Sunday Open Thread [3.6.16]
Florida—Tarrance Group–Trump 35, Rubio 30, Cruz 16, Kasich 9
Michigan—ARG–Kasich 33, Trump 31, Cruz 15, Rubio 11
Michigan—ARG–Clinton 60, Sanders 36
It’s highly questionable whether anyone emerged as the winner in Thursday’s Republican presidential debate in Detroit, though the candidates’ spinmeisters would all quibble with that. There was one clear loser: the Grand Old Party.
The 11th debate of the Republican campaign tested the patience and the limits of viewers and voters. Insults and interruptions overwhelmed sober discussion. The raucous audience, now a staple of the GOP debates, only added to the sense of game-show politics.
Can anyone credibly suggest that the Republicans put their collective best face forward on Thursday night? At a time when the party is in crisis over the possibility that Donald Trump will become the nominee, the debate did next-to-nothing to make Trump or his three remaining candidates look or sound presidential.
Net favorability among Hispanic voters
Clinton: +37%
Sanders: +37%
Rubio: +8%
Kasich: +6%
Cruz: -5%
Trump: -64%
(WaPo)— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) March 4, 2016
“The party will not fracture but will likely splinter,” says former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, a senior party strategist. “The question is: How big will the piece that splinters off actually be?”
Matt Dowd, George W. Bush’s chief strategist in 2004, cast the day’s events in equally dramatic terms. “I think the GOP as a national party will have to be reconstituted,” he said. “There doesn’t seem a good way to put this all together. If Trump is the nominee, there will be a third-party establishment conservative running. If he gets taken out, he will run.”
“I wanna see Trump go up there & do damage to the Republican Party.” GOP voters know exactly what they're doing. https://t.co/l4ryvbXq4P
— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) March 5, 2016
A lot of Democrats are suggesting that the Party needs to be taking the nonsense currently engulfing the Republicans very, very seriously. And believe me…it is important to take any march towards authoritarian fascism seriously. But let’s also keep a few things other things in mind:
1. As I pointed out the other day, the context of the warning about taking Trump seriously is to get Democrats focused on winning over angry white guys…the very ones who even Lindsay Graham said are not enough to secure a victory for Republicans. It is important to hear these voters concerns, but not to the exclusion of everyone else.
2. No matter who the two nominees are, the media will find it necessary to portray this presidential contest as close. They need that in order to generate the eyeballs and clicks necessary to make money. That’s why CEO of CBS Les Moonves recently said this about Donald Trump’s candidacy: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
3. Democrats should stay focused on building their own coalition. As Dana Milbank documented recently, the anger isn’t as ubiquitous as we’ve been led to believe.
It is an article of faith this year that voters are angry. But this shorthand misleads. Certainly, there is real economic anxiety in the United States, but Americans are, overall, quite content: 87 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Republicans alike said in a Gallup poll in January that they are satisfied in their personal lives. The anger that’s out there is directed at the malfunctioning government in Washington — and this anger is mostly on the Republican side.
Americans overall have a dim view of where the country is headed: 36 percent think we’re on the right track, and 60 percent say we’re headed in the wrong direction, in the January Washington Post-ABC News poll. But break that down further and you find that 89 percent of Republicans think we’re on the wrong track. With Democrats, it’s reversed: Only 34 percent say we’re heading the wrong way.
My sense is that the entire political zeitgeist has moved from an addiction to Trumpmania to real anxiety about the fact that he actually might be the Republican nominee. Let’s keep in mind that, even if that happens, he faces yuuuuge obstacles to actually winning in November.
The fundamental landscape is deeply unfavorable to House Democrats. They’re down 30 seats and behind in fundraising with district boundaries drawn in such a way that winning a national majority of votes won’t deliver them a majority of seats. They need, fundamentally, something game-changing and weird to happen. And then, like magic, along comes Donald Trump, who happens to be weak in exactly the sort of Republican-leaning suburban districts they are hoping to peel away from the GOP.
