Friday Open Thread [3.4.16]

Louisiana—Trafalgar Group–Trump 44, Cruz 26, Rubio 15, Kasich 5, Carson 6
Louisiana—Magellan Strategies–Trump 41, Cruz 21, Rubio 15, Kasich 9, Carson 5
Louisiana—Magellan Strategies–Clinton 61, Sanders 14

Reaction to GOP Debate.

Taegan Goddard: “When a debate opens with a candidate suggesting he has a large penis, it’s not going to be a normal night.”

“Overall, the debate was another mess. The crowd sounded like a bunch of angry goons. If you’re waiting for the Republican convention to see the GOP fall apart, you don’t need to wait any more. It happened tonight. It was a national embarrassment.”

The Republican Party is a bunch of angry goons, so naturally an audience would sound like that.

The Republican Party is also in total chaos.

Politico: “For the last seven months, GOP debates have provided viewers with reliable under-the-big-top infotainment – with Trump serving the dual role of lion and lion tamer, mauling his opponents while controlling the tenor of the proceedings. The fun is officially over – as Republicans descend into a sloppy and unpredictable civil war prompted by the previously unimaginable prospect of a Trump nomination.”

“Over the past week – as his frontrunner status solidified – the GOP establishment he so gleefully tortured has regrouped to return the favor with Mitt Romney and a handful of other prominent Republicans declaring their intention to do anything (including wage war on the convention floor) to stop his nomination. That sets up the most toxic and divisive dynamic possible: A coup by the establishment intended to trash a result arrived at by a democratic process.”

New York Times: “The Republican Party is in open civil war. The two leading alternatives to Mr. Trump — Mr. Cruz and Mr. Rubio — openly loathe each other as well as him. Though each pledged to support the eventual nominee, it is almost impossible to imagine Mr. Cruz or Mr. Rubio rallying behind a Trump candidacy in the general election.”

Josh Marshall on the coming GOP July Crisis:

This was the first GOP debate where I saw them make Donald Trump bleed. I really don’t know whether he ‘won’ or ‘lost’. I suspect his support is too ingrained at this point to be easily shaken. But this time Rubio and Cruz and mainly the moderators knocked Trump off his stride. […] Having said [that] though, I come back to something I wrote after one of the earlier debates. Once Trump pulls you down to his level, even when you fight back, you’re still down at his level. And he’s better at this than you are.

There was one point maybe in the 3rd quarter hour of the debate where Rubio and Trump were basically just yelling at each other. It was very messy. Trump was clearly unable to dominate the stage. And yet, as I watched, I thought: this is not doing Marco Rubio any good. It may be bloodying Trump but not to Rubio’s benefit. They knocked him off his perch a bit but they looked like ridiculous animals wrestling with him on the ground.

The other thing I wonder about tonight is the effect of Fox News’ attacks on Trump. Trump’s the frontrunner. His dirty laundry is only now really getting a close look from the press. It makes sense that the moderators would press him more than the others. But it went well beyond that. They were out to get him. No one could watch this debate and not get that. Given how much Trump’s base constituency is driven by resentment against ‘establishments’ and perceived unfairness to themselves and those they support, will this redound to Trump’s benefit? Will it at least not hurt him? I think it’s definitely possible. […]

My cautious, initial take is that all the attacks combined didn’t do much if anything to shake Trump’s support. But they may have started to put an actual ceiling on that support. It may have stopped him from building on his current numbers. I’m truly not sure. This debate was such a mess, so full of moments that even weeks ago would have been considered totally outside the range of acceptable behavior, that it’s very hard to read how it will effect the state of the race.

Dylan Matthews has his Winners and Losers.

Winners: Hillary Clinton, John Kasich, and the Moderators.
Losers: Marco Rubio and Donald Trump (for the night).

The best-case scenario [for the Hillary Clinton] is either facing a bona fide extremist who the Republican party is inclined to abandon and support half-heartedly if at all in the general election — like Trump or Cruz — or facing a Republican party in total disarray without a clear nominee until the convention in July.

It now seems like the latter is all but inevitable. The way things stand, odds still are that Trump wins outright. But tonight emphasized that if he were to lose, it would happen in the most chaotic and disruptive way possible. The window where Rubio could’ve won outright has closed. It’s over. It’s either Trump or a brokered convention.

