a special pleading purpose that harping on his genuine weaknesses doesn’t. To the contrary, Cruz and Rubio’s new, and possibly more effective, line of attack raises obvious, critical questions that may force conservatives to reckon with the Trump phenomenon in earnest rather than blaming others for it, or pretending it doesn’t exist.

Politico: “A handful of Republican big-money groups on Friday launched hard-hitting ad campaigns targeting Donald Trump that echoed Marco Rubio’s Thursday night debate smack-down of the GOP presidential front-runner.”

“The group behind what’s expected to be the most expensive and sustained assault ― a super PAC dedicated to Rubio called Conservative Solutions PAC ― has raised about $20 million in the past week alone, sources tell POLITICO. They say the cash will power a full-frontal assault on Trump in the delegate-rich states that vote in March, starting with Tuesday’s 14 Super Tuesday contests.”