“[Trump] makes districts that would have been hard-core tossup districts” into ones that lean Democratic, and gives Democrats “a little bit of a push” in Republican-leaning districts across the country, according to Kelly Ward, the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. […]
But based on what we know of Trump so far, he seems likely to be a weak general election nominee who is weak specifically in areas that House Democrats see as growth possibilities. Democrats’ top targets are a series of suburban districts where Republican incumbents have retired, somewhat fatigued with the incessant inter-caucus warfare among House Republicans. These kind of districts — places like PA-8, MN-2, NV-3, NY-19 — are places whose Republican voters are disproportionately well-educated and supporting non-Trump candidates. Those are the voters most likely to be persuaded to swing to Clinton or just stay home as a reaction to GOP disunity in the face of Trumpism.
Meanwhile, one crucial element of Democrats’ larger focus has been on identifying areas where the Latino population is growing rapidly in ways that are likely to make them more competitive over the medium term. But a big challenge Democrats traditionally face is that Hispanics punch below their weight in terms of actual voter turnout. Ward believes that “turnout momentum that we could see among Hispanic voters because of Donald Trump could accelerate that competition.” In general, she notes that Democrats win when turnout is high, and the media’s fascination with Trump is creating “heightened electoral awareness” in a way that should boost Democrats.
This was supposed to be a pretty cut-and-dried primary/caucus day. It generally was so for Democrats, with Bernie Sanders winning two caucuses in states — Kansas and Nebraska — with small non-white voting populations, and Hillary Clinton winning another southern primary — Louisiana — in a state where African-Americans cast half or more of the Democratic vote. Sanders will almost certainly add another caucus win tomorrow in Maine.
The four Republican contests today were anything but cut-and-dried. Going into today the closed caucus in Kansas looked to be Ted Cruz’s best chance for an upset win. He won with nearly half the total vote, more than doubling Trump’s, and probably winning 24 of 40 delegates. While nobody had much of an advance handle on Maine’s caucus, it was figured, like the rest of New England, to be Trump Country with John Kasich perhaps giving him a battle. Instead, Cruz won there, too, with 46 percent of the vote; Kasich finished a weak third behind Cruz and Trump and Marco Rubio managed to miss the relatively low 10 percent threshold for winning any delegates. In Kentucky, another closed caucus state expected to have very low turnout, Cruz again gave expected winner Trump a run for his money, falling short but not by much. Kasich had a decent showing in Kentucky counties bordering Ohio. […]
So there’s not much question Ted Cruz at least temporarily reversed Donald Trump’s momentum today, though his near misses in Kentucky and Louisiana have to be agonizing. It is certainly a bittersweet outcome for the Republican Establishment.
Super Tuesday looked so excellent for Trump because both it looked like the race might remain in that stasis for a while — with Trump in first, but Rubio and Cruz relatively competitive with each other for second in a variety of states.
But tonight, things suddenly looked quite different. Rubio utterly dropped off the map in Louisiana and Maine, getting about 11 percent and 8 percent of the vote, respectively. He did a bit better in Kansas and Kentucky, but could only get 17 percent in each. Meanwhile, John Kasich remained far back in every state (though he did top Rubio to get third place in Maine).
Instead, it was Cruz who rose to the occasion, suggesting that we could be entering a new phase of the race — Trump vs. Cruz.
Now, Trump will remain the frontrunner after tonight — there weren’t enough delegates at stake to put that at risk. But, as Vox’s delegate tracker shows, he’ll still have less than a third of the delegates he needs for a majority. And Cruz will be less than 100 delegates behind him.
If Cruz keeps performing like he did on Saturday — beating Trump badly in some states, and coming very close to him in others — he could well close that gap. And depending on the results of the winner-take-all states that will start voting in mid-March, it’s certainly possible that he could surpass Trump.