And the forces pushing for the latter appeared divided and impotent. Kasich put up a good showing, for sure, but Rubio definitely did not, and Ted Cruz refused to even hint at support for a united anti-Trump front. The anti-Trumps are not in total disarray, but they’re not exactly in lockstep either. And while they committed to supporting Trump if he’s the nominee, the sheer venom of their attacks, and the broader context in which they took place, confirmed that if Trump wins he won’t be taking his party with him.

I genuinely don’t know what’s better for Clinton: facing Trump in a 1964/1972-style race where the party establishment doesn’t have his back, or enjoying a summer of Republican chaos until a compromise candidate is chosen at the RNC and the Trump voters become demoralized and stay home in the general. All of her options are good now, and the longer this mess continues the better they get.

Steve Benen: “After any debate, the political chatter quickly shifts to who “won” and “lost.” After a debate like this one, it’s a fairly easy question to answer: Hillary Clinton won and the Republican Party lost.”

“Cleveland is seeking to buy 2,000 sets of riot gear, including riot-control suits and collapsible batons, as part of the city’s latest move to spend a $50 million federal security grant for July’s Republican National Convention,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports.

Everyone assumed (hoped) that the news that the fact that former Clinton staffer Brian Pagliano being granted immunity by the Justice Department might be bad news for Hillary. Or at least not a good omen. To the contrary. First off the assumption that granting immunity means someone did something wrong and is being offered protection so that he can squeal on the higher ups is wrong. It looks like Pagliano and his lawyer were just being cautious, waiting for immunity before talking. And within 24 hours of talking, and turning over his documentation and information, we learn this:

The FBI has reviewed the security logs from Hillary Clinton’s private-email server and found no signs that foreign hackers had ever penetrated it, the New York Times reported Thursday. Federal investigators received the logs from former Clinton staffer Bryan Pagliano, who set up the server in her Chappaqua home, one day after the Justice Department granted him immunity to secure his full cooperation in the ongoing investigation into Clinton’s use of the server during her tenure as secretary of State.

The investigation is nearly over. By May we will have an announcement of no evidence of wrongdoing. And the people who hate Hillary, both liberal and conservative, can continue their lies in calling her a criminal, without evidence.

The New York Times on Mitt Romney’s anti-Trump speech:

Holy Mitt, what a meltdown.

Add this one to Donald Trump’s lengthening list of firsts: He’s forced a Republican Party reckoning overdue for years, all in a few days. It took the Trump-dominated Super Tuesday contests to awaken Republican leaders to the fact that the darkest elements of the party’s base, which many of them have embraced or exploited, are now threatening their party. […]

It is an excellent thing that the Republican leaders have noticed the problem they’ve fostered, now embodied in the Trump candidacy. But until they see the need to alter the views and policies they have promoted for years, removing Mr. Trump will not end the party’s crisis.

Matt Yglesias says that, no matter what happens, the Republican Party is headed to disaster.

The bottom line is that the Republican Party is now on track for a major disaster. One possibility is that Trump will eek out a narrow victory against a divided field in the face of dogged opposition from his own party’s elite. Far too many anti-Trump things have been said at this point to take them all back, and the divisions inside the party will hurt Trump badly in the general election.

For Democrats, this is fun to watch. But more than fun to watch, it’s a key reason why Democrats, though they should avoid complacency about Trump, can also confidently view him as a weaker-than-average nominee. Presidential candidates who run at the head of a united party have no guarantee of victory, but candidates who run without the wholehearted support of their party’s prominent leaders and mid-ranking professional staffers tend to lose.

But the alternative is also disastrous.

If the Republicans running against Trump actually did cooperate with some explicit or implicit alternative in mind, then they could assemble an anti-Trump majority and hand the nomination to their champion. But instead they are all running independent, entirely uncoordinated campaigns and simply hoping to work out the nomination via a chaotic convention floor fight of the sort we haven’t seen for two generations.

Nobody knows who or what would emerge from that, but one guarantee is that it would leave Trump and his supporters enraged and demoralized at what they will see as an underhanded theft of a nomination they earned.

Somewhere, someone at PolitiFact is saying: "I'm not checking that."

— David Nather (@DavidNather) March 4, 2016

#GOPdebate pic.twitter.com/SGW200luN8

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 4, 2016

The first sentence of this ad had me laughing out loud hysterically: