Friday Open Thread [3.18.16]

California—Landslide/NSON–Trump 38, Cruz 22, Kasich 20

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that half of American women say they have a “very unfavorable” view of Donald Trump, up from the 40% who felt that way in October.

“The rise in anti-Trump sentiment among women could pose a problem for the New York billionaire in his quest for the White House. Women form just over half of the U.S. population, and they have turned out at higher rates than men in every election since 1996, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.”

“In unusually candid remarks, President Obama privately told a group of Democratic donors last Friday that Senator Bernie Sanders is nearing the point where his campaign against Hillary Clinton will come to an end, and that the party must soon come together to back her,” the New York Times reports. Further, the Washington Post reports that “President Obama is plunging into the campaign fray, not only to help Democrats retain the White House but in defense of his own legacy in a political climate dominated by Trump.”

“Obama and his top aides have been strategizing for weeks about how they can reprise his successful 2008 and 2012 approaches to help elect a Democrat to replace him. And out of concern that a Republican president in 2017 — either Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz — would weaken or reverse some of his landmark policies, Obama and his surrogates have started making the case that it is essential for the GOP to be defeated in November.”

“As a result, Obama is poised to be the most active sitting president on the campaign trail in decades.”

“Marco Rubio is close to endorsing Ted Cruz, but the two proud senators — and recent fierce rivals — have some details to work out first,” Politico reports. “Cruz has to ask for the Rubio’s endorsement, and both sides need to decide that it will make a difference, according to sources familiar with the thinking of both senators.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told MSNBC that there are cracks forming in the GOP resistance to President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court.

Said Collins: “I am pleased to see that many more of my Republican colleagues are now indicating a willingness to sit down and meet with Judge Garland. Originally, virtually no one was willing to do that. Now I’m hearing more and more voices from my colleagues who are willing to sit down with him. So let’s see what happens.”

She added: “I think most of us are in the position that I’m in. I voted for him back in 1997.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham told CNN that while Sen. Ted Cruz is not his preferred candidate, he’s “the best alternative to Donald Trump,” and he said he will “help Ted in every way I can.” Graham admitted that his Senate colleague is “not well liked,” but said, “I have doubts about Mr. Trump, I don’t think he’s a Republican, I don’t think he’s a conservative, I think his campaign’s built on xenophobia, race-baiting and religious bigotry, I think he’d be a disaster for our party and as Senator Cruz would not be my first choice, I think he is a Republican conservative who I could support.”

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is scheduled to give a speech next Monday at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual conference. Forty or so rabbis have declared they will not be attending.

The concerns being expressed by many Jewish leaders go beyond Trump’s controversial pledge to be “neutral” during peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians — and extend to fears of Trump’s style and approach to power. […]

“These are the darkest days for Republican Jews like myself,” former George W. Bush speechwriter Noam Neusner wrote in a column this month in the Forward, a Jewish newspaper. He wrote that Trump “has built within our party the nearest thing America has ever seen to a European nativist working-class political movement. Such movements, to put it mildly, have never been good for the Jews or allies of free thought and the free market.”

[Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin] said the effort was an attempt to head off “more radical” protest suggestions, including walkouts and jeers, and provide an outlet for those “both nauseated and terrified” by Trump.

Ezra Klein says the differences between the two parties have never been clearer, and anyone who says otherwise, that the two parties are the same, like Naderites, is lying.

In 2012, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote a column for the Washington Post diagnosing what they saw to be the central problem in modern American politics.

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” they wrote. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

“When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

The op-ed hit like a bomb. Mann and Ornstein were institutionalists with wide respect in both parties — Ornstein, in fact, worked (and still works) for the conservative American Enterprise Institute. For them to call out one party as “the core of the problem” in American governance was to violate all the rules of polite Washington society. Their diagnosis was controversial at the time, to put it lightly.

It is obviously correct now.

Hans Noel on why some conservatives want to stop Donald Trump at all costs:

Some conservative Republicans are meeting this week to talk about the possibility of fielding a conservative third-party candidate in the increasingly likely event that Donald Trump hijacks their party’s nomination. Trump is not only not a conservative; he also embraces the most distasteful elements of right-wing populism. An independent candidate would give voters a “real” Republican to vote for.

Such a move has an obvious downside: It likely leads to President Hillary Clinton. Trump and the “real” Republican will split the Republican vote, just as William H. Taft and Theodore Roosevelt split the GOP vote in 1912, giving us President Woodrow Wilson. Is blocking Trump worth the risk of electing Clinton?

If you are a conservative, I think it is.

Presidential elections are unpredictable, but there is one pretty common pattern. The longer the party has been in office, the less likely it is to win. One-term incumbents are reelected at a high rate, but after two terms the office often goes to the other party. After three terms, it’s very hard to hold on to the White House.

Assuming this pattern holds, if Trump wins the 2016 presidential election, he’s likely to win reelection. But the Democrats would likely win in 2024 and again in 2028. You wouldn’t see a “real” Republican in the White House until 2032, after a 24-year drought.

The obvious flaw in this logic is that Democrats, liberals and non-Trumpian conservatives will have been “final solution”-ed by 2019, and Dear Leader Trump will be running unopposed for his fifth term in 2032.

Scoring from four political scientists suggests that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland, would land to the left of six sitting justices, including Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, who are both considered to be part of the court’s liberal cohort. Only the notorious Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor score to the left of Garland according to their history of rulings. These judicial ideological ratings are based on Martin-Quinn scores, a system developed by Andrew D. Martin (University of Michigan, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts) and Kevin M. Quinn (UC Berkeley School of Law). So despite disappointment among many progressives with Obama’s pick, if confirmed, Garland could potentially move the court further left than it’s been in half a century or more.