That’s not to say that he will do either of those things. We don’t know how a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Cruz would turn out. But that late swing toward Cruz in Louisiana, and his surprising strength in Maine, show that Cruz shouldn’t be counted out. He may give Donald Trump a real run for his money just yet.
Matt Yglesias‘ says Bernie Sanders lost last night even though he won 2 states last night. Why?
Kansas and Nebraska combine to offer 58 delegates while Louisiana carries 51. Clinton’s margin of victory in her state was much bigger than Sanders’ in either of his states, so it is entirely possible that when all is said and done she will have won more delegates than he did.
More to the point, with every passing election that Sanders does not alter the fundamental demographics of the race it becomes clearer and clearer that he is drawing dead in this campaign. We’ve seen time and again that Sanders can beat Clinton in states that have overwhelmingly white Democratic parties.
His problem is that there aren’t enough white Democrats to make this strategy work.
So far, Clinton has won every contest in a state where the African-American share of the population is over eight percent (she’s also won Iowa). The Sanders campaign has characterized these as “red states” and it’s true that so far that’s mostly meant southern states. But Virginia isn’t red, and Massachusetts isn’t in the South. The problem for Sanders is that Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Indiana are still outstanding with black population shares over 8 percent. California’s African-American population is on the small side, but due to giant Asian and Hispanic populations it’s one of the least-white states in the union.
Two months ago, the Sanders campaign happily conceded that they had no path to victory without improving their standing with nonwhite voters. But over the past couple of weeks they’ve retreated to proclaiming themselves happy with wins in low-population overwhelmingly white states. That’s fine on a level of pure spin, but there’s no path to victory here.
Leonard Pitts has a great column today. Read it. I can’t give you excerpts because I want to quote the whole thing.
Kathleen Parker is despondent.
So it has come to this: a brokered convention or President Hillary Clinton. …
The most Republicans can hope for now is that Kasich and Rubio win the primaries in their home states of Ohio and Florida, respectively, as Cruz did in Texas, and enough other contests to deny Trump the necessary delegates, thus paving the way for a brokered convention. This was the recommendation of former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who presented a line-item, factual takedown of Trump on Thursday.
The other option, offered in the service of saving the republic, is to vote for Clinton. …
Even though few Republicans could ever vote Democratic, and certainly not for Clinton, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as we know it. But voting for Trump, whom other civilized nations find abhorrent, might be.
I wonder if Rubes will drop “for the good of the party” ?
Trump vs Cruz from now till the convention is an outcome that I didn’t dare dream about.
March 15 is the Game Over date for both parties.
Tuesday we have Michigan for both parties and Mississippi for the Democrats. I think it is Trump v. Kasich in Michigan, and Kasich leads there in one poll. Hillary should win both MI and MS.
Then a week later, on March 15, both parties have primaries in Illinois, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio. Rubio has to win Florida. Kasich has to win Ohio. If they don’t, they are out. I think Cruz likewise has to win at least one to stay in. North Carolina perhaps? On the Democratic side, Hillary is going to sweep all four, and end the Democratic race.
The ides … Very fitting.
I am embarrassed to even talk about the election with many of international contacts. Their view of the U.S. has always been like an elephant (not a GOP elephant). Slow moving, well meaning, lumbering giant, stepping on things by mistake, but overall a good elephant. And now this? I can’t explain it to them because I don’t understand it myself. It’s not what happened to government or the parties. It’s what happened to the people of America? This isn’t who we are is it?
The GWB presidency was a turning point. prior to that the White House had a “governing” function and a “politics” function. Bush collapsed those offices into one.
So. I’m watching early coverage of this week’s PGA golf tournament. It’s taking place at one of Trump’s properties, Doral in Florida. Trump flies in on a helicopter. For the past 15 minutes or so, the network, NBC, focuses on Trump’s every move, basically ignoring the golf.
Wonder how many of the economically-disaffected Trump met with during that time. Every one I saw him with appeared well-heeled and well-fed.
Wonder if NBC’s coverage of Trump during one of its sporting events counts as a campaign contribution.
@j “I wonder if Rubes will drop “for the good of the party” ?”
No.. Rubes will drop to save his own career and his own ass.
If he lets Trump beat him in Florida, he’ll never ever fully recover.
Basically, if he ever hopes to run again, he’s got to quit now.
His problem is that there aren’t enough white Democrats to make this strategy work.
I know this is a “third rail” kind of observation, but it seems to me that there are larger issues ahead than the dissolution of the GOP.
A Democratic Party that grows increasingly non-white is just as problematic for American democracy as a Republican Party that becomes exclusively white. One can see several outcomes to a GOP schism/disintegration–and the most disquieting one would be a centrist, corporatist national party along the lines of the Carper-Carney-Castle “Delaware Way” kind of thing. Such a party would attract a great many white people from the middle class who are not going to sit in bedraggled lawn chairs at Tea Party rallies, but who nonetheless share many of their concerns about “losing their country” (they are too polite to say so in mixed company, but most of them don’t have any close non-white friends, anyway).
Such a party emerging could potentially draw off a significant number of fiscally and socially conservative Democrats, and shift the entire mainstream back quite a bit toward the center-right rather than the center-left most of you guys seem to see as currently winning the game.
Thoughts? Comments?
And as for jason’s I wonder if Rubes will drop “for the good of the party” ? the irony here is that “the Party” (in terms of its formal leadership) is exactly who needs Rubio to hang in so he can be the pick of a brokered convention.
I don’t see the “Us vs. Them” divide ending any time soon. We didn’t come together as a nation much after 9/11 or the 2008 economic meltdown.
Steve,
I know conservatives hate to admit it, but the Democrats being more and more the party of minorities and not of whites is caused by two factors.
First, America is about to become a majority minority country, in that whites will no longer by the majority by 2050. So the Democrats are just the party that is keeping pace and being reflective of our shared societal demographic changes.
Second, Democrats are not making a conscious choice to be the party of minorities. Rather, it is the Republicans that are making the conscious and racist choice to be the party that represents white resentment. So if you have concerns about it, blame the GOP.
But I do take your point, that we are about to witness one of those Grand Realignment Eras of the party system that only happens once every few generations or so.
The First Party System last from our founding to 1828 (featuring the Federalists and the DRs). The Second Party System lasted from 1828 to 1854 (featuring the Dems and the Whigs). The Third Party System lasted from 1854 to 1890s (featuring conservative Dems and liberal Republicans). The Fourth Party System lasted from 1890’s to 1932, and featured lib-con Dems v. lib-con Rep v. Progressives, with being both a force in both parties and a third party in its own right). The Fifth Party System started in 1932 with Roosevelt and his realigning the liberals into Democratic Party while liberals started to die out in the GOP, and continued with Goldwater and Reagan realigning conservatives into the GOP.
This System has just died, and we are on the verge of a new Seventh Party System. It will likely feature a left of center Democratic Party, socially liberal and fiscally moderate. This party will be under pressure from its leftist Progressive flank, and it may eventually split, but not now when it is in power. The GOP will split into three parties, one for the socially moderate and economically conservative, one for the theocrats and one for the authoritarian nationalists. In other words, the new party system we will live through will be chaotic, with coalition of parties rather than having large parties with many coalitions.
It will likely feature a left of center Democratic Party, socially liberal and fiscally moderate.
This is a pretty good description of corporatist Dems. I wouldn’t call them left of center though.
Prof Newton… Speaking only for myself, I take the democratic bit of “Democratic Socialism” very seriously. I believe that most of my cohort do also as would the typical Bernie Sanders supporter. It’s an argument about ideas not empty slogans and war propoganda. The authoritarian flavor of the GOP Trump sedition is anathema to me (and I’d argue us). So whatever split there may be in the left it would not carry the especially vile taste the Republican variety seems to deliver. Just my initial reaction to your comment…
DDs comment reminds me of an architect’s rendering of what some urban renewal project, street view is going to look like, right down to kids walking with balloons on strings and fruit vendors selling oranges and apples out of picturesque carts.
@DD “The GOP will split into three parties,”
Our system is totally rigged to be a two-party system. There are numerous laws and regulations in place to enforce this.
What you may see is a party realignment, but we’re not going to see a 3 or 4 party system emerge from the system we have that was put in place by past rent seekers.
What would be most interesting would be Wall Street abandoning the GOP and joining the Dems, a party or relative sanity.
DD I’m quite aware both of the realignments and of the demographic shifts in motion, but I think that you’re missing several key elements.
1. White voters (conservative or otherwise) will not quietly or easily turn over their perceived role as the arbiters of electoral politics, which is part of the reason that you’re seeing some Bernie supporters saying Trump is their second choice. That structural racism component exists and flourishes in the middle class, even the prototypically Democrat middle class, as is evidenced by our current charter and choice debates in Delaware.
2. The “majority minority” status of the country doesn’t necessarily equate with political power–at least not immediately and definitely without turmoil. Among other things, a high enough percentage of the non-white vote has to actually vote, and vote as a block for that to happen. Remember, in 2050 white become a statistical minority but about a 49% plurality, which is still large enough to win even national elections if other groups fragment. I refer you to the days when it was predicted that women getting the vote would create huge electoral shifts. It didn’t, at least not for many decades …
3. Liberal Elite is right–you are only going to see two major parties left when the dust settles (about 8 years, I’d say), and when you do it is an open question whether or not liberal/progressive Democrats will be the driving force within their own party, or whether we will be back to the days of the early 1960s when there were two national parties, both of which had a liberal and conservative wing.
Democrats are losing the white middle class vote because there is nothing being sold to them. D’s appeal to minority groups because they are working on their causes. Gay marriage, an (all talk and no action) immigration policy, Racial injustice.
What is in the democratic party to sell to white middle class America? Many view the democratic party, the party of quotas, and racial preferences. And are we putting them back to work? Nope. We are shipping jobs to Mexico, thanks to NAFTA. Now the current head of the party has given us a crappy South Korean trade deal that has increased our trade deficit with them (F.U. Carper for that BTW) and is set to sign the TPP.
If you don’t have anything to sell, don’t complain when the buyer leaves. And if all you ever talk about is Black lives matter, amnesty programs for illegals and raising the minimum wage while the middle class suffers flat wages, rising costs for everything else and your job going to Mexico, you aren’t going to branch into that market any time soon.
A Democratic Party that grows increasingly non-white is just as problematic for American democracy as a Republican Party that becomes exclusively white.
It isn’t as though the Democratic Party is at any risk any time soon of being *mostly* non-white any time soon. The “take back our country” types have been largely skimmed off by the GOP anyway (Reagan Democrats) and have been kept animated in part by the Lee Atwater resentment politics that now threatens to take over the GOP primaries. The fastest growing Party ID is still Independent.
Still, it is difficult for a Democrat with the kind of racial resentments that we see now to be in the current party. Whites that remain are socially very liberal anyway and the racial resentments aren’t part of their voting narrative. Democrats are currently a comfortable place for voters who are mostly socially liberal and interested in good government to be. It is why the Big Tent works better for Dems than it does for the GOP. The GOP can’t get to their Big Tent without letting go the politics of racial resentment. If you looked at that Gallup link, the whites that are in the GOP consist of groups that are aging and dying off. It is also why the GOP noted after the 2012 election that they badly needed to reach out to other groups in order to survive. They know that angry white people is not a long-term bet, but they can’t welcome other voters without pissing off their angry white base. Nor can they welcome other voters without finding a narrative that is going to appeal to those voters. Because part of what we are seeing here is the death of the utility of Lee Atwater politics.